THE response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a textbook example of how international law should be enforced against violators. Weapons for Ukraine.
Tough sanctions on Russia. Corporate boycotts and divestment. War crimes and human rights investigations.
Resounding condemnation by the United Nations General Assembly. There are gaps, to be sure. The Security Council is paralysed by the Russian veto.
Important countries have refused to impose sanctions, including China, India and South Africa. Within realpolitik constraints, the world's response is still far better than expected.
Legal solidarity with Ukraine is certainly right. Yet, it raises deeply troubling questions about Western double standards, and how this undermines the rules-based international order the West says it champions.
There are so many examples. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was illegal aggression, but George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard are feted as elder statesmen and, like Putin, are not in prison for international crime of aggression.
In the global 'war on terror', the US was a serial violator of international law, abducting, torturing, indefinitely detaining, unfairly trying, and even murdering terror suspects.
Serious accountability is nowhere to be seen. US, British and Australian war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have also largely gone unpunished.
The US recently recognised Morocco's illegal annexation of Spain's former colony, Western Sahara.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that it does not belong to Morocco, and that the Saharawi people have a right to determine their own future, and to become an independent country.
Astoundingly, the US did this so that Morocco would recognise Israel. Western countries continue to import plundered Sahrawi phosphates to fertilize their farms.
Recently, the ICJ ruled that Britain is unlawfully still colonising the Chagos Islands, which belong to Mauritius, and that all countries must cooperate to end British rule.
The West refuses to do so, not least because the US and UK want to keep vital military bases there.
The US continues to recognise Israel's illegal annexation of Palestine's East Jerusalem and Syria's Golan Heights. It provides military aid which sustains Israel's occupation of the State of Palestine and suppresses Palestinian self-determination.
This includes to protect Israeli colonial settlements, which have been condemned by the Security Council as an obstacle to peace and involve war crimes under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The US has also not opposed Israel's assassinations of Iranian scientists, or its over 400 preventive military strikes on Hezbollah targets in Syria, none of which can be justified as lawful self-defence in the absence of an armed attack on Israel.
Israel has not even attempted to claim self-defence, but makes up its own rules. The US Senate has now encouraged the ICC to investigate Putin.
The same Senate that refuses to allow the US to become a member of that Court, because it never wants Americans to be held accountable there.
The US admirably pioneered international criminal justice at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II. Even that is tainted as victors' justice, with the Allies refusing to hold themselves to account for their own crimes, including fire-bombing of civilian cities.
The die was cast early for western hypocrisy in the new world order. Justice is something we do to others; all are equal, but westerners are more equal than others.
The US still refuses to accept many basic global rules, including treaties on the rights of children and persons of disabilities, or prohibiting land mines and cluster munitions.
It will not even join the Convention on the Law of the Sea, despite lambasting China for violating that treaty in the South China Sea.
Russian violence and nuclear threats are surely terrible. Remember, though, that the US remains the only country to have used atomic bombs, in a first strike to instrumentally incinerate over 110,000 Japanese civilians in 1945.
Mention could also be made of how napalm and agent orange were so liberally used in Vietnam, in contravention of the law of war.
The truth is the West often contemptuously abuses international law. It weaponises it in pursuit of its own political ends, as a cudgel against its adversaries. Or it ignores it when it gets in the way of itself or its friends.
Western selectivity signals that international law is not law at all, just a smokescreen for power. The West then seems surprised when its lectures about a 'rules-based international order' fall on deaf ears.
The West's attitude invites other countries to play the same legal game, learning from the West in Iraq, Kosovo, Guantanamo Bay and Palestine.
As power shifts to Asia, China too has learnt that power lets you create rules to suit yourself, and bend or ignore rules that don't.
The western aid to Ukraine also leaves a bitter taste for the many people suffering elsewhere without the same sympathy, including in Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Palestine and Congo.
For the non-western world, a point comes when the enforcement of international law seems so selective, so hostage to power, and so privileging of western interests that it no longer looks like law at all.
It is just imperialism cloaked in law, for which only contempt, not respect, can be felt.
The writer is Challis Chair of International Law at The University of Sydney, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London, and has taught law at Harvard and Oxford