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of the defendant  having no direct access to his mind  through social
rules of thumb to infer his motives from the situation (a history of
conflict with the victim, something linking him to the crime scene,
etc.). They go further and argue that the defendant s motives cannot
be known apart from these rules of thumb and so there is no reason
to treat the former as springs of action in the first place.77 At the same
time, many now distinguish between two kinds of mental content.
 Narrow content refers to the meanings of actions in a person s head
which motivate his actions, while  broad content refers to the shared
meanings which make the actions intelligible to others.78 While
Wendt draws these distinctions from the philosophy of agency and
structure, they are always perfectly familiar to historians. The diffi-
culties of contemporary history are what face the polemics of Todd
and Harvey. They have relatively little access to the primary archives,
whether official or private, that would satisfy the most rigorous his-
torian, but the value of knowledge is also relative to the circumstances
in which it is constructed, whether individually or socially.
Todd s argument is, very much like Wittgensteinian public criteria,
based on an analysis of the material situation of the US and the mater-
ial consequences of its actions. The US is no longer necessary for the
maintenance of  freedom, democracy, and the rule of law in the
world, given the disappearance of the  socialist world. The country
has, since the 1970s and especially since 1995 2000, seen its economic
situation radically altered to its disadvantage  the world s largest
debtor, and significantly less productive than its main trade rivals. The
same US embarks upon apparently ludicrous military adventures
against extremely weak third world countries and penetrates into the
Central Asian landmass under the pretext of pursuing a terrorism that
it equates with the Arab-Muslim region, despite the limited pull of
militant Islam outside Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It acquires bases in
several former Soviet Central Asian republics, Afghanistan, and, even-
tually Iraq (Todd is writing in December 2002), all through unilateral
action, without consulting NATO or the United Nations. A centre-
piece of this policy is to block any settlement of the Palestinian Israeli
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Marxism and International Law 185
conflict and to keep the European Union marginal to a mediation of
the conflict.
Europe, Japan, China, and Russia have no immediate interest to
quarrel with one another and especially no economic interest to con-
front the Arab and Muslim world. They have every assurance that
energy will be supplied because the Arabs and Iran need that for
their own development. At the same time Israel s quarrel with the
Palestinians is a serious source of conflict of interest for all of
America s traditional Allies. It could weaken or complicate their rela-
tions with the source of an essential energy supply. So the assertion of
unqualified US solidarity with Israel fits together with a plan to main-
tain a literally physical control of the oil resources of the Middle East.
It enables the US to view with equanimity the possible destabilization
of the source of its Allies oil supplies through a generalized Arab-
Muslim hostility towards  the West. 79
The kernel of Todd s structural argument is that the US is behav-
ing irrationally because both its internal and international situation
have become unstable. It is fixated on the unilateral use of force to
ensure control of territory and oil in the Middle East and Central Asia
as a way of maintaining dominance over its erstwhile Allies. In this
context Westphalian and UN Charter rules of international law do
not apply to the US s relations with the Middle East and Central Asia.
Doctrines of pre-emptive strike against terrorist states, or humanitar-
ian intervention against brutal dictatorships, can be variously used
and are being used to underpin a volatile Western Middle Eastern
relationship. The balancing of Israeli and Palestinian rights to self-
determination is not important compared to keeping the European
Union marginal to the political relations of the Middle East.
Writing in the spring of 2003, Harvey possesses the fact that the
war with Iraq is in full swing. He agrees with Todd that the starting
point of US action is its increasingly serious economic weakness. His
argument has a classical Marxist framework, considering the options
between a Kautsky style  ultra-imperialism of the Western powers
and Lenin s scenario of a violent competition among the imperialist
powers  meaning, effectively, all powers, including China.80 He is
also influenced by the tradition of geopolitics of the 1900s of Halford
Mackinder, which treats control of the Eurasian landmass as central
to world domination. However, beyond that Harvey relies primarily
on an  intentionalist explanation of US policy. He refers to planning
documents of US leaders, which are openly available, and also the
writings of influential opinion leaders within the US. These are not
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186 Philosophy of International Law
the equivalent of open access to the minutes of meetings of key
decision-makers, but they suppose that access to US elite intentions is
possible. At the same time, these elites are, for the moment, able to
direct the course of US power.81
Harvey consider that both intentions and actions (e.g. the defense
strategy documents of 1991 2 and the language justifying the inva-
sion of Iraq) show a clear opinion for a military solution to the weak-
ness of the US. Alliances and traditional international law are to be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]