So there might be a temptation to cheer the latest crisis at the International Criminal Court, which throughout its short existence has been the prime locus of “internationalist” legal folly. Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, was expelled from office July 24, following a two-year saga shrouded in convoluted bureaucratic mystery. Ostensibly centered on allegations of sexual impropriety, they were always really more like allegations of allegations: the nature of what was even being alleged is still a morass of murk, at least insofar as any scattered details have been publicly disclosed.

The drama has been made all the more inscrutable by the “ad hoc” bureaucratic rigmarole set up to adjudicate these “allegations,” with oversight opaquely passing back and forth between an internal ICC disciplinary unit, an enigmatic ICC administrative body, a hazily affiliated division of the United Nations, an improvised secret judicial panel, back to some non-specific ICC limbo, and then finally to the “Assembly of States Parties” — thought to be the ICC’s supreme governing authority, which proceeded to terminate Khan, albeit based on authorities that hardly anyone could seem to quite ascertain, not least Khan himself.

As his day of preordained reckoning drew near, Khan remarked that “in terms of the procedure” put forth to eradicate his career and reputation, even he was being kept assiduously “in the dark … I mean, it’s amazing.” So here was one of the foremost expositors of “international law” — who had just earned rapturous applause from “international-law” enthusiasts the world over for orchestrating a series of “arrest warrants” against the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin — marveling that even he had no clue what ad hoc methods had been devised to exact punishment on him for offenses he steadfastly denied, and which had only been the most faintly articulated. Khan was only able to learn of the latest developments, he said, “from the media,” and from “speculation.”

The ultimate claimed basis for Khan’s removal? Certainly not any somber acknowledgment of the failures of “international law,” following a sustained period of careful self-examination. Instead, of course, it was some multi-dimensional sexually implicative “adult-grooming” scandal — the core offending conduct of which remains almost indecipherable to the untrained eye, and only made putatively scandalous by the very same blinkered pathologies that have come to pervade liberal-Left NGO culture. 

While Khan’s alleged wrongdoing has been widely referred to in media reports as centering on accusations of “sexual misconduct” or even “sexual assault,” a recent lengthy CNN interview with the central accuser — a putative lawyer in her late 30s named Sarah Hishan — failed to elucidate with any tangibility what, in fact, she was even accusing Khan of doing wrong, beyond transgressing the latest nebulous frontiers of “consent” and “power imbalance” theory — the bleeding edge of which one would expect to find marinating in workforce environments such as the ICC. 

Khan objected, reasonably enough, to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of the proceedings that were initiated against him, starting in April 2024, when they were supposedly prompted by the 39-year-old’s unveilment of her sexual-grievance story. One might even say there’s an element of karmic justice in his banishment, as “international law” is nothing if not a thoroughly make-it-up-as-you-go-along enterprise. But with Khan’s ensuing downfall, the tactics brought to bear against him have received an outsized boost of validation — which could mean similar tactics may well soon be coming to an institution near you.

More from this author

The hollow campaign targeting Graham Platner

By Michael Tracey

It’s nearly impossible to circumnavigate the organizational, political, and personal factors that seemingly gave rise to this two-plus year debacle, but one factor that’s been less examined might simply be the most bog-standard of factional workplace resentments, which, as they are increasingly wont to do circa 2026, always find a way to inevitably escalate into vague imputations of sex crime. 

Media leaks in an earlier phase of the saga tried to contextualize the genesis of the “accusations” by reference to Khan’s underlings declaring him “an unpopular boss,” who “ran the office [of the prosecutor] as a top-down operation,” and who imposed what some of them apparently saw as “controversial policies” — such as the “requirement that staff working on a particular case be based in the field.” That is, a requirement that ICC employees charged with investigating “international law” violations in far-flung places like Mali or the Philippines have to actually go and work in those places, rather than “Zooming” in remotely from their comfy work-at-home stations in Bezuidenhout or wherever. That this was apparently so “controversial” to the rising generation of “international law” advocates may speak to the general empirical soundness of “international law” fact-finding, or lack thereof. 

One strangely open question — which, in a way, crystallizes the entire affair — is to what degree the main accuser, Sarah Hishan, can even be correctly described as a “lawyer,” as the CNN headline accompanying her July 16 interview labels her, as have innumerable other media reports. Inasmuch as the word “lawyer” connotes a person professionally accredited to practice law in a particular jurisdiction, there is scant evidence to indicate this label should properly apply to Hishan, who has conspicuously demanded anonymity for her media interviews, which the journalists conducting them have invariably granted without any real explanation.

While an online bio attributed to her states that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales,” Hishan does not appear on the Barrister’s Register or Solicitors Register maintained by the Bar of England and Wales. Her LinkedIn page — which she seems to have recently amended to partially anonymize herself — suggests she was enrolled more than a decade ago in something called a “Bar Professional Training Course,” administered by something called “The University of Law” — a for-profit educational venture located in Britain. 

Other than this, there is no sign she has “completed” any conventional lawyering licensure. An email sent to the ICC public-affairs office, requesting clarification as to whether Sarah Hishan is currently admitted to practice law — in either Britain, Malaysia (her country of origin), the Netherlands (her country of residence as an ICC employee), or any other country — has not been returned. (That she has seemingly drawn a full ICC salary from April 2024 to present, ever since she ignited the ICC’s slow-rolling immolation, only adds another layer of self-defeating irony to the whole ordeal.)   

Hishan does claim various other professional certifications — including a two-day “e-learning” course on “genocide” in 2022, another two-day 2022 “e-learning” course pertaining to “international law and the conflict in Ukraine,” and yet another two-day “workshop,” this one seemingly in-person, held by the Interagency Diversity and Inclusion Network in 2020, from which she was duly certified as completing a “training of trainers,” which thenceforth empowered her to become somebody who could purport to deliver “Gender, Diversity and Inclusion trainings to staff members working for international organizations in The Hague” — with an emphasis on concepts such as “disabilities” and “mental health.” This novel certification, perhaps more than anything else, provides the most clarifying window into her professional background, and her stem-winding odyssey in the field of “international law.”

Some skeptical observers have been keen to emphasize the presumed role of Israeli sabotage in engineering Khan’s defenestration, and there is no doubt the ICC arrest warrants he announced in May 2024 against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant provoked intense animus from Israel’s impassioned supporter network, which was then happy to seize on any perceived Khan vulnerability that may surface. But if there was a “conspiracy” afoot, it lies in plain sight. With or without any Israeli involvement, organs of “international law” such as the ICC, not unlike culturally harmonious organizations such as the Democratic Party, are more than sufficiently susceptible all on their own to these spiraling cycles of shambolic collapse the moment some sexual impropriety can be conjured or alleged, no matter how abstruse the core “allegations.”

Of course, it is true that the Jewish state, at least in the person of Netanyahu, would exploit any “allegation” that could be contrived to cast doubt on the credibility of a prosecutor who had generated enormous worldwide publicity by charging top Israeli officials with crimes — as would any defendant charged with crimes, should their prosecutor have liabilities emerge. So it’s no surprise career Israel backers and Netanyahu emissaries like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham went around whipping up whatever “accusation” whispers they could to undermine the ICC’s prosecution process. Newly released audio and video footage from an unfinished documentary, as reported in The New York Times, reveal Graham strategizing by phone with Netanyahu just before the 2024 presidential election as to how they could best amplify the “sexual-misconduct” rumors, as if Graham and Bibi were deeply concerned for the welfare of Hishan.

Netanyahu even indulged in some strategically inflammatory sex talk himself, telling the website Breitbart in August 2025 that a then-anonymous woman in Khan’s office had accused him of “raping her and sexually assaulting her for over a year.” This turned out to be a total load of hogwash, as the woman herself eventually explained to CNN that she has expressly declined to “put a label” on the conduct she was allegedly victimized by, including when someone once asked her directly if she had been raped — an episode chronicled by UN investigators who took charge of the Khan inquisition in November 2024, and eventually leaked to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The woman’s reasoning, she told Amanpour, was that “I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession” — and so “It’s not my place to label anything.” 

No one has to propose any sprawling clandestine “conspiracy” to note the obvious exploitability of the “ad hoc” adjudicative process concocted to determine Khan’s fate, which rested with a quasi-legislative “international-law” assembly convening in a nondescript chamber in New York City. For one thing, the final expulsion vote was conducted by secret ballot, thanks to an inexplicable provision of the original Rome Statute that established the ICC. 

If the end-result of the cockamamie “international-law” tribunal was influenced by a desire among certain ICC member states to placate their American hosts in the Trump administration, this would only be surprising as cold political reality, whatever the egalitarian-flattening pretensions of the high-minded “international-law” theorists who drafted the ICC’s founding documents. US primacy has certainly remained in full force since the ICC started operations in 2002, as evidenced in miniature by the ICC governing body continuing to be physically housed in the United States, despite steadfast US refusal to join the ICC, and dare surrender any of its sovereignty to “international law.”

Perhaps the current Trump administration’s attitude on the Khan question was a political variable that these “Assembly” members, operating in an expressly political capacity, might have foreseeably taken into account as they pondered the proper recourse for Sarah Hishan’s weighty “allegations.” Khan had already invited a simmering fury for his breach of bipartisan understandings — which he had carefully cultivated with the Biden administration, and even Senate Republicans — with the allegedly “rushed” May 2024 application for arrest warrants he brought against the top Israeli officials. (Three senior Hamas officials were also charged on the same occasion, reflecting Khan’s attunement to political sensitivities, but this had no material effect in terms of dampening the fallout.) 

Then soon came an incoming Republican administration already primed for baseline ideological hostility against the ICC, and which had been given all the more reason to go scorched earth. As he barreled in for his second term, Trump wasted no time imposing maximum reprisals on the ICC and Khan individually, sanctioning him by name as one of his first orders of business on Feb. 6, 2025. Among other things, this sanction appears to have barred Khan from physically attending any of the disciplinary proceedings related to him in New York, not to mention cutting him off from the US-controlled international financial system — “international law” be damned. Bank accounts frozen, no more credit cards, and travel overall severely limited. Other ICC officials were then hit by Trump-backed sanctions several months later. 

Suggested reading

MAGA’s samurai justice in Venezuela

By Michael Lind

Given this fraught political situation, one could easily see the faction of ICC member-states in the US-supplicating orbit — say, the EU-NATO bloc — having an interest to retain whatever favorable standing they could with the mercurial Trump. As such, these countries could have been particularly peeved with Khan for the wholesale US assault on the ICC his actions seemed to have precipitated — an especially wrenching turn for the countries that had optimistically watched a growing US-ICC truce. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Washington had been turning toward a gradual but non-trivial embrace of the ICC, after decades of scathing antagonism. Suddenly, the US and ICC found themselves happy to set aside old differences and collaborate on going hard after Russia. Even eminent Republican congressional figures such as Graham — who previously would’ve been known as among the ICC’s most boisterous haters — were glad-handing with Karim Khan during the Biden years, a detente clearly stemming in part from the concerted effort undertaken by Khan himself to smooth relations with both Republicans and leery Democrats. 

These efforts had seemingly paid off, as bipartisan 2022 legislation authorized US officials to “render assistance” to the ICC in an anticipated prosecution of Putin, by placing him in the same category of unique evildoers as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Slobodan Milošević, whereby America would allow an exception to the standard prohibition against any US collaboration with the ICC. Long gone were the days when Graham & co. had championed an infamous law that could theoretically authorize a US military invasion of the Netherlands, in the event that any American servicemen were ever scooped up and brought to The Hague.

But in this new Ukraine-heady period, the US presidential administration was being led by reverential devotees of Rules-Based International Order. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken had already seen to it that executive order(s) from Trump’s first term, which even then had slapped the ICC with retributive sanctions, were revoked almost a year before Putin aroused the flames of liberal-internationalist fervor all the more epically by invading Ukraine.

Bolstered by this period of glorious bipartisan unity against Russia, and thus an improbable upsurge in official US-ICC tolerance under Karim Khan’s tutelage, Biden and the Democrats did all they reasonably could to keep the momentum going. In April 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland even dispatched a DOJ prosecutor to The Hague to provide the ICC with “significant resources,” courtesy of the US taxpayer, for use in a multitude of “ad hoc” efforts aimed at activating otherwise-flaccid EU-based instruments of international law which might be utilized to “hold accountable” the war-making Russians, up to and including Putin himself. The prior default flaccidity of these mechanisms suddenly stiffened like magic, thanks to a virile overnight infusion of US hegemonic zeal.

But this moment of glory was soon squandered … and capped off by an “adult grooming” fiasco. 

One theory goes that as the first murmurs of “accusations” emerged against Khan in April 2024, he suddenly switched tactics from steady US-ameliorating to willful US-antagonizing. No question Khan was politically astute enough to know that dropping a Netanyahu arrest bombshell would promptly upend whatever collaborative trajectory might have been in progress with his American partners — even under a Democratic administration, at least one helmed by self-proclaimed Zionists such as Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken. He must also have anticipated the tentative new cohort of ICC-curious Republicans, personified by Graham, would erupt into instant vindictive frenzy. And that the reverberations were destined to extend to the faction of ICC member states that maintain allegiance to Israel, namely the EU-NATO bloc of Germany, Britain, and France (kind of) — which also happen to be outsized contributors to the ICC’s operational budget — as well as miscellaneous others like Poland (kind of), Hungary, the Baltics, etc.

So much for that brief, shining moment of Ukraine-inspired harmony! 

One thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, it’s July 13, 2026 — 11 days before the scheduled vote to oust Khan — and there’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, striding forth on behalf of the Trump administration to announce a “sweeping campaign to dismantle” what he declared was the “intolerable threat” the ICC posed to American sovereignty. (As if all those gender-diverse folx on temporary Dutch visas were getting ready to storm down Pennsylvania Avenue.) Rubio vowed “no diplomatic option will be off-limits” in this invigorated anti-ICC campaign. Meaning, it would presumably not be “off-limits” to politely encourage the ICC member states and their New York-based diplomatic reps to please consider voting to remove Karim Khan the following week. For added laughs, they could even tearfully act like they were doing it to honor “grooming” survivors.

That about sums up the theory of international law under which President Trump extracted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his home at a military base in Caracas to put him on trial in New York City for drug trafficking. It’s law for a stateless space — which is to say, for our world. 

There are, of course, other theories of international law. One view — call it the Hobbesian, after the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes — holds that there is no such thing as international law. In this view, in the absence of a world government with its own police, law exists within states, but not among them, other than the law of the jungle, tempered by whatever restraints morality or prudence might support.

At the other extreme is what might be called the Wilsonian view, after President Woodrow Wilson. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, many idealists dreamed of world federalism, which would replace international affairs with the internal affairs of a world government. 

Other reformers a century ago put their hopes in international agencies — leagues of nations, world courts and arbitration tribunals, international police forces, international agencies — that could create de-facto world governance in the absence of a world state by means of cooperation among independent states. Wilsonians put great weight on multilateral treaties and the rulings of transnational agencies and courts as definitive and compulsory international law.

But the most persuasive account is the one depicted in The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. It could be described as the vigilante theory of international law. Vigilantism is the practice by which members of a community or outsiders carry out rough justice in the absence of a functioning or legitimate state. In this view, international law is genuine law — but it is the customary law of a stateless society.

The bureaucratic state — in which legislators and judges and police and military officers are paid out of taxation to enact, judge, and enforce laws — is a recent development in human history. But law is much, much older. It has long existed in societies that have lacked modern states or anything resembling a state at all.

More from this author

Beware tech-bro economics

By Michael Lind

In stateless societies, laws are norms that rest upon a widespread social consensus but are enforced informally, voluntarily, and by interested parties. Lacking a salaried constabulary, the stateless society relies on enforcement by individuals and groups. But the enforcers can’t be compelled to enforce the norm against violators, and their decision to do so may be colored by self-interest of some kind.

The Viking-era Icelandic commonwealth that lasted from the 900s until its subordination to Norway in 1262 is an example of a stateless society. Customary law was recited by law-speakers at the Thing, the assembly of free Icelanders. Judges selected from among the attendees had the power to find criminals guilty. But lacking a professional constabulary or a professional army, the judges could only declare an alleged wrongdoer to be an outlaw. In the case of full outlawry, such a finding permitted anyone to kill the outlaw without legal repercussions. Usually, those who took on the risk of killing an outlaw had a personal interest in the case, like relatives of a murder victim. 

Medieval Latin Christendom offers another example of law in a stateless society. The effective powerlessness of the Holy Roman Emperor meant there was no real government above the level of kings and other potentates. The pope could excommunicate a king, but the king’s overthrow had to be carried out by the king’s subjects or other monarchs, and in practice, they chose whether or not to do so.

The execution of justice in the absence of a functioning or non-corrupt state is a familiar theme of cinema. Hence, The Seven Samurai. In gangster movies like The Godfather, the mafia functions as an informal, extra-legal, parallel government, with its own customary rules and deliberative councils which can order murders. In Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western classic, Unforgiven, prostitutes offer to pay bounty hunters to avenge one of their own in a town run by a tyrannical sheriff and his henchmen.

In a world without a world government — our world — the equivalent of masterless samurai, private gunslingers, and medieval knights-errant are the few great and middling powers that possess the military capacity to project power and intervene in other countries, in addition to defending themselves.

In a modern country with a functioning government, it would be an outrage if a salaried police officer personally decided whether or not to respond to a 911 call, and if salaried firefighters, after rescuing a family from their blazing home, insisted that they be paid by the victims in cash or took some of their possessions as a reward. But in a world that has law but lacks a world state, law enforcement can be both voluntary and self-interested. 

The few military powers that can enforce customary international law have the right to choose when and where they intervene and can legitimately ask to be repaid by the nations whom they rescue in the form of cash, basing rights, or economic access for their own companies and investors. 

What about the content of contemporary international law? Conventional accounts try to cover all bases, by saying that evidence of international law can be sought in treaties, domestic judicial decisions and laws, and the practice of states. But the practice of states — and of great military powers, in particular — is the main evidence of the existence of an international legal norm, because laws which aren’t enforced are just words on paper.

The practices that are legitimate according to the customary “tribal” law of our stateless international society change over time. Before World War I, it was widely accepted that countries could invade and occupy other countries to force them to repay debts to foreign nationals. This practice has fallen out of favor, as has the practice of hiring privateers to seize and loot enemy shipping in wartime, though a vestige remains in Congress’s power to authorize “letters of marque and reprisal” under the US Constitution.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rights of nations — usually defined as identifiable ethnocultural groups — have increasingly weakened or displaced older notions of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. There is a strong norm against genocide, the deliberate extermination of an ethnic nation or minority, which emerged following World War II and the Holocaust. More recently, following the Balkan Wars, a norm against ethnic cleansing or forcible transfers of an ethnic nation has taken hold. Such norms didn’t exist in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the victorious Allies allowed population transfers involving millions of ethnic Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians.

Even the Trump administration, otherwise allied with the far Right in Israel, has backed away from Trump’s earlier horrifying endorsement of the permanent eviction of the people of Gaza from their homeland. In 2019, the first Trump administration declared that the annexation of the occupied West Bank and the slow-motion squeezing out of Arabs to make way for Jewish settlers were not “per se incompatible with international law.” Yet Trump last month restored the policy of previous presidents of both parties opposing the colonization and annexation of Palestinian land by Israel.

Thus, there is strong evidence of a norm against the dismemberment and annexation of foreign states and disputed territories: from global opposition to Israel’s annexation of the Occupied Territories, to broad international support for the US war to evict Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait, to the widespread opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and efforts to seize the Donbass region of Ukraine.

In today’s customary international law, however, state borders aren’t absolute, to judge from the practice of the great powers and other states. True, foreigners can’t invade a country, expel the inhabitants, and annex the territory. But the national right to self-determination has been allowed to alter the borders of existing states. German reunification after the Cold War is one example.  And since 1945, many former colonial countries or breakaway nations have won recognition of their sovereignty. Following the Cold War, Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in a bloodless “velvet divorce,” while Yugoslavia broke up in bloody conflict into seven countries, and the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent successor states in 1991. 

Nations that have failed to obtain their own independence, like the Kurds and Igbo and others in Biafra in Nigeria, have lacked great-power support for their ambitions, a fact that illustrates the role of the great powers in choosing when and where to enforce a norm — in this case, the norm favoring national self-determination. The fact that norms are enforced selectively or hypocritically, however, doesn’t undermine their status as norms.

The flip side of national self-determination is popular sovereignty when it comes to choosing constitutions and leaders. Although it is far from universal, the custom of legitimating governments through free and fair popular elections is more widespread than ever. Elections and plebiscites are far from perfect, but the alternative is worse — allowing a supposed norm of “state sovereignty” to protect any tyrant or junta that seizes effective control in a country, no matter how much it abuses its power by executing, torturing, imprisoning, or exiling its opponents.

Which brings us back to Venezuela under Maduro. In that case, the United States and 10 Latin-American neighbors, along with Japan and most of the democracies of Europe, either refused to recognize Maduro’s legitimacy or raised questions about it, given his obvious theft of the 2024 election in Venezuela.

Suggested reading

Venezuela’s path to freedom

By Juan David Rojas

The Trump administration plausibly could have won widespread international support — outside of autocracies like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — by emphasizing enforcement of the international norm favoring democracy as the main purpose of its intervention in Venezuela, with US support for rebuilding the decayed Venezuelan oil industry subordinated to the decisions of Venezuela’s democratically elected leaders about what to do with their country’s oil.

But Team Trump chose not to emphasize democratic restoration, relying on other rationales. Trump and his deputies have claimed that the overthrow and imprisonment of Maduro was merely a case of extraterritorial American enforcement of domestic US anti-drug laws — an excuse as transparently dishonest in the case of Maduro as it was in the case of Manuel Noriega’s ouster from Panama in 1989. This pretext was made even more preposterous by Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who’d been sentenced to prison for 45 years in the United States for drug trafficking and violating US weapons laws.

Trump also claimed, falsely, that beginning in 2007, under former strongman Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan government “unilaterally seized and stole American oil.” But the oil was never “American.” Under Venezuela’s democratic 1999 constitution, all oil and gas in the country belongs to the state, which can collaborate with private companies to extract it. Moreover, Saudi Arabia nationalized American oil company interests between 1973 and 1980, and Mexico did the same in the 1920s, without Washington regarding either as justification for a regime-change war.

Worst of all, Trump has implied that instead of handing over power to the winners of the 2024 election, the United States, either directly or through remnants of Maduro’s dictatorship, will govern Venezuela for an indefinite period, a strategy that appears to put the interest of US oil companies above the restoration of Venezuelan democracy. Such a policy is likely to galvanize nationalists and anti-imperialists throughout Latin America and around the world, and bolster the stereotype of US foreign policy as “capitalist imperialism.” 

Given the importance of elections in legitimating governments in today’s world, it is hard to make a case from customary international law against a limited intervention by a foreign power that replaces a dictator and restores democracy in a country. But if the intervening power does not move quickly to support a transition to rule by the country’s own democratically elected leaders, it risks violating another strong norm of modern customary international law: the norm against conquest, annexation, and indefinite occupations.

Unfortunately, the efforts of Trump and his aides to explain why the United States overthrew Maduro have been as botched and counterproductive as the operation to capture and remove the Venezuelan dictator was tactically effective.

In a world without a world government and a world constabulary, vigilantism by major military powers is often the only way to bring about rough justice under customary international law. But when it comes to the norms they invoke, the enforcers aren’t judges in their own case. Others, including those whom the vigilantes claim to liberate, will decide whether justice has been done — as a matter of morality, if not enforcement. Audiences admire the protagonists of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven because, while self-interested, the justice they render is finally real justice. The Trump administration would be wise to follow suit.

 Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

More from this author

The virtue of America First

By Arta Moeini

On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

Suggested reading

Iran’s devastating hubris

By Sohrab Ahmari

Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

The trials established for the first time the principle that all governments and their servants are subject to international law. If there was no Nuremberg, there would be no International Criminal Court. Political and military leaders responsible for this century’s genocides would not be brought to justice. Even when they can’t be — as with Putin and Netanyahu, against whom charges have been brought — they are barred from visiting any of the 125 countries that have signed up to the court since its foundation in 2002. But it was far from inevitable that the Nuremberg trials would take place.

Once it became clear that Germany’s defeat was only a matter of time — roughly around the end of 1941, once Hitler had abandoned his plans to invade Britain, and Operation Barbarossa had ground to a halt in the snows of the Russian winter — the Allies were faced with the question of what to do with the Nazi leaders once the war was won. The British, led by Winston Churchill, simply wanted them shot. The Soviet Union preferred a series of show trials, modeled on the rigged and pseudo-legal spectacles mounted by Stalin against his political rivals. It was the United States, however, that advocated a formal trial — one where the defendants would be allowed counsel and proceeding would be as fair as possible, thus demonstrating the superiority of Western legal principles. The British were skeptical about this, because a similar if less elaborate scheme of trials had been brought against the Kaiser and his minions after the First World War had proved to be a fiasco.

Suggested Reading

The AfD storm has only just begun

By Wolfgang Streeck

But while Western opinion had been deeply skeptical of stories of atrocities committed by the Germans from 1914-18, people had few doubts as to the extent of the Nazis’ crimes. That they were culpable for the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 was virtually undisputed, whilst their responsibility for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians, including over 20 million Soviet citizens and six million Jews from all over Europe, was undeniable. But it was not until August 1945 that the Allies acceded to the American idea of a formal trial.

Many of the Nazis who should have faced these charges had killed themselves in order to avoid facing justice. They included Hitler himself, as well as senior officials including Goebbels and Himmler. But many still remained, from Hermann Göring, the former head of the air force and “second man in the Third Reich”, to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. Military leaders including Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel faced charges of war crimes, while the vicious antisemitic propagandist Julius Streicher stood accused of whipping up the hatreds that lay behind the Holocaust.

Over the following months, a vast amount of evidence was presented to the court. Even the 22 defendants were shocked by film footage shown in the courtroom of concentration camps at the moment of their liberation by Allied troops, with thousands of starving, emaciated prisoners and mountains of rotting corpses. Witnesses testified to the extermination program carried out at Auschwitz and other camps, as well as the deliberate starvation of more than three million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans.

All of this was given wide publicity, including in the Allied-controlled German media, which underlined the trial’s function as a means of educating Germans about the true nature of the Third Reich. And yet despite being offered clear evidence of their crimes, the defendants showed neither remorse nor repentance. They blamed Hitler, or Himmler, or claimed that they had not known these atrocities were happening. Attempts by the defense to highlight what they deemed to be Allied atrocities, such as the carpet-bombing of German cities, which caused more than half a million civilian deaths, were rejected as irrelevant to the proceedings.

The murderous show trials carried out in the Soviet Union in the Thirties on Stalin’s orders presented another problem, particularly since Andrey Vyshynsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor, was in charge of Soviet preparations for Nuremberg. Moreover, it was the 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that had resulted in the Red Army invading eastern Poland, with many thousands of Polish civilians deported to Siberia, and some 22,000 Polish officers and aristocrats murdered by the Soviet secret police at Katyn in early 1940. This too was swept under the carpet in the hope that the Germans would remain the focus of the Tribunal’s attention.

The verdicts passed by the panel of judges reflected their desire to appear fair. Three of the 24 were acquitted, including Hjalmar Schacht, an economist sidelined by Hitler before the war began. Others, like the architect and armaments minister Albert Speer, were imprisoned for lengthy periods. The main trial was then followed by several other trials, with the Americans forcing German industrialists and doctors to take the stand for crimes committed during the Nazi era. The trial of German judges for their role in condemning many fellow-citizens to death featured in the powerful 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg.

Beyond this, there were a large number of trials of lower-level perpetrators, largely forgotten now, but which resulted in the conviction of thousands of war criminals from Poland to Italy, in the countries in which their crimes had been committed. Yet even before these trials were over, real-world politics began to intrude. From 1946 onwards, as the Cold War era emerged, Americans did not want to offend the West Germans in case they succumbed to communism. Sentences passed in war crimes trials were commuted, and many Nazi war criminals were released early. The massive program of “denazification” was wound down. The need to recruit experienced professionals — doctors, lawyers, teachers — to help rebuild society and its institutions in West Germany meant that many thousands of former Nazis resumed their old positions.

Suggested Reading

The genius of the World at War

By Aris Roussinos

The chief aim of the trials — to lay the foundations of postwar democracy by educating Germans about the crimes of the Nazi era — was met only for a brief time. While three quarters of Germans polled after the Nuremberg trials considered them fair, the figure had fallen to less than half by 1950. It was not until the Jerusalem trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, the main co-ordinator of Holocaust logistics who had been kidnapped by Mossad from his exile in Argentina, and the trial of Auschwitz camp personnel in Frankfurt in the mid-Sixties, that attitudes toward changed. A new determination to deal with the Nazi war criminals began to emerge in West Germany. By this time, the “economic miracle” had convinced West Germans that democracy could deliver prosperity, in contrast to the failure of democracy in the Twenties and early Thirties. Nazism never revived in Germany: the current success of the far-Right is based on anti-immigrant sentiment, not a desire for global conquest.

For all its flaws, the Nuremberg trials established the legitimacy of international criminal law for the future. Of course, just as they fell into the political context of the emerging Cold War in the late Forties, so International Criminal Court rulings today are prey to 21st century power dynamics. The USA opposes any attempt to prosecute its ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. Actual trials and verdicts have been held against countries that lack powerful international backing, most notably in Africa, leading to charges of bias. Nevertheless, while politics affect international justice today, just as they did at Nuremberg, the principles established after the Second World War still remain vital to the struggle for peace and humanity. The threat to a rules-based international order posed by Putin and other politicians who have violated fundamental principles of international law still comes up against the principles established at Nuremberg and their articulation by the International Criminal Court and beyond that, world public opinion. That is why we continue to celebrate Nuremberg and its legacy today.

What’s striking is how much of the debate recorded by Thucydides uses the language of what we would now consider international law: treaty obligations, even something approaching customary law in the obligations owed by colonies to their founding cities, the Corcyrans’ offer to resolve the dispute by third-party arbitration. But equally striking is that in Thucydides’ narrative, little of this amounts to more than a cover. Both sides’ ultimate appeal is to the raw self-interest of the Athenians, under the cloud of growing tensions with Sparta.

Classical Greece (and the later Hellenistic and Roman periods) was anarchic, in the sense used in international relations theory: each state was fundamentally governed by its own interests. But that very anarchy was tempered, if to a limited degree, by customs — the preservation of the Olympic truce, the principle that treaties should be kept to, some degree of protection for sacred sites, and some mercy for non-combatants — that are not dissimilar to modern international law. No Greek state would have sacrificed its vital interests for these principles, all of which were, to some degree or another, breached over the course of the Peloponnesian War. But even two millennia removed we can see the outlines of a system that must have oiled the wheels of state interaction and regulated the petty, minor disputes that might otherwise consume officials’ time or flare up out of all proportion to the offense.

In this basic state of affairs, there is a lesson that can be lost in the overwhelming complexity of modern public international law: that there are two fundamentally important roles for international law. First, it provides a framework for the day-to-day running of the international system. If there were no settled rules over the treatment of diplomats, and every issue arising from consular relations had to be conducted from first principles, if every matter of international trade had to be negotiated from scratch, if there were no accepted principles of maritime navigation, diplomatic departments the world over would buckle under the workload. Pointless spats would become major crises on a regular basis. Some of this is specified in treaties, some just the result of established custom, but without basic rules to govern the little things, the thousands of ways that states interact with each other every day would become completely unmanageable. For the most part, these interactions are so minor and uncontroversial that the rules that govern them can safely be treated as binding.

The second, more sweeping, role for public international law is to set down clear expectations about what the behavior of states ought to be. Thus states should keep to their treaties, they shouldn’t start unjustified wars of aggression, they should look to spare civilians where possible in war, and so on. That, by treaty or general custom of the international community, these sorts of principles exist gives a strong steer to states that might be tempted to breach them, and provides diplomatic cover to other members of the community in punishing any breaches. The very fact that there are principles broadly agreed in the international community does not, however, mean that it will always be possible to resolve a dispute by following the principles over hard-edged interests and the balance of power. In a system without any true enforcement, it’s somewhere between naïve and wilfully stupid to think that states will sacrifice their vital interests in the name of abstract ideals.

Except, of course, for Britain. And it’s here that the real problem with the Government’s approach to the dispute over the Chagos Islands comes into focus — it seems determined to collapse any distinction between a useful system of rules governing day-to-day interactions and what Britain’s vital interests are. Instead, we’re stuck with an establishment that seems obsessed with the idea that the grubby business of national self-interest can be determined by dusty submissions and dry legal clarity, even as the rest of the world becomes ever more confused and chaotic. It seems to believe that questions of national sovereignty can be as dependent on arcane rules as the finer points of taxation treaties.

And the answer, of course, is that they can — but only one way. No other country is going to follow suit. We can provide a beautiful role model for the rest of the world in our determination to adhere to every bit of the spirit and letter of international law, but it’s farcical to think that anyone else will do the same. Yet this attitude — if only we follow the rules one more time, everyone else will realize how wonderful they are — has hamstrung British policy for decades now. Our conviction that the ongoing dispute over Chagos was what was preventing Russia from realizing the error of its conquering ways in Ukraine, or China abandoning its nine-dash line, is of the same artless innocence as our insistence on not only following, but gold-plating to the hilt, every new EU directive during our membership, even while other EU members smirkingly ignored the inconvenient aspects. The unworldliness of our governing class would be comical were it not such a betrayal of our interests.

There is only one way that this can go. So long as the UK holds itself open as an enthusiastic victim, those countries that do still know how to weigh their national interests will pounce. £101 million a year to Mauritius for the privilege of allowing us to surrender territory to them. How much will we one day give Spain for Gibraltar? Will we be paying for Argentinian drilling equipment as the price for surrendering the Falklands? No wonder we were so comprehensively out-negotiated by the EU over Brexit, and no wonder we’ve so meekly fallen in with the current US administration’s chaotic vision for the world.

Perhaps this is all according to plan, part of our rulers’ grand scheme to make Britain the first truly post-national state, a herald of the new world order where law and lawyers rule supreme. But if that’s so, then they’re missing the most essential part of the picture, that voters won’t tolerate such wilful disregard for British interests indefinitely. If Brexit was the canary in the coalmine of rising anger at high-handed interference by abstruse international bodies, it’s not a warning that has been given any heed. The Chagos deal itself may not — yet — have achieved widespread cut-through, but whether it’s opposition to the ECHR, or increasing backlash against trade deals, there’s a steadily growing current of deep suspicion towards international law in general. It’s become increasingly fashionable, in parts of the online right, to deny the very existence of international law. With Reform consistently leading in the polls, how long is it before the UK has a government consciously committed to repudiating the rules-based system in principle? Nor, of course, is the UK alone in this. The US is, if anything, ahead of us, and much of Europe not far behind (even if popular anger there may have been tempered in part by the wry disregard many European nations have long shown for the more restrictive elements of the international legal system).

There’s a sense in which this is a tremendous problem. For all the pomp and imperial overreach of modern international law, it does serve a purpose. The West – including the UK – has done extremely well over the last century out of a system that it broadly designed to serve its own interests. To the extent that the rules-based international system collapses completely, we are immensely vulnerable as a medium-sized power dependent on free-flowing global trade. It’s hardly in our national interest to return to that kind of Thucydidean interstate anarchy that would require us to expend real resources not on ever-expanding welfare, but on guns and ships.

But when we reach that point — as looks increasingly likely — it will be that imperial overreach of the worshippers of international law that will have been the cause. Far from leading to some kind of Fukuyama-esque internationalist utopia, the hubris of Starmer and his ilk can only undermine democratic consent for those bits of the liberal international order that do work. Once democratic support for, and trust in, the basic principle that resolving disputes through rules is gone, it will be difficult to regain. Modern populism is characterized by its deep suspicion of any kind of international cooperation beyond raw power plays. We risk training a generation of future political leaders to have an inbuilt hostility to international law, even where it might in fact serve our interests.

There’s still time to fix this. A sensible government could pull us out of treaties that do nothing but tie our hands — the Aarhus Convention, the Ottawa Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions — and take a hard-headed look at whether others, like the ECHR, are worth the constraints they place on us. A sensible government could rip up the Chagos deal even at this eleventh hour. Indeed, a sensible Parliament could and should vote it down. Despite the Government’s attempts to avoid scrutiny by concluding the deal just before recess, it has committed to implementing the treaty through primary legislation, and is required in any case to lay treaties before Parliament pre-ratification under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.

There’s no real prospect, though, that this government will do any of that. Its key members have been forged in a world of grandly benign public law, and seem genuinely incapable of understanding why people might actually care for their nation. Given Labour’s vast majority, there is likewise little hope of MPs exercising even their limited powers of scrutiny to block the deal. This is a governing class that takes pride in a self-flagellating attempt at well-meaning atonement for (real or imagined) historical sins. A change of heart is sadly beyond the realm of the likely, or even perhaps possible. By the time we get a government prepared to stand up for British interests, it may be too late to salvage those parts of the system that actually work. The result won’t just be the collapse of everything Starmer and Hermer have dedicated their lives to — it will be a narrower and more suspicious world for all of us.

Thucydides’ History is, as much as anything else, the story of how even the limited constraints of custom and diplomacy were ever more swept aside in favor of ruthless self-interest under the pressures of war. Less than 20 years after the civilized arguments of the Corinthians and Corcyrans, Thucydides records another debate at Athens over the fate of Melos, a rebelling member of Athens’ empire. The Melians appeal to the Athenians’ better nature; they are unsuccessful. In perhaps the bleakest statement of Thucydides’ worldview, the Athenians justify their decision to slaughter the Melians with the famous “δίκαια μὲν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης ἀνάγκης κρίνεται, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν”: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Government will regret its role in bringing back this predatory world.

Netanyahu, accused of starvation and directing attacks against civilians, has described the warrants as “antisemitic” and a “dark day in the history of humanity”. Keir Starmer has nonetheless effectively endorsed them.

It’s hard, though, to see how the warrants stand up as law. Israel is not a member of the ICC and Palestine, which along with human rights luminaries South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti petitioned for the warrants, is not recognised as a state by many. Meanwhile, the Rome Statute that governs the ICC states that any member cannot affect “the rights and privileges” of a third party that is not a signatory.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the Israelis are enraged. The particularly egregious crime of starvation, according to the Statute, relates to “depriving [civilians] of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions”. To prove this, the court must show that Israel acted with the deliberate intent of starving civilians. It’s hard to see how it can given Israel permits aid into Gaza daily. Food insecurity is not an indication of deliberate starvation; nor can Israel do anything to mitigate the hijacking of aid supplies by Hamas.

Yet more enraging, as far as the Israelis are concerned, the ICC is only supposed to intervene as a court of last resort when a nation is “unwilling or unable” to investigate alleged crimes itself. As Dr Yuan Yi Zhu, a fellow at Policy Exchange, points out: Israel’s “fiercely independent” prosecutors weren’t allowed the opportunity to investigate themselves before the ICC issued the warrants.

And the warrants aren’t only legally disreputable, they’re politically cretinous. They’re a gift to Netanyahu — who was reviled by many Israelis even before the negligence that allowed October 7 to happen. Now though, in the face of this type of external attack, the country is rallying behind him. The result? He will almost certainly feel emboldened. More military operations, not fewer, are likely in Gaza and Lebanon. And you can forget any idea of a negotiated peace — at least for the moment. If Palestine is putting out arrest warrants on Netanyahu, he’s hardly going to be making deals with them. It’s a colossal own goal.

All the more so given that America is not a member of the ICC and has an already antagonistic relationship with the organisation. Remember that back in September 2020, following the ICC’s decision to open an investigation into war crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan, Trump used an executive order to sanction the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. Bensouda eventually put the investigation on hold, and under Joe Biden, the US quietly withdrew the sanctions.

While Biden has dismissed the latest warrants as “outrageous”, American Senator Lindsey Graham has made clear that the incoming administration’s thoughts on them are even more robust. “If you are going to help the ICC, as a nation, enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant… I will put sanctions on you as a nation,” he warned. “You’re gonna have to pick the rogue ICC versus America…We should crush your economy because we’re next,” Graham said. “Why can’t they go after Trump or any other American president under this theory?”

Certainly, the ICC’s choice of targets might be considered erratic. It never tried Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, for example, despite his use of chemical weapons against his own people. It claims (with levels of chutzpah usually associated with Israelis) that it has no jurisdiction because Syria is not in the ICC. And yet the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates the death toll from that war to have been 613,000 with an additional 55,000 civilians believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons.

So if it’s all legally suspect and politically obtuse: why did the ICC do it? To say it is antisemitism alone is too simplistic. More credible is the idea that, as one international law expert told me, the ICC must have a diversity of judges, so it has a lot of mediocre people from countries across the world where legal standards are poor. “They just aren’t very good lawyers. Many of its judges are from the global south so from countries not favourable to Israel. Plus, if you are a human rights lawyer it’s taken for granted that you are anti-Israel.”

More from this author

The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand

By David Patrikarakos

There are many, especially on the Right, who claim that this proves that international law is an ass — or worse that it’s a “fiction”. But this is wrong: we need it to govern maritime rights and arbitrate on cross-border trade disputes. But on fundamental questions of national self-defence, and the defence of civilisation undertaken by people answerable to electorates, the idea that an institution such as the ICC has the essential competence or legitimacy to be the ultimate arbiter is massively stretching the power that international law should have.

A couple of days after the warrants were issued, I watched a clip from Channel 4 News in which human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, was pronouncing on the warrants. No one ever expected Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to turn up in the dock in the Hague, but in the end his own people handed him over, he observed. Might not the same happen to Netanyahu when he “fell from power”?

His rhetoric only served to highlight the disconnect that pervades this world. For all the problems Israelis have with Netanyahu, it is fundamentally unserious to believe that they will ever throw him under the bus for fighting the terrorists who killed over a thousand of their fellow citizens and dragged hundreds more off to Gaza, no matter how much his actions have annoyed Djibouti.

The clash here is not just of political tribe or legal debate; it is of a fundamental understanding of reality. On the one hand, we have Robertson, the ICC and Keir Starmer (who privately refers to IHL as his “north star”) who believe that the bloody and chaotic practice of war can be ordered and adjudicated upon by bureaucrats in Holland.

On the other, we have Vladimir Putin and his war of conquest with its razed towns and cities, and Hamas’s psychopathic — and mediatised — barbarities. If the ICC’s vision ever had any basis in fact, it died in Gaza and eastern Ukraine, as I have seen first hand. This is the world we are now living in, and it will not yield to delusion, or legal sophistry.

In America, meanwhile, Senator Hawley of Missouri has introduced a bill which would pave the way for coronavirus-related lawsuits in US courts against China. His Justice for Victims of Covid-19 Act would remove the immunity that China currently enjoys before US courts under international law.

This may sound like an American fantasy, but it should not be too lightly dismissed. Beijing will be watching the process closely. And although this bill is unlikely to be the right answer, some sort of legal reckoning for China is inevitable.

The Hawley proposal isn’t the first of its kind. In 2016, Congress adopted the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (“JASTA”) to allow US courts to decide civil claims brought by families of victims against Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the 9/11 attacks. The action did raise tensions between the US and the Kingdom, with the Saudi government threatening to dump its investments in the US, but repercussions on relations weren’t as severe as some had feared.

The political and economic consequences of a Covid-19 law, however, would be much farther-reaching — enough to make the Chinese regime sit up and listen.

Further reading

China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

First, the damages are unprecedented. Twenty million people have now filed jobless claims in America. Each one of them could become a plaintiff, alongside thousands of businesses. The Henry Jackson Society has estimated that losses for the United States will be well over $1 trillion — given the increases in public spending necessary to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. But were damages to be determined by courts, in a tsunami of private lawsuits, the total figure could end up being far in excess of that.

Second, while the US and Saudi Arabia have a close military, security and strategic partnership, the same is not true of the US and China. There is no military partnership; very little by way of security cooperation; and no shared strategic understanding. Crucially, the idea that China’s rise would be beneficial to US interests has virtually disappeared in Washington. Few today would be prepared to defend the strategic assessment behind President Clinton’s decision to let China into the WTO, namely that free trade would beget liberty and democracy.

Because of the scale of the threat, the Chinese Communist Party would be unlikely to take Senator Hawley’s legislation on the chin. There would certainly be tit-for-tat legislation, which would make the trade wars and tensions of the last few years seem like a walk in the park.

Given the chaos it could unleash, Senator Hawley’s proposal is not a good solution for either side. The US would risk putting itself on the wrong side of international law by violating sovereign immunity, and its courts would be in no position to acquire the necessary evidence. And although China’s holdings of US securities, at just over $1.5 trillion in 2018 according to the Congressional Research Service, would probably be enough to cover the potential losses, the enforcement and execution on these assets would be complex and hazardous.

The repercussions would put the clock back on US-China political and economic relations not merely to the time before the WTO, but to the time before Nixon in China.

Further reading

Is China preparing for war?

By Maajid Nawaz

On the other hand, doing nothing is not an option either. The Hawley bill is only one of many legal initiatives on China, the latest being a claim filed yesterday by a luxury hotel in the Italian Dolomites against China’s Ministry of Health. Some kind of legal reckoning with China is inevitable, but what form should it take?

First, an international investigation.

Before any question of compensation is assessed, the origins of the virus and the handling of the first phases of the epidemic by the Chinese authorities must be investigated. The International Health Regulations of the WHO could provide the framework.

Would the Chinese regime sign up to it? To avoid the virus being used to exploit divisions in the West, the US, Europe and Japan would have to maintain a united front. Britain and France would have to lead in Europe, and rein in the pacifying instincts of German mercantilism. A reset of relations with Russia should also be on the cards. Unwinding Nixon in China could be followed by the prospect of Trump in Moscow.

Senator Hawley’s legislation and similar initiatives in other countries may turn out to be useful here. If the Chinese Communist Party calculate that the alternative to an international enquiry would be a challenge to their economic model and a barrage of international recriminations, then they might consider an international forum in charge of establishing facts preferable to an array of foreign domestic judicial and legislative institutions. A single international dispute settlement track would lower the political temperature and allow China to fend off any immediate political and legal initiatives from individual states. Establishing facts first and talking money later may not be a bad option for China at this point.

And second, a new major international treaty.

The post-coronavirus settlement coming out of an investigation must have a larger purpose than just addressing China’s role in the coronavirus disaster. If this global pandemic resulted from some error or was avoidable, China may bear great responsibility. But let us be honest: this is a risk that the entire world failed to take seriously enough.

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reported that the State Department raised concerns about safety at the Wuhan Lab as early as 2015. Why wasn’t more done to address them? SARS I warned us to be vigilant, but was the international surveillance in place fit for purpose?

What’s more, epidemics are just one of a series of existential threats that arise from our interdependency and that require international action.

Further reading

We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

In The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord calculates the chances of an existential catastrophe via a number of different natural or anthropogenic risks. According to his analysis, an ‘engineered’ pandemic, unaligned artificial intelligence or unforeseen anthropogenic risks are the most likely to cause an existential catastrophe in the next 100 years—- the chances of that happening being, respectively, 1 in 30, 1 in 10, and 1 in 30. Other well-known and yet neglected risks include antibiotic abuse. Countries that tolerate or encourage the abuse of antibiotics for human and animal consumption endanger the whole of humanity. But at present no one is holding them to account.

There is no regime of international law in force that is commensurate with the gravity of these risks. Other serious risks like climate change or nuclear weapons (each posing a 1 in 1,000 chances of existential catastrophe in Ord’s view) are covered by at least some international law, and certainly attract greater public awareness.

We need a new framework for identifying and addressing these risks. Quite aside from questions about its performance in the current epidemic, the WHO is not the right institution for this task. This is not a challenge that can be left to a specialist institution or to a body of experts. International diplomacy and domestic politics must be engaged at the highest level.

We need to aim for nothing short of a new Treaty on Risks to the Future of Humanity, with a series of Security Council resolutions to place this new framework on the strongest legal footing. Those who choose to remain outside this new legal regime – or to flout it – should no longer benefit from free trade or international cooperation.

He may have got the specifics wrong, but Senator Hawley’s instinct is right: we need new laws. China must be held to account, and we should use this opportunity to forge a new pact between nations to ensure that none is permitted to jeopardise the whole of humanity.