The three legal ways to enter another country
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The three legal ways to enter another country is the formulation John Kiriakou uses to test American military action abroad against the law, and to answer the objection that the CIA's interventions are simply how great powers behave.

He states it as a closed list. There are "only three ways that you can go into another country. Three legal ways": with the approval of the United Nations Security Council, at the invitation of that other country, or if that other country attacks you first.

His conclusion is that the United States satisfies none of them, "We never meet any of those three criteria", and he runs through the cases as a list of the same failure repeated: overthrowing the government of Venezuela and kidnapping its president; bombing Iran over a dislike of its politics; overthrowing, invading and occupying Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and pushing al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan while also removing the Afghan government and occupying the country for twenty years. "None of that is legal."

He frames the argument as a correction of what he was raised to believe. Asked whether he had once thought otherwise, he supplied the phrase himself, "We were the good guys", and said most Americans still do, and that the United States is not smarter, more honest or more forward-thinking than anybody else. Corruption, he adds, is "a terrible problem" at home.

Applied to the Strait of Hormuz

Kiriakou has used the same three-part test on a specific proposal. Responding to the suggestion that the United States should move on the Strait of Hormuz and take Iranian oil, he called it a war crime twice over: stealing the natural resources of another country is "quite literally written into the war crimes law", and the strait is sovereign Iranian territory. "The only legal way for the United States or any country to move into Iran is if the Iranians invite us... If the Iranians attack us first, which they didn't, or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council", which, he notes, had not even met on the question, because Washington would veto it.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
- The Libertarian Party
