We have the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables from 1884. Doesn't appear to have been needed until now so is relatively untested.
That’s like saying we need a policy where every country agrees to be friends. If cables are cut as part of some clandestine operation by who evers security forces, they aren’t going to stop it because of some treaty.
(There are all ready guidelines from ICPC on cable protection design, cable crossings etc)
It would be literally impossible to get every country to even agree to a declaration that "warm puppies are good." Also, a lot of the shit countries do to each other is already explicitly against agreements they've signed.
Sadly, geopolitics isn't a gentleman's club. It's a brutal dog-eat-dog brawl where those with enough military power pretend rules matter - until they don't. The UN doesn't (and can't) enforce anything. It just proclaims platitudes which are ignored when it comes to anything that matters to those with real power. I mean they let Saudi Arabia chair the humans right committee, so it's clearly a joke.
Many countries ignore the International Criminal Court when it suits them and most of the others who protest, would turn around and do the same if something that really matters to their domestic power centers happens. The ICC is useful for dealing with regional warlords and criminals who don't have (or have lost) nation-state power. The criminals and warlords who do have nation-state power just ignore the ICC and the clever ones use the ICC to deal with domestic enemies when it's convenient. Unfortunately, respecting some ideal of international law or norms is a polite fiction for school children and the gullible.
For some reason people on HN imagine that, but it's not how it works in reality.
There are many, many international agreements - decades and in some cases centuries of them - that are effective, and new ones all the time. The UN Security Council has great power - that is why countries work so hard to promote or defeat Security Council decisions.
The ICC has been effective - warlords know that they can, in many cases in wartime, murder people with impunity, and in the past that was the end of it. But now they know that will be liable forever after, subject to arrest, trial and imprisonment, branded an international criminal, and unable to travel to ICC signatory states or (I think) to do business there.
No law or system of laws is perfect. Everywhere, some escape them, some manipulate them. But it's not 100% or 0%; the standard is not perfection or a complete waste - otherwise everything humanity does is a complete waste.
But everything depends on you (and me). Do we find ways to make it better, or just idly tear it down? Sitting on the sideline and complaining has become a normal behavior, but there is nobody else - nobody is on the field, except some very bad people.
It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-orbit space with satellite fragments", because you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go, but like most simplifying heuristics that make things cleaner to think about, the conclusions this leads you to should be taken with a grain of salt
