Larger countries constantly bully smaller ones and will continue to do so anytime it's economically convenient. The reason Grand Cayman exists is because the people with money that control global politics want it to exist. That's the beginning and end of the story. There's a reason the Panama Papers went away quietly despite the assassination of the human who exposed it...
The human who exposed it is still anonymous. A journalist who wrote using the Panama Papers as a source was murdered, most likely by local Maltese exposed by the journalist.
There has been $1B plus in taxes recovered as a result of the publication.
How many people are in prison? How many middle class folks get by with a slap on the wrist for tax evasion?
Corporates can't be put in prison and piercing that veil takes a lot of work. Getting the money disgorged is a good step.
Details? By whom? What for? Is this claim based on anything?
These places were all considered "rogue states" at some point, i.e. places that openly neglected the very same rule of law which protects others. Being a 'rogue' state may leave you open to being bullied, but that's hardly inconsistent with rule of law being very important.
International politics is rule by power rather than rule of law. The person you're replying to got it right.
it seems, then, the only thing stopping these rogue states are powers or coalitions of powers with the potential to dominate them (or i guess survive) via conflict, either via subterfuge or military means, and the will to do so. put more simply, reigning in Iraq or Nicaragua is a hell of a lot easier than Israel. why is that, if not for power differentials?
That still doesn't change the reality that the US broke international laws [0] under the pretext of supposedly enforcing them.
And it did so in a very calculated and premeditated way [1] that justified everything on a domestic legal basis, while completely disregarding international law and institutions like they do not matter at all.
Imagine if China would pass a law declaring how their soldiers and government officials can't be held accountable by any international body, how would that be framed by US media?
Yet in the US, this has been established legal reality for close to two decades and plenty of US Americans defend it like it's the most normal thing in the world due to their internalized "exceptionalism".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
On the other hand, I think that within a sovereign nation the adherence to "rule of law" has a more substantial meaning and relevance.
These things (laws, ability to peacefully cooperate, ethics) are like religion, if you believe in them, they, for all intent and purposes, exist.
But we are infused with an ideology of rational distrust, because a small amount of people can't mentally grasp any alternative to power. so we dig our own graves.
given that, history is rife with examples of powerful nations basically looking the other way when other countries not in their playpen get "bullied". these large international bodies e.g. League of Nations, UN have all failed generally when powerful entities decide they want to shake things up. individuals countries, obligated by treaty, also failed when e.g. Germany decided it wanted to chow down on "certain" parts of Europe. consider pre-WW2, Israel, what the US has done post-WW2, China/Xinjiang, etc. etc.
Did you see a map recently? Do you grasp the size of Israel vs it's neighbors? (The Sinai desert, which Israel gave back to Egypt as part of the peace agreement is x3 larger than Israel)
You can't clamp together imperialists like US Germany and China with Israel defense strategy, that's just weird.
Now don't get me wrong, some israeli leaders did/do crappy things, but never at the scale of China US or Germany, or for that matter any colonial country. It's a whole different scale.
That's not strictly true. You're forgetting the 1947–1949 Palestine war, the first part of which was effectively a civil war where there's ample evidence of Jewish militias, with premeditation, taking part in land grabs every bit as much as the Arab militias.
In the West and especially in America this aspect is overlooked and even denied, as it doesn't fit the narrative of Israel as the underdog. Conversely, in the Muslim world this is pretty much the only aspect they want to discuss, for similarly self-serving reasons.
Israel fought back, and got territorial gains. Of course there were Jewish militias, Jews in British Mandate era were constantly being attacked by local arabs.
Anyway, even with all the complications of this era and our ability to form a tidy nerrative, the comparison of Israel to American and Chinese empirialism is just crazy talk. This stays true even if you totally accept the Arab narrative.
The UNSC is actually a pretty successful institution, all things considered. It gives "shakeups" a reasonable chance of being defused, and that's good enough most of the time. Enlightened self interest has to do the rest, of course - so failures will occur, but they ought to be rare. And Nazi Germany, the PRC in Xinjang etc. aren't exactly models of the rule of law!
Enlightened self interest. Those "insignificant" islands are generally speaking countries. By showing respect for the rule of law even in situations where they could easily overwhelm with force or economic power smaller nations, the larger ones reinforce that the law matters.
The larger countries use as a defense the idea that something is an "internal matter", IE it's no one else's business. If they bully their way into other smaller countries' business, then they open themselves up to the same interference.
Might does not make one right. Law does.