The international legal order was not an accident. It was built on purpose, out of rubble and mass graves, by people who had counted the dead — soldiers and civilians alike — and decided that the cost of leaving powerful nations unconstrained was measured not in politics but in human lives. The post-Nuremberg order was built to prevent what is now happening. The question is whether anything can replace it.
Two world wars killed roughly a hundred million people. The Holocaust industrialised murder on a scale that forced the civilised world to confront what civilisation actually meant. And in the aftermath — at Nuremberg, at San Francisco, at Geneva — the victors sat down and constructed something unprecedented: a body of law designed to ensure that power alone could never again justify aggression, that sovereignty meant something, that the strong could not simply devour the weak and call it statecraft.
The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that the waging of aggressive war was “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”¹ The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, prohibited the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.² The Geneva Conventions codified the protection of civilians, prisoners, and the wounded.³ The Genocide Convention — born directly from the ashes of the Holocaust — made the destruction of a people a crime under international law, regardless of who committed it.⁴ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted that certain protections belonged to every human being, not as gifts from governments but as inherent rights that governments were obligated to respect.⁵
This was not an abstract exercise. These were binding legal instruments, ratified by sovereign nations, designed to constrain the behaviour of the powerful. And they were authored, in large part, by the United States of America — the nation that served as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, that drafted the UN Charter, that championed the Geneva Conventions, and that declared to the world that the rule of law would govern relations between nations just as it governed relations between citizens.
That order is now dying. And the nations killing it are the ones that built it.
The Architecture
To understand what is being destroyed, you must first understand what was built and why it mattered.
The post-war legal order rested on a simple foundation: states do not get to bomb other states. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. There are exactly two exceptions. The first is authorisation by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII — the collective security mechanism by which the international community, acting through its designated body, can authorise the use of force to maintain or restore peace. The second is self-defence under Article 51, which preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.⁶
Two exceptions. Everything else is illegal.
The architecture was not naive. The people who built it understood power. They had just fought a war against nations that believed power was its own justification, and they had won. The question was whether their victory would produce something better than the system it replaced — or whether they would simply install themselves at the top of the same hierarchy and call it progress.
The answer was imperfect. The Security Council structure was a concession to power from the start. Five nations — the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China — were given permanent seats and the power to veto any substantive resolution.⁷ This was the price of getting the great powers to participate. The alternative, in 1945, was no United Nations at all. The League of Nations had already demonstrated what happened when major powers refused to join or walked away when the institution inconvenienced them — it died, and the world got a second war even worse than the first.
The contradiction was visible from the moment the ink dried. One of the five nations given permanent power to enforce the prohibition on mass atrocity was, at that very moment, responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people. Stalin’s purges, his forced collectivisation, his gulags, and the engineered famine in Ukraine had killed an estimated twenty million people — a death toll that rivalled the Holocaust in scale.⁸ The architect of those killings took his seat at the table, received his veto, and the system designed to prevent crimes against humanity was built to accommodate a man who was actively committing them. The post-war order was not corrupted later. The corruption was foundational.
So the architects accepted the compromise. The veto was the structural flaw sewn into the foundation. But the foundation itself — the prohibition on aggressive war, the protection of civilians, the principle that sovereignty means something — was sound. And for eighty years, imperfectly and inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions, it held. It did not prevent every war. It did not stop every atrocity. But it established a framework within which violations could be named, condemned, and — at least sometimes — punished. It created a language of accountability that had not existed before. And it prevented a third world war.
What is being tested now is not whether any particular nation survives. It is whether that framework survives. And if it does not, the nations that will suffer most from its collapse are the ones that are currently tearing it apart.
The principle that law should govern the conduct of nations is not a foreign concept imposed on the United States from outside. It is the foundational American idea, taken to its logical international conclusion. Aristotle said it first: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”⁹ Thomas Paine made it the cornerstone of the American revolution: “In America, the law is king.”¹⁰ John Adams enshrined it in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 as “a government of laws, and not of men.”¹¹ The post-war international legal order was nothing more than the extension of this principle beyond national borders. The United States did not merely sign that order. It authored it.
And now it is shredding its own work.
The Erosion
The United States did not abandon international law overnight. It eroded it — war by war, precedent by precedent, each violation a little larger than the last, until the original design became unrecognisable.
Korea, 1950. President Truman sent American troops to fight a full-scale war without a declaration of war from Congress. He called it a “police action.” The United Nations provided a fig leaf of legitimacy through a Security Council resolution that passed only because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council at the time — a procedural accident that would never be repeated.¹³ Thirty-six thousand Americans died.¹² The constitutional power to declare war was not repealed. It was simply ignored, and Congress’s silence was treated as consent.
Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 — the alleged second attack on the USS Maddox — was later determined to have likely not occurred. The NSA’s own declassified internal history, published in 2005, concluded that the signals intelligence used to justify the resolution was flawed.¹⁴ But by then, fifty-eight thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese were dead¹⁵, villages had been burned, civilians massacred at My Lai, and a generation had learned that their government would fabricate a pretext for war and call it self-defence.
Iraq, 2003. The most consequential violation of the post-war order by its principal architect. The United States launched a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation without Security Council authorisation, on the basis of fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. No armed attack had occurred. No imminent threat was demonstrated. The war produced Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners. It produced Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture.¹⁶ It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. And it established the precedent that the most powerful nation on earth could wage a war of choice, in open violation of the Charter it had authored, and face no institutional consequence whatsoever.
Libya, 2011. The United States provided seventy-five per cent of the aerial refuelling and seventy per cent of the intelligence for a NATO campaign¹⁷ that exceeded its Security Council mandate — authorised for civilian protection, executed for regime change. The Obama administration argued that sustained bombing operations did not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution. The word had been redefined to mean whatever the executive needed it to mean.
And running through these wars is a parallel escalation that the legal order has never addressed: what happens to the leaders of the states that America targets.
Saddam Hussein was captured during an illegal war, tried by a tribunal established under American occupation, and executed on the thirtieth of December 2006.¹⁸ The Iraqi High Tribunal was nominally Iraqi, but it was created under conditions that the United States engineered — and it did not meet international fair trial standards. Human Rights Watch called the trial “fundamentally flawed.”¹⁹ The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights raised concerns about due process.²⁰ Whatever Saddam’s crimes — and they were monstrous — the legal vehicle for his conviction was the product of a war that had no legal basis.
And that should matter to everyone, because due process — the right to a fair trial — is the foundation of law that protects all of us, rich or poor, regardless of status, no matter how large or small the crime. The worst criminals in the history of human civilisation were given a trial at Nuremberg. We are now refusing even that for alleged criminals who have not matched the threshold of crimes those laws were founded to prevent.
Muammar Gaddafi did not even get a trial. He was captured by rebel fighters during the fall of Sirte on the twentieth of October 2011, beaten, and shot — an extrajudicial killing captured on video and broadcast to the world.²¹ The United States did not pull the trigger. But it created the conditions: the NATO campaign that toppled his government exceeded the Security Council’s mandate, and the lawless vacuum it produced made his killing inevitable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reaction, captured on camera — “we came, we saw, he died”²² — was not a confession of guilt. It was something worse. It was indifference to the distinction between law and conquest.
The trajectory is unmistakable. With Saddam, there was at least a trial, however compromised. With Gaddafi, there was no trial — only killing in the chaos that American intervention had engineered.
And then Iran. February 2026. The capstone.
The United States and Israel launched a sustained military campaign against a sovereign nation — during active negotiations. This was the second time. In June 2025, Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran during a prior period of diplomatic engagement, drawing the United States into a twelve-day war.²³ The pattern was established then: negotiate, then strike while the other side is at the table. February 2026 repeated it — and exceeded it.
On the twenty-fifth of February, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a historic agreement was “within reach.”²⁴ On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes began — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles to the lowest level possible through irreversible conversion to fuel, and to submit to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Al Busaidi called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”²⁵ This was not the JCPOA being reheated. This went beyond what the Obama-era deal had secured. Iran had conceded everything the United States had asked for. Additional talks were scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna. They never took place. On the twenty-eighth of February, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury.
No Security Council resolution authorised the strikes. No armed attack by Iran had occurred. No congressional declaration of war was sought or obtained. The Senate voted on a resolution requiring presidential authorisation for further military action; it failed, 47 to 53. The House voted on a similar measure; it failed, 212 to 219.²⁶ Congress did not authorise this war. But it refused to stop it. Silence, once again, read as consent.
The campaign killed Iran’s supreme leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a head of state, assassinated by airstrike as a deliberate military objective. Not captured. Not tried. Not even given the sham proceedings that Saddam received. Simply killed, along with forty-nine other senior officials²⁷, in a strike designed to decapitate a sovereign government. The escalation from Saddam to Gaddafi to Khamenei is the erosion of due process rendered in human lives: from a flawed trial, to no trial, to no pretence that a trial was ever contemplated. It struck a girls’ school, killing 175 children.²⁸ It bombed civilian economic infrastructure, destroyed ten thousand homes in Tehran alone²⁹, and pursued explicit regime change. The White House posted videos splicing real war footage with Call of Duty video game clips.³⁰ The Secretary of War claimed more than fifteen thousand “enemy targets” had been struck.³¹
The international response confirmed the illegality in terms that have no precedent among traditional allies. France stated the strikes were conducted “outside the framework of international law.”³² Spain rejected the strikes outright and refused the use of its military bases.³³ Switzerland accused the United States and Israel of violating international law.³⁴ Norway emphasised the illegality. At the United Nations Security Council, 135 nations co-sponsored a resolution on the crisis — the largest co-sponsorship in Security Council history.³⁵ The European Council on Foreign Relations concluded that there is “little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression.”³⁶ Professor Mohamed Arafa, writing in JURIST, described the strikes as violations of “both US constitutional law and foundational international norms.”³⁷
No allied government called this war legal. No adversarial government called it legal. No neutral government called it legal. Not one.
Each violation in this trajectory established a precedent. Each precedent made the next violation easier. Korea established that a president could fight a war without a declaration. Vietnam established that a president could fabricate the justification. Iraq established that a president could ignore the Security Council entirely. Libya established that a president could redefine what “hostilities” meant. Iran established that a president could launch a war during active peace negotiations, assassinate a head of state, pursue regime change, and face no institutional consequence — not from Congress, not from the courts, not from the international community. Not from anyone.
This is what eighty years of erosion produces. The constitutional power to declare war has not been repealed. It has been abandoned. Not by amendment, not by judicial decision, but by the slow, bipartisan accumulation of precedents, each one a little larger than the last, until the original design is unrecognisable.
The Institutions That Looked Away
The erosion is not limited to the Security Council. It runs through the entire institutional architecture of international accountability — including bodies that have no veto mechanism to blame.
Consider the International Atomic Energy Agency. When Russia occupied the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine — Europe’s largest — the IAEA responded with force and specificity. Director-General Rafael Grossi condemned strikes in explicit terms, calling them “unacceptable” and “reckless,” demanding they “must stop now.”³⁹ The agency established five concrete principles for protecting the facility. It maintained permanent on-site inspectors from September 2022 onwards. It convened emergency Board of Governors meetings. The UN Secretary-General specifically condemned attacks by name. When a Ukrainian drone struck a reactor containment structure, Grossi said it “significantly increases the risk of a major nuclear accident.”⁴⁰ The IAEA’s report concluded that Russia’s occupation violated all seven pillars of nuclear safety.³⁸
Now consider Natanz and Bushehr.
On the twenty-first of March 2026, Iran’s atomic energy organisation confirmed that the United States and Israel had struck the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility — one of the country’s most important nuclear sites.⁴¹ The IAEA’s response was a statement noting “no increase in off-site radiation levels” and Grossi reiterating a “call for military restraint to avoid any risk of a nuclear accident.”⁴² Three days later, a projectile struck within the compound of the Bushehr nuclear power plant — an operating reactor, the kind of target Grossi himself had called the “reddest line” of nuclear safety.⁴⁴ The IAEA confirmed the strike hit a structure 350 metres from the reactor.⁴³ The language, again, was passive: “restraint,” “concern,” a reiteration of previous calls.
No condemnation. No demand that the strikes “must stop now.” No permanent on-site monitoring mission. No emergency Board session demanding accountability. No five principles established for protecting Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA explicitly called on the agency to condemn the attacks. The agency did not do so.⁴⁵
The same agency. The same director-general. The same category of threat — military strikes on nuclear facilities during an armed conflict. Two entirely different institutional responses. One gets condemnation, permanent presence, and binding principles. The other gets calls for restraint.
The contrast is even starker when measured against the IAEA’s own history. In June 1981, Israel struck Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor — the first military attack on a nuclear facility. The IAEA Board of Governors condemned the attack. The IAEA General Conference condemned it again in September and suspended all technical assistance to Israel.⁴⁶ A draft resolution to expel Israel from the agency entirely was introduced, though it was ultimately defeated. The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 487, condemning the strike as “a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct” — with the United States voting in favour.⁴⁷ In 1981, the international community treated a strike on a nuclear facility as an offence demanding institutional consequences. In 2025 and 2026, the same country has struck Iranian nuclear facilities repeatedly — including an operating reactor — and the institutional response has regressed from condemnation and suspension to calls for restraint and radiation monitoring.
The IAEA has no veto mechanism. There is no structural excuse for this disparity. What there is, plainly, is the operating logic of the entire international system when power overrides law: the rules apply to those who cannot prevent their enforcement, and they do not apply to those who can.
The Enablers and the Enabled
The erosion of international law does not radiate from a single source. It cascades. When the most powerful nations demonstrate that law is optional, every other nation in the system absorbs the lesson — including those with legitimate grievances, and including those that should know better.
The post-Holocaust legal architecture — the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions — was built in direct response to the industrialised murder of European Jews. The world looked at what had happened and said: we will construct laws to ensure that this can never happen to anyone, ever again. “Never again” was not a tribal claim. It was a universal commitment, encoded into binding international law that protects all peoples equally.
The Genocide Convention does not say “against Jews.” It defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The law that protects Jewish people from genocide is the same law that protects Palestinians, Tutsis, Bosnians, Rohingya, and Darfuris. It protects everyone, or it protects no one.
Israel has invoked the moral authority of “never again” while violating the legal instruments that give that phrase its force. The International Court of Justice has identified evidence of genocidal intent. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Amnesty International reviewed 102 official Israeli statements and found 22 constituting direct evidence of genocidal intent.⁴⁸ These are not the words of commentators or activists. They are the words of sitting government ministers, spoken on the record, documented by international legal bodies:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Amalek — the biblical command to exterminate a people to the last child. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” President Isaac Herzog declared that there are no innocent civilians. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.⁴⁹
You cannot claim “never again” as your moral shield while your own officials use the language of extermination. You cannot invoke the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism while your government’s own words meet the legal standard for genocidal intent established by the very institutions built in the Holocaust’s aftermath.
The Palestinian right to resist occupation is recognised under international law. General Assembly resolutions have repeatedly affirmed the right of peoples under colonial and foreign domination to struggle for self-determination by all available means, including armed struggle.⁵⁴ The occupied status of Gaza — even after the 2005 withdrawal of settlers — has been affirmed by the UN, the ICJ, and the overwhelming majority of international legal opinion, on the basis that Israel retained effective control over borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry, and the movement of goods and people.⁵⁵
This does not make everything that happened on the seventh of October 2023 legal. Targeting civilians and taking hostages are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions regardless of the legitimacy of the underlying struggle. The right to resist does not extinguish the obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
But Israel’s response did not distinguish either. And even where a state has a legitimate right to respond in self-defence, that response is subject to the principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law — the requirement that harm to civilians must not be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated.⁵⁶ Israel’s campaign has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroyed the majority of Gaza’s infrastructure, and produced famine conditions across the territory. This is not a proportionality question with a difficult answer. It is not proportionality at all. It is collective punishment on a scale that multiple international bodies have identified as genocide.
And the context cannot be severed from the response. The people of Gaza had been hemmed inside a wall, subjected to a blockade that controlled their calories, their water, their electricity. They had endured repeated military campaigns that Israeli officials themselves described as “mowing the grass” — periodic operations designed not to resolve the conflict but to degrade Palestinian military capability at regular intervals, accepting civilian casualties as a cost of maintenance. They had been ethnically cleansed when Israel established its state. They lived under conditions that the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and multiple human rights organisations had described as collective punishment — which is prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.⁵⁷
October 7 did not emerge from a vacuum. And Israel’s response — the campaign that the ICJ, the ICC, Amnesty International, and the UN’s own investigators have identified as plausible genocide — was enabled by a single structural mechanism: the United States veto.
The Security Council voted repeatedly on Gaza ceasefire resolutions from October 2023 onwards. The draft resolutions demanded ceasefire, hostage release, and humanitarian access. In vote after vote, all fourteen other members of the Council voted in favour. The United States vetoed them — not to protect American interests, but to shield an ally from accountability while genocide findings accumulated from the very institutions the United States had helped to build.
One nation. One vote. The will of the entire rest of the Council nullified. The legal apparatus activated and then rendered impotent by the nation that authored it.
Iran: When the Victim Becomes the Violator
Iran was subjected to an illegal war. Its right to self-defence under Article 51 — the very provision the United States ignored — is arguably the strongest legal claim any party to this conflict holds. A sovereign nation was attacked without provocation, without Security Council authorisation, during active negotiations, and its leader was assassinated.
And yet.
Iran’s retaliation struck Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — nations that had not attacked Iran. The picture, however, is not as simple as that sentence suggests. According to the Washington Post, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had multiple phone calls with Trump urging him to attack Iran⁵⁸ — while publicly positioning the Kingdom as an advocate for diplomacy and restraint. Saudi Arabia did not fire a shot at Iran. But it lobbied for the war that produced Iran’s retaliation, and it did so behind closed doors while presenting a different face to the region. That is not neutrality. It is treachery. None of which makes Iran’s strikes on Saudi civilian infrastructure legal — but it complicates the narrative of six innocent nations caught in someone else’s war. Iranian missiles and drones hit civilian infrastructure, energy facilities, and residential areas across the Gulf. The strikes killed civilians in six countries. Iran’s attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas facility — which produces twenty per cent of the world’s liquefied natural gas⁵⁹ — threatened global energy supplies. A projectile struck near the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. Fallen debris damaged residential towers. Eight people were killed in the UAE alone, including civilians.⁶⁰
President Pezeshkian’s position — that Iran targeted “US military bases, not neighbours”⁶¹ — does not survive contact with the casualty figures. Iran claimed it was exercising its right to self-defence against American military assets hosted in neighbouring states. But the distinction between a military base and the country surrounding it collapses when your missiles are killing that country’s civilians and destroying its economic infrastructure. The Saudi foreign minister warned that patience in the Gulf was “not unlimited.”⁶² Qatar condemned the attack on Ras Laffan as “a blatant violation of national sovereignty.” The UAE called the strikes “terrorist attacks.”
The Security Council adopted Resolution 2817, condemning Iran’s “egregious attacks” against its regional neighbours, with 135 co-sponsors. The resolution passed 13 to 0, with two abstentions.⁶³ The condemnation was swift, specific, and nearly unanimous.
But here is what the resolution did not do: it did not condemn the illegal war that triggered Iran’s retaliation. The same Security Council that condemned Iran’s strikes against its neighbours has not held the United States and Israel accountable for the war of aggression that started the entire chain of events. The mechanism that condemned the response was structurally incapable of condemning the cause — because the cause was committed by a permanent member with veto power.
The argument is not that Iran had no right to respond. It is that responding to an illegal war by committing your own violations of international law does not restore the legal order. It confirms its collapse. When the system fails to prevent the initial violation, the victims do not restore the system by responding within it — because the system has already demonstrated that it does not work. They respond outside it. And the collapse accelerates.
Iran’s retaliation proves the thesis of this article. When law dies, everyone becomes a violator.
The Genocides No One Prevented
Since 1945, the world has witnessed genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and Myanmar — and in most cases, the international community failed to prevent it. The Genocide Convention exists. The institutions exist. The law exists. But the enforcement has been catastrophically selective.
In Rwanda, eight hundred thousand Tutsis were murdered in a hundred days⁶⁴ while the United Nations debated whether to call it genocide — because calling it genocide would have triggered a legal obligation to act. In Bosnia, the massacre at Srebrenica occurred under the protection of UN peacekeepers who stood aside while eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed.⁶⁵ In Darfur, the ICC issued arrest warrants that were never enforced. In Myanmar, the Rohingya were subjected to mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing while the Security Council was blocked from action.
Most people are never taught about these genocides in any depth. The public understanding of genocide is distorted — as if it were a historical event that happened once, to one people, and the legal architecture exists to protect that one people alone. It exists to protect everyone. And when it is applied selectively — enforced for some, ignored for others, wielded as a shield by those committing the violations — “never again” becomes the most hollow promise in the history of international law.
The Structural Failure
The evidence is now overwhelming. The question is why the system cannot correct itself. The answer is structural, and it is embedded in the architecture that was supposed to make the system work.
Article 27(3) of the United Nations Charter gives five nations — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom — the power to veto any substantive resolution of the Security Council. The veto was the compromise that made the UN possible. Without it, the great powers would not have joined, and the institution would have died in the womb as the League of Nations died before it.
But the compromise has become the disease.
The Gaza record is the clearest contemporary illustration. The United States has vetoed Gaza ceasefire resolutions repeatedly since October 2023. In vote after vote, all fourteen other Council members voted in favour. The draft resolutions demanded ceasefire, hostage release, and humanitarian access — demands that were not controversial to any other nation on the Council. One vote blocked them all. One nation, acting alone, prevented the Security Council from fulfilling its mandate to maintain international peace and security — while supplying the weapons used in the campaign those resolutions sought to stop.
The Iran war compounds the indictment. One hundred and thirty-five nations co-sponsored a Security Council resolution on the crisis — the largest co-sponsorship in the history of the institution. The resolution condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes against its neighbours. It passed. But no resolution has held the United States and Israel accountable for the illegal war of aggression that triggered those strikes — because the United States would veto any such resolution, and everyone knows it. The multilateral framework was not even tested. It was simply bypassed, because the outcome was structurally predetermined.
Russia has used the veto to shield itself from accountability in Ukraine. The United States has used it to shield Israel in Gaza. China has used it to block action on human rights. The pattern is bipartisan and transnational: the veto does not distinguish between legitimate security concerns and naked obstruction of justice. It treats them identically. The powerful are exempt.
The global majority recognises the problem. The France-Mexico initiative — a proposal for voluntary restraint on the veto in situations involving mass atrocity crimes — now has the support of 107 nations.⁶⁶ The ACT Code of Conduct, which urges permanent members to refrain from vetoing action against genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, has 120 signatories.⁶⁷ The 2022 “veto initiative” — General Assembly Resolution 76/262 — automatically triggers an Assembly meeting each time a Security Council veto is cast, ensuring that vetoed resolutions receive public scrutiny.⁶⁸ Seventeen vetoes have triggered seventeen meetings since its adoption.
But the General Assembly can only issue non-binding resolutions. Scrutiny without consequence is not accountability. And the fundamental structural trap remains: amending the UN Charter requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, ratification by two-thirds of member states, and — crucially — the approval of all five permanent members. The veto protects itself. The mechanism that prevents accountability cannot be reformed without the consent of the nations that benefit from its existence.
Any system that gives the accused the power to block their own prosecution is not a legal system. It is an arrangement of power. When the United States vetoes resolutions on Gaza while supplying the weapons used in the campaign those resolutions seek to stop, it is not exercising a safeguard — it is obstructing justice. When Russia vetoes resolutions on Ukraine while occupying Ukrainian territory, it is doing the same thing. The veto does not distinguish between these cases. It was not designed to. It was designed to ensure that the most powerful nations could never be constrained by the institution they created. And it is working exactly as designed.
The defenders of the veto argue that removing it would cause the great powers to leave, collapsing the United Nations as the League of Nations collapsed. But the League did not fail because it constrained the powerful too much. It failed because it could not constrain them at all. The Security Council is now reproducing that failure — not by driving the powerful away, but by allowing them to remain while rendering the institution incapable of acting against them. The result is the same: an international body that cannot fulfil its stated purpose.
Accountability Without Permission
If the Security Council cannot hold the powerful accountable because the powerful control the Security Council, then accountability must be built through mechanisms that do not require their consent.
This is not a utopian proposition. Several of these mechanisms already exist. None of them is sufficient on its own. But the argument that “nothing can be done” is itself a form of complicity — a surrender dressed as realism — and the evidence does not support it.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza — the first warrants ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed state. Israel rejected the court’s jurisdiction. The United States called the warrants “outrageous” and sanctioned ICC judges and prosecutors. But the warrants stand. The ICC’s appeals chamber upheld them in December 2025, and all 125 member states of the Rome Statute are legally obligated to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory.⁶⁹ Netanyahu’s plane now flies non-standard routes to avoid the airspace of signatory states.⁷⁰ That is not nothing. A sitting prime minister rerouting his flights to avoid arrest is the architecture of accountability functioning — not perfectly, not swiftly, but functioning. The warrants create permanent legal exposure that does not expire and cannot be vetoed.
Universal jurisdiction offers a complementary path. National courts in signatory states can investigate and prosecute international crimes regardless of where they occurred. Belgium opened a judicial investigation into a Belgian-Israeli citizen who served in an IDF sniper unit in Gaza.⁷¹ A group of lawyers filed suit in the United Kingdom accusing ten British nationals of war crimes committed while fighting for the Israeli army.⁷² Spain’s attorney general announced the creation of a task force to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.⁷³ An Israeli reservist suspected of war crimes had to flee Brazil to avoid arrest.⁷⁴ These are not symbolic gestures. They are legal proceedings in sovereign courts, and they establish the principle that individuals who commit war crimes cannot assume safety outside the conflict zone.
The General Assembly has emerged as an alternative centre of gravity when the Security Council is paralysed. Resolution 76/262 — the veto initiative — automatically triggers an Assembly meeting each time a Security Council veto is cast, ensuring that blocked resolutions receive public debate. The Uniting for Peace mechanism allows the Assembly to recommend collective measures when the Council fails to act. These instruments produce non-binding resolutions, not enforceable orders. But they are norm-setting. They establish, on the record, what the global majority believes the law requires — and they deny the vetoing power the ability to act in silence.
Economic and diplomatic consequences imposed by coalitions of states offer another avenue. The 135 nations that co-sponsored Security Council Resolution 2817 on the Iran crisis demonstrated that the global majority can organise. The question is whether that organisation can translate into material consequences — trade restrictions, diplomatic isolation, suspension from international bodies — outside the Security Council framework. Individual states have already acted: Spain refused the use of its military bases for the Iran war. South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel to the ICJ. Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia severed diplomatic relations with Israel over Gaza. These are not coordinated, and they are not sufficient. But they demonstrate that states are not powerless outside the veto structure.
Domestic accountability remains the most direct mechanism — and the most neglected. The United States Congress has the constitutional power to declare war and the power to refuse to fund one. It exercised neither in Iran. The Senate voted 47 to 53 against requiring presidential authorisation for further military action. The House voted 212 to 219 on a similar measure. These were not landslide defeats. They were narrow failures in which a shift of a handful of votes would have changed the outcome. The judiciary has standing to review executive overreach — though courts have historically been reluctant to intervene in war powers disputes. Citizens have standing to demand that their representatives act. The erosion of congressional war powers is not inevitable. It is a choice, made repeatedly, by elected officials who have decided that the political cost of opposing a war is higher than the constitutional cost of abdicating their responsibility.
And there is a form of accountability that operates on a longer timescale than any of these: the historical record. Nuremberg did not happen during the Second World War. It happened after. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established years after Srebrenica. The documentation being assembled now — by the ICJ, the ICC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission of Inquiry, journalists, and forensic investigators — may not produce consequences today. But it forecloses the possibility of future denial. Every satellite image of a bombed school, every verified civilian casualty count, every recorded statement of genocidal intent by a sitting official, every vetoed resolution in which fourteen nations voted yes and one voted no — these become the evidentiary foundation for accountability that the current political moment cannot deliver but that the future may demand.
The post-war legal order was not built during the war. It was built after, by people who looked at what had happened and decided that it must never happen again. The institutions they created are failing. But the principle that animated them — that power must be accountable to law — is on life support. And the outcome of that test depends not on whether the Security Council reforms itself — it will not, voluntarily — but on whether enough nations, enough courts, enough citizens, and enough institutions are willing to build accountability without waiting for permission from the nations that benefit most from impunity.
What Happens When Law Dies
This is not abstract. When the most powerful nations demonstrate that law is optional, every nation in the system absorbs the lesson.
Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and cited the Kosovo precedent — which the United States had established. The Iran war establishes the precedent that a sufficiently powerful state can launch a war of choice during active negotiations, assassinate a head of state, pursue regime change, bomb civilian infrastructure, and face no institutional consequence. Iran’s retaliation establishes the precedent that a nation under attack can strike six of its neighbours and claim self-defence. Israel’s campaign in Gaza establishes the precedent that genocide findings from the ICJ and ICC can be rendered meaningless by a single veto.
Each precedent feeds the next. Each violation teaches the system that violation is costless. The architecture of accountability does not collapse in a single dramatic failure. It collapses incrementally — as each actor watches the one before it escape consequences, and calibrates accordingly.
The question from the Iran war articles applies at the systemic level: what happens when it is your turn?
The United States will not always be the most powerful nation on earth. The precedents it is setting — that aggressive war is permitted, that the assassination of foreign leaders is acceptable, that international law is a constraint on rivals but not on oneself — will be cited by the next power that decides another nation’s sovereignty is inconvenient. The rules that America is breaking are the rules that were designed to protect America when it is no longer strong enough to protect itself.
Rome did not fall to barbarians at the gates. It fell because it had spent centuries treating its own rules as optional — applying them to its subjects while exempting itself — until the rules meant nothing and there was no structure left to hold the empire together. The post-war order that the United States built in 1945 was designed to prevent precisely this cycle. It worked — imperfectly, inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions — but it worked well enough to prevent a third world war for eighty years. What is being tested now is not whether any particular regime survives. It is whether that order survives.
The people who should know are already giving their answer. On the twenty-first of March 2026, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said: “We are witnessing a stage in history taking us back to a world where nothing existed — no international law, no Versailles system, no Yalta system — nothing. A world where might makes right.”⁷⁵ Four days later, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote: “International law is dead in practice — driven by Western double standards on Gaza vs. Ukraine and silence on Israel-US aggression on Iran.”⁷⁶ China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on the international community to oppose “the regression of the world to the law of the jungle.”⁷⁷
These are not neutral observers. Russia is occupying Ukrainian territory. China has its own record on Xinjiang.⁷⁸ Iran has struck six of its neighbours. None of them comes to this argument with clean hands. And that is precisely the point. When even the nations that violate international law are declaring the system dead, it is not propaganda. It is a diagnosis. The order has collapsed so visibly that its own violators feel no need to pretend it still exists.
The Choice
The choice is not between the current system and a perfect one. Perfection was never available. The choice is between a flawed system that constrains power — imperfectly, inconsistently, with shameful exceptions — and no system at all.
The Security Council needs reform. The veto, as currently constituted, is an instrument of impunity, not of peace. The structural trap is real — the veto protects itself — but that does not make the problem unsolvable. It makes it urgent. The longer the current structure stands unreformed, the more precedents accumulate, the more the law is hollowed out, and the harder it becomes to rebuild the consensus that law should govern the conduct of nations at all.
But structural reform is only possible if enough people understand what is at stake. And what is at stake is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a world in which nations are accountable to law and a world in which they are accountable only to power. We have lived in the former, however imperfectly, for eighty years. We are watching, in real time, the transition to the latter. The League of Nations collapsed, and the world got a second war worse than the first. The United Nations was built to ensure there would never be a third. If this order collapses — if the prohibitions on aggressive war, the protections for civilians, the principle that sovereignty means something are allowed to die — then history is not ambiguous about what follows. The architecture that has prevented a third world war for eighty years will be gone, and nothing will have replaced it.
If you believe that laws should govern the conduct of nations, then you must believe it when those laws are inconvenient for the nations you support. If you only value international law when it serves your interests, you do not value international law. You value power. And the historical record is unambiguous about what happens to civilisations that mistake power for law.
They discover, eventually, that the rules they broke were the ones holding them up.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Nuremberg Tribunal, Judgment, 1 October 1946. The full passage: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
² Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945. Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
³ Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, ratified by the United States on 2 August 1955.
⁴ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, entered into force 12 January 1951.
⁵ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, 10 December 1948.
⁶ UN Charter, Articles 2(4) and 51. Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
⁷ UN Charter, Article 27(3): “Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members including the concurring votes of the permanent members.”
⁸ Estimates of deaths attributable to Stalin’s regime vary widely among historians. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), estimated approximately twenty million. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010), provides lower estimates for specific campaigns. The figure remains contested; “an estimated twenty million” reflects the upper range of mainstream scholarly estimates.
⁹ Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 16.
¹⁰ Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).
¹¹ Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Part the First, Article XXX, drafted by John Adams.
¹² Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System. Total US deaths in the Korean War: 36,574.
¹³ The Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council from January to August 1950 in protest at the refusal to seat the People’s Republic of China. Security Council Resolution 83, adopted 27 June 1950, recommended military assistance to South Korea.
¹⁴ Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified 2005.
¹⁵ Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System. Total US deaths in the Vietnam War: 58,220.
¹⁶ International Committee of the Red Cross, Report on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation, February 2004.
¹⁷ Congressional testimony and Department of Defense reporting on US involvement in the 2011 Libya intervention.
¹⁸ Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006 following conviction by the Iraqi High Tribunal for crimes against humanity in the Dujail massacre.
¹⁹ Human Rights Watch, “Judging Dujail: The First Trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal,” November 2006.
²⁰ UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, statements on the Saddam Hussein trial, 2006.
²¹ Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel fighters during the fall of Sirte on 20 October 2011. The killing was recorded on video.
²² Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CBS News interview, 20 October 2011.
²³ The Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran began in June 2025 with an Israeli surprise attack. House of Commons Library, “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026,” research briefing, March 2026.
²⁴ Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach,’” 25 February 2026.
²⁵ CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026. Al Busaidi disclosed that Iran had committed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, irreversible downgrading of existing stockpiles, and full IAEA verification.
²⁶ Senate vote on war powers resolution, 4 March 2026, failed 47 to 53; House vote on similar resolution, 5 March 2026, failed 212 to 219.
²⁷ US President Donald Trump stated that the strikes killed Khamenei and 49 other top Iranian officials. Al Jazeera, CNN, and Reuters, 28 February–1 March 2026.
²⁸ The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, occurred on 28 February 2026. Iranian authorities reported 175 killed; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated victims were mainly girls aged between 7 and 12. CNN, NPR, BBC Verify, TIME, and Al Jazeera investigations, March 2026.
²⁹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Tehran’s governor.
³⁰ ABC News, “White House posts so-called ‘hype’ videos combining real Iran war footage alongside movie, video game clips,” 7 March 2026; CNN, “White House posts video about Iran strikes using ‘Call of Duty’ video game footage,” 5 March 2026.
³¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Secretary of War Hegseth.
³² French President Emmanuel Macron, statement, 4 March 2026.
³³ Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the strikes, refused the use of Spanish military bases, and called the war an escalation. Multiple sources, March 2026.
³⁴ Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister, interview with SonntagsZeitung, 8 March 2026. Reuters, “Iran attacks breach international law, Swiss Defence Minister says,” 8 March 2026.
³⁵ Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026.
³⁶ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026.
³⁷ Professor Mohamed Arafa, “No Authorization, No Imminence, No Plan: The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law,” JURIST, March 2026.
³⁸ IAEA, “Nuclear Safety, Security and Safeguards in Ukraine,” ongoing reporting from September 2022. Director-General Grossi established the Seven Indispensable Pillars of Nuclear Safety in March 2022 and the Five Principles for protecting Zaporizhzhia in May 2023.
³⁹ IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi, statement, 11 August 2024. Arms Control Association, “IAEA Warns of Risks at Russian Nuclear Plant,” September 2024.
⁴⁰ NPR, “Attacks Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant increase accident risk, IAEA head says,” 8 April 2024. Grossi confirmed three direct hits on reactor containment structures.
⁴¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran says US and Israel attacked Natanz nuclear facility,” 21 March 2026.
⁴² IAEA statement on X, 21 March 2026. “No increase in off-site radiation levels reported. IAEA is looking into the report. IAEA Director General reiterates call for military restraint to avoid any risk of a nuclear accident.”
⁴³ World Nuclear News, “’Projectile’ hit 350 metres from Bushehr nuclear reactor — IAEA,” March 2026.
⁴⁴ NucNet, “IAEA’s Grossi Says Iran Nuclear Plant Strike Risks Crossing ‘Reddest Line,’” March 2026. Grossi: “An accident on an operating nuclear power plant would be something very, very serious. This is the reddest line of all.”
⁴⁵ Iran International, “IAEA says no damage at Iran nuclear sites, envoy...,” 2 March 2026. Iran’s ambassador Reza Najafi called on the IAEA to condemn the attacks.
⁴⁶ National Security Archive, “Israeli Attack on Iraq’s Osirak 1981,” George Washington University, 7 June 2021. The IAEA Board of Governors condemned the attack in mid-June 1981; the IAEA General Conference condemned it again in September 1981 and suspended all technical assistance to Israel.
⁴⁷ UN Security Council Resolution 487, adopted unanimously on 19 June 1981, condemning the Israeli strike as “a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”
⁴⁸ Amnesty International review of 102 official Israeli statements, finding 22 constituting direct evidence of genocidal intent. Referenced in ICJ proceedings, South Africa v. Israel, 2024.
⁴⁹ The following statements by Israeli officials have been documented by Amnesty International, the ICJ, and multiple international legal bodies: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Amalek (1 Samuel 15:3) in the context of the Gaza campaign, October 2023. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant stated on 9 October 2023: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” President Isaac Herzog stated on 13 October 2023 that there are no innocent civilians. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in a radio interview, 5 November 2023.
⁵⁰ See endnote 49.
⁵¹ See endnote 49.
⁵² See endnote 49.
⁵³ See endnote 49.
⁵⁴ UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974); Resolution 37/43 (1982), reaffirming the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for self-determination “by all available means, including armed struggle.”
⁵⁵ ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall, 9 July 2004; ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 19 July 2024. The majority of international legal opinion holds that Gaza remains occupied territory.
⁵⁶ Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Article 51(5)(b).
⁵⁷ Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, Article 33.
⁵⁸ The Washington Post reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had multiple phone calls with Trump urging him to attack Iran. Cited in Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war,” accessed 25 March 2026.
⁵⁹ Al Jazeera, “War enters new phase as Israel attack on Iran gasfield sparks Gulf response,” 19 March 2026.
⁶⁰ Wikipedia, “2026 Iranian strikes on the United Arab Emirates,” citing UAE Ministry of Defence figures, accessed 25 March 2026.
⁶¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran to halt strikes on neighbours unless attacks from there: Pezeshkian,” 7 March 2026.
⁶² Al Jazeera, “Saudi FM warns Iran that patience in Gulf not ‘unlimited’ amid attacks,” 19 March 2026.
⁶³ UN Security Council Resolution 2817 (2026), adopted 13 to 0 with 2 abstentions. UN Meetings Coverage, “Security Council Adopts Resolution 2817 (2026),” March 2026.
⁶⁴ The genocide in Rwanda occurred between April and July 1994. The figure of approximately 800,000 is cited by the United Nations and the Rwandan government.
⁶⁵ The massacre at Srebrenica occurred in July 1995. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia established that approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed.
⁶⁶ The France-Mexico Joint Declaration on voluntary restraint of the veto in cases of mass atrocity, presented in 2015. As of 2025, 107 countries support the proposal. UN General Assembly debates on Security Council reform, 2025.
⁶⁷ Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Code of Conduct. As of January 2020, 120 member states had signed. Security Council Report, “The Veto.”
⁶⁸ UN General Assembly Resolution 76/262, adopted 26 April 2022.
⁶⁹ ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on 21 November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Upheld on appeal, 15 December 2025.
⁷⁰ Ynetnews and multiple outlets reported that Netanyahu’s plane flew non-standard routes to avoid airspace of ICC signatory states.
⁷¹ Belgian public prosecutor’s office, investigation into Belgian-Israeli citizen, October 2024. Justice Info, “Justice for Gaza: who is doing what?” November 2025.
⁷² Lawsuit filed in the United Kingdom, April 2025, on behalf of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Center. Justice Info, ibid.
⁷³ Spain’s attorney general, announcement, September 2025. Justice Info, ibid.
⁷⁴ Israeli reservist fled Brazil, January 2025. Justice Info, ibid.
⁷⁵ Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, interview for Looking Back television programme, 21 March 2026. Reported by Anadolu Agency and Türkiye Today.
⁷⁶ Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, post on X, 25 March 2026. Reported by Yeni Şafak and The Hill.
⁷⁷ Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in phone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. Chinese Foreign Ministry press conference, 2 March 2026.
⁷⁸ UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” 31 August 2022. The report concluded that serious human rights violations had been committed which “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”