*All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence
*
Can someone explain this, elaborate on it a bit and give a real world example of it being enforced and is not enforced.
Also what is the significance of the UN Charter? What was the point of the UN Charter to begin with? What are the goals of the UN Charter, and how do we plan on achieving those goals? How successful has it been?
It also means don’t use the threat to force a political change in another nation.
You can see how well this is working with Ukraine and Russia, the latter would dearly love to replace the current Ukraine government with one more friendly to their interests, intimidation through the use of threats did not work, so now they are using actual military force.
It doesn’t specifically refer to invasion. It refers to annexation or conquest.
The point of the UN Charter was to set up an institution to facilitate international discourse and formalize some concepts relating to resolving international disputes. There are numerous examples of the UN not being able to meet its responsibilities on important issues - it couldn’t stop the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, for example. But considering that a heck of a lot of the UN’s rules are based on more or less voluntary compliance by various countries, I think it’s track record is pretty good.
WWI was caused in part by interlocking agreements among countries. It was thought that setting up a talk shop might prevent a few pointless wars or pointless world wars. Churchill said, “Better jaw-jaw than war-war.” Modern conservative warmongers disagree, which explains their hostility towards the UN.
They have fewer complaints about UN peacekeepers though.
The key to the answer to your question is later in the charter:
There’s a reason that 2.4 doesn’t say “war” or “invasion” or anything similarly limiting. It’s inevitable that your international lawbreakers - the people who you’re going to potentially need to enforce this stuff against - are going to be the type to claim that what they’re doing isn’t actually what they’re doing. What is force, what’s a threat, what’s aggression? We’ll know it when we see it.
That article bans war in all forms (threatening or using force against another country). So, under the UN Charter war is outright banned. However, there are two clear exceptions to that ban.
The UN passes a resolution that allows it.
An example would be the First Iraq War. The US went to the UN and asked for the resolution and they agreed and gave us permission to invade Iraq. Another example would be the Second Iraq War. The US went to the UN and asked for a resolution and the UN never passed one. The US invaded anyways.
Self Defense. If a country gets attacked, it’s not a breach of the UN Charter (the ban against war) to fight in self-defense.
An example would be in the Second Iraq War - Iraq did not breach the Charter by fighting back against the US (up to the point that the Iraq gov’t is still in control. Things change once the country is occupied.)
Also, the First Iraq War is a unique example of self defense. The UN self defense exception gives every country in the world the right to fight back with the country that got invaded (thus, the US did not need a resolution to attack Iraq. The US, though never threatened or attacked by Iraq, could act in self defense of Kuwait which was invaded by Iraq). This is referred to as collective self defense.
The self-defense article and what “self defense” actually means is much debated. For instance, you can “attack” in self defense. You don’t have to wait to be shot at.