Press. voanews.com
Use of the law
as a weapon of war may find favor with the Trump administration, according to
some scholars and attorneys. The concept is popularly known as
"lawfare," and is used to reach strategic objectives traditionally
achieved by the use of lethal weapons.
One lawfare
specialist predicts the new U.S. president will find the practice familiar,
noting Donald Trump's use of law as a weapon in his business.
Trump "sued
his business adversaries some 1,900 times in the past decades, which, according
to the study, is far out of proportion from what similar businesses were
doing," said Arizona State University law professor Orde Kittrie, a senior
fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "And if you look at
quotes from Donald Trump, and you look at quotes from people associated with
him, they see law as a weapon to be used to advance their business interests
and crash their adversaries in business."
The Trump
administration is still putting into place its top layers at various agencies,
including the State Department."I don't know what plans the Trump
administration may have to incorporate lawfare into its foreign policy
strategy, but if we have an opportunity to use law instead of more traditional
weapons to address foreign policy issues, I'm all for it," said professor
Charles Dunlap, executive director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics
and National Security.
Economic
sanctions
Economic
sanctions often were used by the Obama administration. But some key Trump
Cabinet members have questioned the effectiveness of sanctions, especially
against countries such as North Korea.
"I consider
economic sanctions as a form of lawfare because you are using a legal
prohibition instead of force to coerce another nation," explained Dunlap,
a retired U.S. Air Force major general who was a deputy judge advocate general.
Lawfare, he says, is "the strategy of using — or misusing — law as a
substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational
objective." Kittrie, author of the book Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War,
sees the concept as neutral "just like a rifle or a missile" that
"can be used by the United States or by our enemies."
Some critics
consider lawfare as only something negative.
"Lawfare is
a tool that is used by the enemies of the West — very strategically to
undermine our freedom," said human rights attorney Brooke Goldstein, who
points to those affiliated with violent extremists whom she says are abusing
the legal system and manipulating it as a means of asymmetrical warfare.
"I see it
as the opposite of pursuit of justice," Goldstein, founder of the Lawfare
Project and author of Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech, told VOA, citing
what she called malicious lawsuits filed against those accused of Islamaphobia.
‘Great tool’
Kittrie, who as
an attorney spent more than a decade at the State Department, acknowledges that
lawfare is being used most aggressively by both the Israelis and Palestinians
against each other, but he also points to China turning it into a weapon
against the West.
"The
Chinese are eating our lunch when it comes to lawfare because they're much more
serious, they're much more systematic about it," he said. "With
regards to the South China Sea, the Chinese have this whole strategy of pushing
the limits on the law of the sea, creating these islands, fortifying these
islands, then claiming the area around them," Kittrie explained.
"They're doing the same thing in the cyber arena, where the Chinese are
making the argument for their own reasons, that the law of armed conflict
doesn't apply to cyber conflict."
Both Trump and
the presumptive secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, have been expressing
skepticism that economic sanctions harm business interests. Iran would be an
obvious lawfare target for the new administration, with more than $53 billion
in uncollected judgments in U.S. courts against the Islamic Republic, including
$1 billion specifically against the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei.
"So, if
you're going to squeeze Iran, this is a great tool," Kittrie told VOA.
"You can use it to collect judgments, any Iranian assets coming through
the U.S., and potentially Iranian assets going through Europe."
Kittrie sees it
as ironic that American lawyers use the law very aggressively in domestic courtrooms,
"but when it comes to the international arena, under the Obama
administration, and even before that, we've been treating law with kid gloves.
I'm not arguing that we should violate law, but when law cuts to our advantage,
we should use it and we should approach it very systematically."
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