International Law Only Binds the Weak | Ask the Professor

YouTube channel member @KamranRazvan asks: What does the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty actually offer a non-nuclear state if international law has no real enforcement?

My answer starts with a distinction between great powers and minor powers. Great powers create international institutions, write the rules to serve their own interests, and break those rules when they conflict with their national interest. No higher authority can punish them. The UN Security Council veto is the clearest example. Minor powers don’t write the rules, and they almost always have to obey them, because the great powers that built the institutions have the economic and military might to enforce them.

The NPT, created in 1968 by the United States and the Soviet Union, shows the pattern. Washington, Moscow, and today Beijing all have an interest in keeping non-nuclear states from getting the bomb. They enforce the treaty, not the institution itself. North Korea is the glaring exception.