As Grasp on Power and Narrative Slips, West Re-Imagines Old Norms
As Grasp on Power and Narrative Slips, West Re-Imagines Old Norms
As Grasp on Power and Narrative Slips, West Re-Imagines Old Norms
A “professor of constitutional law” from Hofstra University has penned an oped for Washington Post titled “With Iran, international law has lost its credibility: International lawyers defend a framework that cannot capture real moral differences in war.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/05/iran-un-charter-war-rules/
The piece attempts to describe a new conception of moral equivalency for the post-GWOT age wherein international law is dismissed as an inflexibly rigid and obsolete antique. In its place, the ‘expert’ argues, should be built a system which adjusts for nuanced interpretations of more abstracted concepts like ‘self defense’. He absurdly argues that the US’s unilateral acts of aggression of the past several decades would not violate any ‘international law’ under the new framework, because they are justified for a variety of hair-splitting reasons. Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine, naturally, falls under the previously understood framework as an illegal and criminal act of international law.
The article is chiefly an apologia for Trump’s criminal attacks against Iran. The author argues that many ‘counter-arguments’ can be made for why the US is justified in these attacks despite “international law”—or more specifically, UN Article 51—stating that only attacks in self defense are deemed legitimate. Iran’s “militias” have been attacking US forces, the author concludes, which should be construed as US exercising self defense.
International law governing the use of force has ossified into a formal binary. A strike is either lawful or unlawful.
Well, generally legal code is designed to be clearcut for a reason: precisely so that duplicitous individuals like the author here do not have power to corrupt the law with their “creative” re-interpretations.
But he goes on:
There is little space in the doctrine to distinguish among profoundly different uses of force. Under a strict reading, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a limited U.S. strike aimed at deterring Syria’s use of chemical weapons are both illegal. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo — undertaken to halt ethnic cleansing — is likewise condemned as a Charter violation. Meanwhile, the Charter has strikingly little to say about catastrophic internal wars in Sudan or Myanmar. And its application to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan would turn on technical questions of recognition and statehood that might even favor China’s aggression.
Note his conveniently arbitrary recharacterizations of events: NATO’s barbaric attacks against Serbia’s civilian population is styled “intervention”; China’s hypothetical retaking of Taiwan is “invasion”. Russia’s actions in Ukraine bear the regime media style-guide issued stenographic qualifier of “full-scale” invasion, while US’s actions in Syria are “limited”. Convenient cherry-picking leaves out the “limited” Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya operations, for some reason.
The problem is not that governments ignore international law. It is that international lawyers have too often retreated into a rigid formalism that refuses to grapple with moral and strategic differences everyone else can see.
But our moral authority here believes that he alone bears peremptory judgment on these matters. In such a deluded propagandist’s mind, Israel’s horrific post-October 7 genocide of Gaza would be classified as an act of “defense” because it was responding to Hamas’s laughably tiny operation. But Hamas’s operation itself—surprise, surprise—would not fall under “self-defense” despite years of unjustified Israeli aggression against Palestine. These are the types of heinously arbitrary moral equivalence games imperial stooges like the author play in order to manufacture the concensus necessary for the Empire’s continued barbarism around the globe.
The problem with such “stretching” of definitions is it allows you to effectively sell any justification at all. US’s illegal kidnapping of a sovereign nation’s legally-elected sitting president in Venezuela? Justified under “self defense” because some made up drug cartel can be used to argue that Venezuela was indirectly “attacking” the US. In that way, any nation on earth can easily manufacture its own ad hoc justifications for war against neighbors. Maybe Ukraine and Taiwan were likewise smuggling drugs into Russia and China, etc.
He digs the hole deeper:
A more honest approach would acknowledge that the jus ad bellum — conditions under which states may resort to war — already rests on moral judgments. We distinguish instinctively between Russia’s attempt to erase Ukrainian sovereignty and other, more limited uses of force such as last summer’s U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. We distinguish between humanitarian interventions and wars of conquest, between defensive necessity and strategic opportunism. The law should be capable of articulating those differences rather than pretending they do not matter.
So, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to “erase Ukrainian sovereignty”, but Israel’s invasion of Gaza—which openly revolves around erasing the Palestinian people’s culture, nationality, existence, etc., and outright ethnically cleansing them into a different land—would be totally justified under the author’s dishonest remaking of international law.
That’s not even to mention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was officially done for the very same reasons as US’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities the author mentions: both were to neutralize an imminent threat. Except in Russia’s case, that threat was immediate and directly to the homeland, which actually borders the nation from which the threat is emanating. The US lies on the other side of the globe from Iran, and Iran verifiably does not possess weapons that can reach the US homeland. The author gets his equivalency completely backwards: it’s clear that Russia possesses the far more definitive case of jus ad bellum than the US, which is actually acting under the aegis of a different foreign power—in this case Israel.
His article closes with a lament that the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked attacks against Iran “fall on the wrong side” of international law’s interpretative spectrum. He pleads for the system to be reworked such that it becomes easier to arbitrarily bend interpretations and redefine long-established norms so that US and Israel’s criminality can continue getting rubber-stamped, while the lawful actions of their enemies are blanketly condemned as “illegal”:
The U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran arguably falls on the wrong side of the Charter’s traditional interpretation. But if that conclusion leaves the law unable to differentiate meaningfully between the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, the problem runs deeper than any single episode.
International law’s authority ultimately depends on its ability to align legal judgment with widely shared moral intuitions about war and peace. If it cannot do that — if it insists on treating profoundly different conflicts as doctrinally interchangeable — it will not meaningfully constrain powerful states. Nor will it command the moral clarity needed to condemn genuine aggression when it occurs.
This kind of thinking has become emblematic of the recent trend in the West to increasingly bastardize the ‘rule of law’ or reinterpret key civil understandings of norms to favor the imperial expression.
The EU, for instance, is allegedly floating a new initiative to establish a “multi-tier” system for EU membership which would administratively erode the so-called “democratic” nature of the bloc by allowing different countries to operate at different membership levels:
The purpose, if you haven’t guessed, would of course be to sideline sovereign states like Hungary from being able to spoil the EU’s totalitarian power-centralization initiatives by effectively lowering the “tier” of any country which refuses to play ball:
While the EU has traditionally sought to advance in lockstep (or at least pretend that’s the case), the idea of moving ahead with a multispeed Europe is gaining traction. Leaders meeting in the Belgian countryside for an informal retreat this month cautiously backed the idea that some reforms would have to be carried out by a smaller group of countries.
“Often we move forward with the speed of the slowest,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told journalists. “The enhanced cooperation model avoids that.” In EU jargon, “enhanced cooperation” means “screw you and your objections, we’re doing this anyway.”
The bolded portion above spells it out.
The author notes that this idea has been long in the making, but apparently only the recent crisis-riddled period has spurred Ursula’s apparat to accelerate their plans.
From another previous Politico piece:
With the bloc buffeted by multiple geopolitical crises, it’s starting to realize that it can’t come to grips with them if it only acts when all 27 member countries agree. From defense to energy to investment, the European Commission, which makes the rules, and national governments, which are supposed to implement them, are finding themselves hamstrung.
[...]
Just like the EU attempts to redefine the precepts of unanimity by quietly introducing multi-tiered national rights, so too are its henchmen redefining core concepts of basic human rights, as are its shills and stooges doing the same for long-accepted norms of international law so that the Western imperial order can continue exercising its centuries old global hegemonic predation with total legal impunity.
It’s times like these we must shine a light on the slow-creeping nature of these processes. But the good news is that the desperate uptick marks a canary-in-coalmine moment of panic and doom for the [imperialist] order which is losing control. The situation in the Middle East of the past two years in particular—namely, the Gaza genocide and its attendant conflicts—has really shaken things up and revealed the moral bankruptcy at the core of the ‘international order’ and its varied organs.
It has become the final nail in the coffin of the entire post-war establishment, with a recklessly law-agnostic Trump acting as the hammer driving it home. We can only hope that in the untethered chaos that follows, nations of the world gravitate and coalesce around new pillars of moral fairness, like China and Russia, countries led by political organs that stress cooperation and legal punctiliousness even under the most extreme forms of hostile duress.
But before then, we’re likely in for quite a few more loud groans from the spasming Order as it does everything in its power to cling on and forestall the inevitable.