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Dr. Roslyn Fuller is an author and founder of the Solonian Democracy Institute
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We have an expectation of a rules-based system of international order. Some of these rules are very famous, they show up in popular media, thing like diplomatic immunity, basically if you send an ambassador to another country, they can’t be arrested, their bags can’t be searched, you can’t even give them a parking ticket.
That gives us some anomalies sometimes, again, more often in fiction than in real life, but it does happen; the wife of an American government worker in England drove on the wrong side of the road, killed a young man a while back, she was whisked back to the US to escape justice. It’s not clear that she did have immunity, it’s not even clear what her husband’s position was, probably because he was a spy.
But countries almost always follow these rules, because they want to benefit from them sometimes too. Diplomatic immunity is one, but there are lots more, some of them are explicitly codified, some of them are just understood conventions. At a high level, there are rules against one country trying to prosecute rulers of another, and it goes all the way down to how leaders are treated when they visit another country, who gets a red carpet, who gets the national anthem and all that.
There is one important thing to remember here: Rules benefit the weak.
That’s not always true, there will be a thousand examples where someone can point out where weak countries suffer because of capricious rules, but that doesn’t change the basic principle: without rules, the strong can do and take what they want. Rules, even if they are imperfect, even if they are not consistently applied, generally benefit the weak.
We’ve had two instances in recent weeks of people, for totally understandable reasons, demanding that Ireland throw out that international rulebook of how countries behave towards each other. The first were the demands to expel the Israeli ambassador, to mark disapproval of the ferocious attack on the densely-packed, poorly defended, and impoverished refugee settlements in the Gaza Strip.
The second was the calls for various retributions against the Lukashenko regime in Belarus which, in an act of what can only be called air piracy, forced a Ryanair jet to land in order to seize the exiled opposition activists Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega.
I’d add a third Irish-related incident to the outrage list: the cyberattack on the HSE IT systems that have crippled the healthcare system in Ireland. I don’t think that this was done on the orders of a foreign government, but the highly-sophisticated teams of hackers operate with, at a minimum, a nod and a wink of approval from the Kremlin.
Russian intelligence services, the FSB and the GRU, most certainly know exactly who these people are, know exactly where they are, and know exactly what they are doing. They probably have these guys saved on speed-dial on their phones. It is highly likely that the bosses of this gang pay up to elements within the intelligence services, probably cash, but also putting their services at the disposal of the Russian military when required, in exchange for operating with impunity.
I think that the attack on the HSE was probably purely motivated by cash, but the attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which disrupted supplies of fuel from Texas to much of the south-eastern United States, is even more sinister. In theory this was also a ransomware attack, but I find it very difficult not to see this as a trial run for a military operation to cripple the enemy’s infrastructure.
It goes without saying that these cyberattacks, and the Kremlin’s, at best, blind-eye towards the criminals responsible for them, along with Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza and the air piracy in Belarus, are massive breaches of the international rules for how international relations should be run.
There is a huge temptation to say we should do the same, in reprisal. Hit back, hack their systems, seize their aircraft, expel their ambassador.
I’m not arguing that we should not defend ourselves, we should. But it’s important to note that there seems to be a decline in the respect being shown to these rules around the world. Russia sending agents to murder defectors in England and Germany, Thai police cooperating with Saudi thugs trying force the escaping daughter of some bigwig onto a plane back to captivity, along with the other issues I’ve mentioned.
The west is not innocent here either, with support for coups in Venezuela and Bolivia; they might argue that it’s against a dictatorial government in Venezuela, they might be right, but there are rules against this, and they exist for a reason.
On the HSE cyberattack, the government was absolutely right not to pay those crooks a cent, and I have no evidence of this, but I suspect that the fact that the gang published an unlock code to decrypt the data on their website could have been the result of behind-the-scenes pressure from Ireland on their counterparts in Russia, to the extent you could even call that ‘pressure’.
So my point is this: these rules are not perfect, and they are not perfectly observed, far from it. But to the extent that they exist, they are to our benefit, mostly. If any country feels like trampling all over Ireland’s sovereignty, there is precious little that we can do about it. In terms of international relations, Ireland isn’t a small fry, we’re not even a minnow. What little power we have to defend our interests comes from appealing to the sense of fair play within the rules of the international community.
If we lose that, we have nothing. It is in Ireland’s interest to promote the primacy of these rules at every turn – and even that doesn’t get us far. The world is an unstable place, we may be entering an even more unstable phase, and even sticking to the rules ourselves is no guarantee that others will respect them for us. But that’s all we have. That and hope.
