US Military Intervention Abroad--The Relevance of Statutes, the Constitution, and International Law

Pretty much everyone who looks into the matter knows that courts don’t enforce statutory, constitutional, or international law limits on the deployment of US military forces overseas. What are we to make of that fact? That we don’t need judicially enforceable limits on this sort of policy choice to get along reasonably well? That the limits work “behind the scenes” to affect the choices political actors make? Or, perhaps more disturbingly, that legal limits in this area are pretty much like legal limits everywhere: they effectively limit exercises of power by powerful people who want to comply with the law? Is it really true that, as Plato’s character Thrasymachus might be taken to suggest, law is merely the interest of the powerful?