ABSTRACT
The contemporary understanding of international law considers the use of force by states to be permissible not only in self-defence but also for humanitarian ends. Its application must fulfil a set of conditions laid down in Chapter 7 of the UN charter and developed in various statements of the ‘responsibility to protect’. But these conditions are general and context-independent. Preoccupied with the universal application of an abstract model, international legal normativism has lost sight of the particular and the contingent. Yet strategy, to be effective, requires a clear political aim which might deviate from the general rule. The failure of contemporary western statesmen in the twenty-first century to address this paradox or to prioritize their political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and now the Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of modern rationalism and consider instead a return to an earlier understanding of statecraft that prudently avoided ‘premature generalisations’ (Toulmin 2001, 117).
