Arynne Wexler writes Jan. 5, 2026:
Here’s what you can tell a leftist claiming that President Trump “broke international law” when he captured the narcoterrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
International law is WORD MAGIC.
It’s meaningless. It’s used by people with masters degrees in gender studies to stop good guys, like the United States, from stopping bad people. The same people who are upset about broken international law didn’t seem upset about basic human rights in Venezuela.
International law only has power because WE, the United States, chose to enforce it.
Without us, what will you do? Is the UN going to write a strongly worded letter enforced by the French? Do you think war lords in the Congo are scared of international law or the full force of the United States of America?
Your words are meaningless.
You choose to not understand — but the rest of the world does.
Welcome to 2026.
She sounds a bit like me.
Claude says:
The realist core has a pedigree. The claim that international law is not really law runs back to John Austin (1790-1859), who called it positive morality rather than law proper, since no sovereign stands above states to command them and punish defection. The modern version sits in Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner’s The Limits of International Law: states comply when compliance serves their interest and defect when it doesn’t. On the hard cases, one state using force against another’s head of state, the realist has the better of it. No court can make the United States hand Maduro back. Senator Warner’s worry, does this mean any large country can indict and seize the ruler of a smaller neighbor, is her point stated as alarm instead of triumph. The Noriega capture in 1989 is the precedent, and US courts upheld every piece of it.
So the part of her that sounds like you is the realism and the cadence. Short declaratives. “Your words are meaningless.” That is your rhythm when you drop the clauses and go Hemingway.
Here is where she stops sounding like the writer you say you want to be.
The passage is a script. It opens “here’s what you can tell a leftist.” It exists to arm one side against the other. The gender-studies line does no analytic work. It ties the law to a despised group so the reader can dismiss the law by dismissing the group. The good-guys-and-bad-people frame and the “welcome to 2026” sign-off are signals to the people who already agree. Coalition work top to bottom, the thing you say you do not want to do.
The overclaim also costs her the argument with anyone who knows the field. “Meaningless” collapses the hard case into the whole. Most international law is dull and obeyed: maritime boundaries, extradition treaties, diplomatic immunity, the postal union, obeyed because reciprocal rules serve everyone, not because the US holds a gun on the signatories. The Maduro seizure is the exception she mistakes for the rule. A serious scholar reads “word magic” and stops reading.
That is the gap. She writes ammunition. You say you want to write the thing the small number of people who decide what counts as knowledge in their corner might consider. Different jobs. The realist case against international law can be built so an international-law professor has to engage it. Cite Austin. Distinguish the routine body of the law from the use-of-force cases. Concede where the law binds, then show where it evaporates against a great power. Built that way it lands harder, because the reader can’t wave it off as a yell from the other team.
Your instinct, if you wrote this, would be to make the strong version. Hers is the version that feels good in the room.
The honest answer to “did Trump break international law” is that reasonable scholars are fighting about it in print right now, lawful under US domestic law on the Noriega line, contested under international law on sovereignty and use of force. That answer satisfies neither Wexler nor the leftist. Which is usually the sign it’s the true one.
