I mean, if you ever needed smoking gun proof this is a lie, you got some today.

Countries appeal to international law when they don’t have enough power to achieve their goals through brute force alone.

Countries that do appeal to international law but also have the wherewithal to do what they want only make those appeals to conceal their naked ambitions under the guise of the rules based order. It’s just good marketing. Nothing more.

The model you should construct should assume treaties and agreements are stable insofar as the incentives for players to maintain them remain in place.

It’s all about national interest, always has been, and at this point I’m surprised anybody can be so dense as to not be able to see this.

And you'd have lost the bet with such a naive understanding of geopolitics and power dynamics played by nation states. Are you reading the thread you're on?