if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva Conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule. We have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.

Looks like we announced the rules are dead then. Israel and the US killed them. :/