[Prefatory Note: This post of mine is a much modified and expanded version of what was published on the TMS (Transcend Media Service) on its weekly listserve, July 27-August 3, 2026. Another version with a different title was published today on my Substack account.]
In the writing about how to restore hopes for the avoidance of further bloodshed, devastation, and suffering arising from frequent reescalations of the confrontation between the US/Israel and Iran it is crucially relevant to take account of the current situation as stemming from an unprovoked war of aggression started by the United States on February 28, 2026, hours later joined by Israel, and resumed from time to time since as a joint venture. This new war seemed at first a repeat of the Twelve Day June War of 2025 in which Iran failed to respond to devastating strikes against its nuclear program facilities. This prior war launched against Iran was also unprovoked and in violation of the core UN Charter and international law prohibition of non-defensive uses of force
Unlike this earlier 2025 war it was evident from the first days of the 2026 War that Iran had changed its tactics, as well as equipping itself with impressive capabilities to engage the regional interests of the United States, while along the way imposing heavy costs on U.S. dependent allies, especially Saudi Arabia, in the region. As well, Iranian counter-measures adopted to offset its vulnerability to military strikes has inflicted far greater wider harmful regional and global ramifications than originally anticipated by the aggressor governments that have been temporarily somewhat overlooked by Trump’s bluster and threats. What has happened to Iran, Israel, and the Gulf since this new war began is a more correctly perceived as a regional disaster for the West and a huge negative milestone in the struggle to attain stability in the post-Cold War world, as well posing grave questions as to the reputation of the United States as a reliable and capable protector of the national security of the Gulf countries. One tangible expression of this new atmosphere of tension, conflict, and uncertainty is the conclusion of a defensive security alliance joining Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan is a NATO-like treaty arrangement.
The original pretexts for initiating this second Iran War concerned revived allegations about Iran’s nuclear program and stockpiles of enriched uranium relevant to a possible production of a nuclear weapon. In the early days of the war Trump arrogantly ordered the Iranian people ‘to take back their country’ and have a new leadership in Tehran that acknowledged defeat and praised the total U.S. military victory with a show of gratitude for liberating the Iranian people from a repressive ruling theocracy. The preferred Washington victorious scenario was ‘a Venezuelan operation’ in which the furniture of Iranian sovereignty was preserved for all to see, and only the carpet was changed, but this would make enough difference to achieve U.S. political objectives of control and economic goals of profitable investment and management of national development of natural resources. In retrospect, some White House insider should have ear;y on whispered a simple message in Trump’s good ear, ‘Iran is not Venezuela!’
Israel was initially kept somewhat in the diplomatic background while making no secret of its additional national belligerent goals of a radical regime change in Tehran, featuring not only new faces but an enforceable commitment to end proxy relations with regional Islamic movements (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, Iraqi militias), and secondarily, to insist upon the destruction of Iran’s remaining missile capabilities including launchers. While the U.S. was negotiating bilaterally it tried with minimum results to separate itself from Israel’s continuing regional warmongering especially in southern Lebanon, and less dramatically in Syria, as well as its separate demands directed at Iran. This Israeli security agenda is being promoted as a matter of urgency by the Netanyahu government faced with October elections whose outcome seems to hinge in keeping the ultra-right religious parties within the Likud-led coalition.
The highpoint of Off Ramp Diplomacy was the disclosure of a Memorandum of Understanding on June 17 that set forth a plan generated by high profile negotiations with Pakistan as the intermediary that seemed to be a formula for a permanent ceasefire and the gradual normalization of Iran as a state among states in West Asia, with assurances of Iran’s future security. The MOU left the regulation of Iran’s nuclear program and enriched uranium to further negotiations in a 60-day period. Israel’s extreme displeasure with the MOU was not hidden, and its continued attacks on Lebanon violated Iran’s quite reasonable expectations that the MOU applied to Israel as being the U.S. partner in aggressive war. Such behavior doomed diplomacy and revived an atmosphere of acute mistrust accentuated by Trump’s repeated crude and bloodthirsty threats sometimes accompanied or soon followed by new military strikes against strategic targets, including civilian infrastructure, and warnings of further and worse attacks if Iran keeps refusing to reject U.S. demands, which have not been clearly articulated beyond a repetition of the commitment to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon, and more recently, the most genuine priority of assuring future navigational freedom in the Strait of Hormuz, which presupposed an arrangement of collective regional administration that excluded Iran
Both of these goals seem questionable. In light of its aggressive behavior toward Iran ever since the Islamic Republic came to govern Iran in 1979 Israel has obstructed Iran’s peaceful nuclear program while developing a secretive nuclear arsenal of its own, thereby deftly avoiding the constraints of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). With this latest Israeli aggression, aggravated because initiated in the midst of ongoing encouraging diplomatic negotiations under the auspices of Oman, Israel destroyed any prospects of a normalized future relationship with Iran. In light of such developments, Iran although foregoing the acquisition of its own nuclear deterrent for decades, out of respect for ethical principle, which now make it seem reasonable and even prudential to develop its own nuclear deterrent capability, especially if the U.S. succeeds in its resolve to ensure that Hormuz would not be blocked to commercial shipping in the event of future crises involving Iran, supposedly ensuring that the safe daily passage of 100 that would not be impeded in the future. But why would Iran give away what has proved to be its most powerful countermeasure to the military onslaught. If the February 28 attacks were motivated even in part by anti-proliferation objectives the failed military operations may be remembered as the spark that lit the fire of a West Asian nuclear arms race.
The Iran War can be divided into six distinct phases: (1) U.S. launch of a war of aggression; (2) joint U.S./Israeli aggression; (3) effective countermeasures by Iran within the scope of reasonable acts of self-defense, including attacks against regional military bases in the Gulf region used by the U.S. to carry out its military operations and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping that disrupted energy and fertilizer supply chains; (4) bilateral U.S./Iran negotiations climaxing with the mutual acceptance of an apparent war-ending MOU; (5) Breakdown of the MOU envisioned process and resumption of threats and periodic military attacks by the two aggressor countries and continued resistance by Iran in the Hormuz context and further military actions against U.S. bases; (6) Search for a mutually acceptable Off Ramp for the U.S. and adaptations in political alignment and security arrangements throughout West Asia.
This is not the Iran War that has been portrayed to publics in the West, especially by the voices of the Western governments and even the United Nations since its initiation on February 28, 2026. The evidence and the intention of applicable law is to brand the failure to use peaceful means to resolve international disputes and to refrain from recourse to international force as a War of Aggression. This has been formally regarded as an international crime since 1928 when the Pact of Paris was signed into law, a status confirmed at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals by their assignment of wars of aggression to the ultimate category of international crimes, Crimes Against the Peace. The aggression against Iran was aggravated by the fact that the country was previously subject to a war of aggression less than a year earlier when the so-called Twelve Day War initiated on June13, 2025. It was further aggravated in 2026 by recourse to war during ongoing negotiations in Oman that the mediating official described as being on the verge of success thus amounting to a rebuff of diplomacy, as well as the legal imperative of peaceful settlement of disputes. Both of these dimensions of prior contempt for peacemaking betraying the kind of trust among sovereign states that diplomacy depends upon,
Beyond this, was the shocking events on the first day of the Iran War that included the deliberate targeting for assassination of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini who as well as being the political leader for a long period was revered as a sacred religious figure among Sh’iite Muslims throughout the region, despite being an admittedly controversial figure within Iran. On the same day an elementary school in Minab was struck that killed at least 165 underage children. U.S. officialdom discounted the incident without issuing an apology for the attack, claiming it was as an accident of war caused by relying on obsolete targeting information. Even if this explanation is true, it hardly eliminates the symbolic impact of such tragic impacts of warmaking on the unblemished innocence of young children.
Against this background, it should shock international sensibilities that the UNSC could not mobilize the political will to condemn the aggression but instead outrageously seized the occasion to blame Iran for spreading the war by its attacks on the military bases on the territory of Gulf countries. [S/RES/2817 92026) by a vote 0f 13-0, with China, Russia abstaining] Mainstream Western media did little better, confining its coverage to speculations about which side was winning the war as if both sides were equally culpable for the advent of the chaotic conditions brought about, and war was nothing other than an international game to identify winners and losers. The UN resolution altogether refrained from criticizing the United States, and of course Israel, for this unprovoked recourse to war. It should be viewed as a major UN capitulation to geopolitics reminiscent of SC Res. 2803 last November absolving Israel altogether from the Gaza genocide while giving its blessings to the one-sided Trump 20-point Peace Plan.
The NY Times and other liberal media platforms characterized the war from a Western perspective as ‘a war of choice,’ implicitly admitting that it was not initiated or waged because of a credible security threat, much less as a legal response to a prior armed attack. The media did by and large counter U.S. governmental propaganda that its recourse to war produced an immediate and decisive victory and that the White House was running out of patience with Iran’s refusal to admit as much. Yet the influential media soon countered this rare display of journalistic objectivity in the treatment of foreign policy by also giving a respectful nod to the views of notorious foreign policy hawks such as John Bolton who in a NY Times Opinion Piece called upon Washington ‘to finish the job’ as if assuming that crimes of the aggressor are legitimate international undertakings. [Bolton, “Finish the Job: How Trump Can Still Win in Iran, NY Times, April 4, 2026.]
Peace can only be restored by taking account of the identity of the aggressor and not through a false symmetry of both sides diplomacy. At minimum, this would require taking Iran’s future security requirement into serious account given its total vulnerability to military assaults by its enemies. As with the Gaza Genocide Trump’s ‘peacemaking’ in the Iran setting analogously rewards the perpetrators of a war of aggression and inflict further punishment on its victims.
More independent good will proposed diplomatic initiatives are also non-judgmental as to the two sides when setting forth plans to put in place measures to end the Iran War coupled with arrangements that will establish a more stable future for the region. Such proposals have tended to focus on assurances of future freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz by some sort of joint management of this waterway that is a choke point of globally vital supply chains. These proposals often fail to take account of Iranian vulnerability to future aggression or to impose punitive accountability of the aggressors for the devastation and the betrayals of trust seem unworthy of sympathetic consideration. It is impossible to expect Iran to accept an arrangement for Hormuz that doesn’t include some reliable alternative nationally effective means of deterrent and self-defense in the likely event of further attacks. At present, there is no foundation or justification for Iran to rely on the U.S.’s, much less Israel’s, professions of peaceful intention without assured access to reliable deterrent capabilities or retaliatory countermeasures. Without such features a peace agreement would almost certainly become a death trap for Iran. At present, the only plausible way of achieving Iran’s future security, absent a presently unthinkable willingness to standback if Iran chooses to develop a nuclear deterrent, would be equally unthinkable. It would authorize Iran’s managerial access to Hormuz in the event of a future national security emergency. Similarly unthinkable would be a total withdrawal by the United States from its post-colonial willingness after the failed Suez Operation of 1956 to maintain a Western hegemonic presence in West Asia, increasingly after 1967 in tacit partnership with Israel. If such viable and benevolent off-ramps were ever to become feasible they could be helpfully reinforced by the demilitarization of the U.S. presence in the form of alliances and arms sales and supplies. It would also be facilitated by a radical revision of Israeli foreign policy in the region, which is even more unthinkable now than the other stabilizing arrangements involving humbling adaptations by the United States.
This disastrous Iran War has many lessons that need to be learned by liberal democracies that continue to voice rhetorical praise for an international rule of law while Atlanticist governments deny the relevance of international law whenever compliance becomes strategically inconvenient. While international law retains its usefulness as a policy instrument (rather than a regulatory regime) when assailing the behavior of adversaries as in the 2022 Russian attack upon Ukraine, it should not be allowed to distract U.S. foreign policy advisors steeped in ‘realism’ from pursuing strategic ambitions in the domain of global security. As we have seen in the mainstream policy debates among ‘realists,’ ‘wars of choice’ are a convenient substitute for ‘international law’ in situations where the adherence to law is at odds with geopolitical priorities and behavior. So long as this normative polarization is operative, lawless governments will have a coherent basis in international practice, also evident in formal UN actions, in deflecting criticism, without regard to whether or not formulated in legal language, as nothing more than hostile propaganda. If this geopolitical practice remains ineffectively challenged it likely prefigures a wartorn future for humanity.
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[Prefatory Note: this post needs updating, but it still seems relevant in pointing to the generally neglected interplay between legality and legitimacy as important modes of assessing conrroversial transnational behavior of states, especially with respect to the war/peace agenda of geopolitical actors, which for reasons of convenience I identiy as the five Permanent Members of the Security Council.]
Abstract: International law failed in Gaza after October 7 to stop genocide and crimes against humanity despite authoritative rulings by the ICJ and ICC, and resolutions in the UN General Assembly. Israel consistently defied international law, being shielded in doing so, by ‘lawful’ geopolitical shielding and complicity by the NATO permanent members of the UN Security Council, especially by the United States. Such obstruction created enforcement, complicity, and accountability gaps that has allowed Israel’s criminality to proceed. These formal legal condemnations of Israel’s conduct do support the conclusion that international law is weak whenever its assessments clash with strategic interests of geopolitical actors. This should not be interpreted to mean that international law is irrelevant to the pursuit of justice or rights-based peacemaking . International law remains potentially important as it legitimates civil society activism and solidarity initiatives with a people, in this case the Palestinians, struggling for their basic rights. Hypothetically, if the ICJ and ICC had sided with Israel, accepting legal arguments about Israel’s right of self-defense or the counter-terrorist nature of its use of force, then the contradictions between law and justice would have given Israel a (deeply contested) legal entitlement to carry out genocide, ethnic cleansing, and overall criminality. It is notable that most wars since 1945 have been won by the side that prevails in the Legitimacy War, and not as political realists continue to insist, by the side with superior military capabilities. That is capturing the high moral and legal ground in a violent conflict is often more decisive than dominating the battlefield as the colonial powers and the US should have discovered in the Vietnam War. A mobilized people as in the anti-apartheid campaign can shift the balance of political forces to favor human rights and justice. Whether this will happen in the Gaza context remains uncertain due to the severity of the genocide and the depth of complicit behavior by the governments of the liberal democracies, especially the United States.
Did International Law Fail in Gaza? Yes and No
The failures of international law in relation to the prolonged and cruel genocide taking place in Gaza for a period approaching two years are more obvious that its limited successes and positive, if indirect, impact of the underlying struggle to promote basic Palestinian rights. It seems appropriate to lament these failures as being far more consequential than any successes for the entrapped Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, with extended genocidal tremors bringing further misery to Palestinians living in the Occupied West Bank supposedly under Israeli protective administration legally required to respect international humanitarian law. The core failure of international law, and of the United Nations as the principal site for enforcement in situations of this kind, is the inability to implement authoritative renderings of international law that are of benefit to victimized persons suffering from pervasive criminality. In an early 2024 an Interim judgment of the International Court of Justice almost unanimously granted South African requests for Provisional Measures back in the first months of 2024, which if complied with or enforced would have greatly mitigated Palestinian suffering for all the months that followed.
Additionally, the International Criminal Court accepted the Chief Prosecutor’s dramatic recommendation that arrest warrants be issued for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. It was unlikely at the time of issuance that these arrest warrants would never be actualized, but the struck a mighty symbolic blow that infuriated Israel and angered its ally, the United States. It was a persuasive step in challenging the public discourse that had previously held sway to the extent that Israel was the victimized party, not Gaza or the Palestinian, and it was Israel that had a legal entitlement to strike back. Although the arrest warrants covered crimes committed before October 7 they can a dark shadow over such Israeli pretensions that the IDF was ‘the most moral army in the world.’
Neither authoritative of these ejudicial initiative has been enforced, nor has the juridical actions even attempted to impose some level of accountability on those powerful states or their leaders whose governments aligned themselves with Israel by lending various forms and levels of material, strategic, and diplomatic support, making them complicit for failing to uphold the Genocide Convention’s emphasis on preventing and punishing the crime of genocide and seeking to end the impunity of geopolitical actors and their protected allies. Beyond this, the issue of corporate complicity has been almost totally neglected until the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine. Francesca Albenese, controversially highlighted corporate compllicity in her June 2025 UN Report, which made her almost immediately subject to targeted unlawful sanctions imposed by the US Government in a defiant lawless challenge to the independence for UN experts.[1]
What is revealed is the normative order operative since 1945 is seriously deficient when examined closely. It was never endowed with the autonomous capabilities to make international law effective in the face of non-compliance by a geopolitical actor (conveniently identified here as the five permanent members of the Security Council or P%) or a state enjoying geopolitical protection by way of the veto or by direct alignment by a formal alliance as with NATO members. In effect, for these two categories of sovereign states (that is, violators and their powerful protectors) adherence to international law when it comes to global security issues is essentially voluntary and was intended to be so from the outset.[1] Nevertheless, from the perspectives of civil society activists or governments giving priority to a reconceptualization of national interests more in line with the contemporary global public good, international law has become a useful policy instrument for resistance on behalf of a global normative order that is post-geopolitical with respect at least in the setting of global security, war, genocide prevention, and human rights, including economic and social rights.[2]
This defining operative reality of international law, even as progressively interpreted, in relation to the war/peace agenda can be summarized as producing several gaps that are responsible for widespread disappointment when it comes to the effectiveness of international law and lowered expectations of transcending geopolitics in relation to responses by the United Nations in this most vital area of international relations.[iii] For the sake of clarity these gaps can be briefly identified:
—Enforcement Gap: The International Court of Justice in responding to South Africa’s formal submission alleging Israel’s violation of the Genocide Convention in the course of its military operations constituted genocide, displayed a juridical respect for a regulative view of international law in its near unanimous rulings that granted several of South Africa’s requests for interim measures given the humanitarian emergency conditions in Gaza.[iv] The ICJ is empowered to declare the law authoritatively in response to legal disputes referred to it for resolution, but it is dependent on compliance by the losing party or enforcement sanctions imposed by the Security Council, which are hampered by the veto (both its inhibiting prospect or actual exercise) in contexts with a geopolitical dimension.
In this instance Israel refused to comply with interim rulings based on a finding that it was ‘plausible’ to view Israel proclaimed intentions together with its combat tactics as genocide and the right of veto possessed by the NATO P5 members of the Security Council were standing by to nullify any serious enforcement efforts or punitive action. Additionally, the interim character of the ICJ judgment, although of historic significance, was an additional concern arising from ponderous legal proceedings that might take several years before a final judgment is forthcoming. At such a point, the genocidal reality will have been superseded by developments and the ICJ outcome would be mainly of significant as a precedent, yet itself weakened by a provision in the ICJ Statute denying any legal obligation to respect prior ICJ pronouncements.
—Accountability Gap: As with enforcement, accountability for international wrongdoing is subject to a geopolitical exception that is illustrated by the approach taken after World War II (itself foreshadowed by the feeble effort to hold actors accountable for criminal acts dddafter World War I). This approach rejected accountability tied to violations of international law by all states during the war. In deference to geopolitics accountability was determined by the winners and imposed on the losers who were prosecuted and punished. This underlying dichotomy was given a ‘civilized veneer’ by according the accused losers of some elements of due process and the appearance of a fair trial. In contrast, the crimes of the winners, including indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities and the use of atomic bombs, were not legally scrutinized, much less prosecuted and punished. From a regulative perspective this treated international law as a partisan policy instrument rather than as a universally applicable restraint on the behavior of sovereign states. This precedent set in the aftermath of World War II also incorporated these regressive features of international relations into the normative order established to cope with the unmet dangers of the nuclear age, as well as the related risks of the emergent Cold War.[v] In effect, global security and large-scale war prevention were entrusted to the P5 to address outside the framework of the UN, which resulted in arms races, periodic war/peace crises, reliance on secretive deterrence frameworks that were completely removed from any pretensions of legality or even some mechanism of custodial guardianship. This discretionary nuclearism was further geopoliticized by the selective nonproliferation regime that seems blind when it comes to Israel’s covert acquisition of a nuclear arsenal while committed to waging war against Iran to destroy its nuclear program, especially its enrichment facilities. The structure reveals a reliance on the prudence of political leaders of the nuclear weapons states, which seems a fragile basis on which to stake the future of the human species.
—Complicity Gap: The reference here is to the legal responsibility of governments, corporations, banks, and international institutions/alliances that have either openly or covertly intentionally aided and abetted the commission of serious international crimes, including genocide. In the context of the Gaza genocide the support given to Israel by several Western governments was instrumental in carrying out the crime. It included the provision of weaponry, funds, intelligence-sharing, steadfast diplomatic protection against moves to censure or sanction, and a willingness to go along with Israel’s diversionary, manifestly false legal, moral historical narratives of self-defense counterterrorism, and antisemitism. The issue of criminal complicity was central to the 2025 SR Report containing data and analysis pointing to high profits from genocide gained by 48 named corporations and financial actors, including some of the most prominent. Such truth-telling by the SR, Francesca Albanese, led Israel’s primary supportive government, the United States, to impose the previously mentioned personal sanctions, themselves unlawful as applied to a UN undertaking. This punitive pushback by the US was obviously intended to inhibit criticism of the economic infrastructure of Israeli support, as well as to warn the ICC, the UN, and other political actors, including the Palestine Authority, to refrain from future efforts to attack Israel or the United States from the perspective of international law.[vi] It was also reinforced Israel’s defamatory propaganda that Ms. Albanese was long unfit for the job because of her antisemitic beliefs and performance as SR, thus wrongfully challenging UN attempts to expose human rights abuses and hold perpetrators accountable. In this instance, such action interfered with UN efforts relating to the genocide through reliance on the veto-free Special Procedures capabilities of Human Rights Council;
—Pedagogical Gap: This may be the least familiar and yet in the long run the most significant gap, which in my view, is all-important for closing the other three gaps in the post-1945 global normative order. This pedagogical gap needs to be narrowed, if not closed, for there to be any realistic hope of incorporating a regulative view of international law into the worldview and operational code of foreign policy elites in relation to global security, war prevention, and crime prevention agendas.[2]
Yet the pedagogical gap is the most daunting ideological barrier because it remains unacknowledged reflecting the ideological hegemony of outmoded militarized versions of political realism within the policymaking domains of geopolitical actors and their civilian infrastructures of well-funded lobbying on behalf of special interests and think tanks subscribing fully to the critical realism of governmental foreign policy establishments. There is no immediate way of overcoming this barrier, and my advocacy is initially directed at revamped citizenship training and public international law instruction and practice around the world. The central objective would be to place a greater emphasis on adapting political realism in international relations to the underlying urgencies of climate change, ecological instabilities, genocidal violence, the menace of nuclear weapons, and aggressive recourse to force to resolve international conflict situations. International law in its regulative role illuminated by critiques of geopolitical usages and historical international roles including giving legal backing to economic exploitation and colonial arrangement should be included in interdisciplinary and sophisticated law school instruction and scholarship. This should be understood as part of an upgraded and reconfigured perception of the relations between adherence to international law and the pursuit of national interests and the public good. As matters now stand the most influential centers of study and policy research are dominated by anachronistic ideas of legal and foreign policy pedagogy tied to various versions of militarized group think, intolerant even of such prudently inclined and morally sensitive political realist thinkers as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, John Bacevich, and Trita Parti who continue to identify themselves ‘realists.’[3] I suppose their exclusion from Washington’s corps of foreign policy advisors is mainly due to their greater skepticism when it comes to national reliance on military approaches to foreign policy challenges. Such views are unwelcome and unrepresented in the inner circles of foreign policymaking of the geopolitical or P5 actors, perhaps most overtly in the United States, a telling sign that the military/industrial complex remains an impediment to the adoption, or even the serious discussion, of less militarist and more cooperative interpretations of global security.
Hopefully, the influence of TWAIL perspectives on younger generations of students and teachers will sharpen their critical convictions with what is identified here as ‘progressive interpretations of international law.’[vii] As is understandable TWAIL scholarship and advocacy has sought up to now mainly to criticize and reform international law in the economic sphere engaging the right to development from the perspectives and priorities of the Global South. In the future it seems reasonable to expect more attention to be devoted to policy challenges in the spheres of global security and war/peace. The Treat of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, 2021) is an example of Global South leadership with regard to denuclearization and abolition of nuclear weaponry. Another example is the degree to which challenging the enforcement gap with respect to the Gaza genocide have been due to legalist initiatives at the UN and elsewhere pushed almost exclusively by countries in the Global South.[viii]
Because of the political realist dominance in the policy realm of ideas, the subject-matter of public international law tends to be marginalized, except as it bears on trade and investment, in law schools, and most influential lawyers have little knowledge of either its constructive potential or its systemic disregard in policy-making arenas of decision. This should be challenged and changed, adapting cooperative multilaterism, which depends on codifying agreements in the form of enforceable treaties, to policy concerns of global scope. Future security, stability, and even species survival depend on making these adjustments in a timely manner, and will only happen as a result of civil society pressures, which until now have ranged from weak to non-existent
Reevaluating International Law’s Response to the Gaza Genocide: A Legitimacy War Perspective
Without underestimating the weaknesses of international law in relation to global security, war/peace issues, and genocidal internal politics, it is nevertheless even with these flaws an important policy instrument in the context of civil society activism and public discourse in relation to the quest for demilitarized justice-driven peace and ecologically sensitive stability among states. With respect to the Gaza genocide, post-1945 international law with regard to this crime is set forth in the 1948 International Convention of Genocide that was relied upon by South Africa’s widely praised recourse to the ICJ, with interim proceedings at The Hague given wide TV coverage and receiving favorable coverage of the presentation of its principal allegations against Israel: violation of the Genocide Convention and unlawfully blocking the international delivery of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza long deprived by Israel of the necessities of life. Such a visual and theatrical presentation of the international arguments for and against Israel’s policy in Gaza has had a major impact on the continuing process of delegitimizing Israeli claims of self-defense, counterterrorism, and antisemitism further informed by its contention of being victimized by the October 7 attack that it claims was ‘the real genocide.’
At the same time, the carefully crafted and TV broadcast legal arguments of the South African team lent legitimacy to the South African requests for interim measures on an emergency basis and the weaknesses of Israel’s responses had a major public delegitimizing impact, including on the previously self-censoring most influential international media platforms. These patterns were reinforced by the ICJ Interim Rulings granting South Africa’s requests for provisional measures, especially characterizing its principal allegation as ‘plausible genocide’ and ordering Israel to stop impeding the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
What gave this historic interim set of rulings additional legal credibility was the near unanimous vote among the 16 participating judges, and beyond this, the professionalism of the legal reasoning and conclusions that did not mirror their national affiliations. This alone tended to refute US/Israeli dismissal of the legal outcome in the ICJ as matters of politics not law.[ix] Until the present, the media continued to self-censor explicit descriptions of Israel’s behavior in Gaza as ‘genocide,’ but recently the NY Times broke ranks with a guest column by an academic genocide specialist, Omar Bartov, although ambiguously as it published prominently a notorious genocide-denier, Bret Stephens, a few days later. Yet on balance part of the delegitimating trends affecting Israel’s stature as a state among states is the normalizing of ‘genocide’
Even though the enforcement gap precluded implementation of the ICJ rulings, the decision is correctly interpreted as having as a breakthrough in the civil society protest efforts to turn the tide of discourse and public opinion in the Legitimacy War that up to then Israel, benefitting from Western governmental, media self-censorship, and Israeli inflated accounts of supposed Hamas atrocities slanting public perceptions to forgo judging the severity of Israel’s response for several months. This attitude of indulgence was largely abetted by decontextualizing the October 7 attack to enable Israel’s response to seem within the scope of reasonableness in asserting a self-defense rationale for its retaliatory attack. This shielded Israel from criticism and censure throughout the remainder of 2023.[x] As important as the formal behavior of the established intergovernmental tribunals were in the legitimacy competition, the voice of independent experts, most notably associated with the Special Procedures mechanisms established by the UN Human Rights Council, especially the brilliant institutional innovation of appointing Special Rapporteurs to address significant human rights themes or problematic country conditions.[xi] Partly due to Israel’s sensitivity about criticism, its formidable media influence, and the Zionist diaspora lobbying and support network, the SRs for Occupied Palestine have increasingly become a controversial center of attention either by way of praise for their truthful reports despite harassment intended to be disabling or because of the relentless campaigns to question their credibility as impartial experts. This dynamic peaked during the first three years of Francesca Albanese six-year tenure, climaxing with the US Government imposition of unprecedented and legally questionable sanctions on July 9, 2025, barring her entry to the US and freezing any American assets she might possess.[xii]
The formation of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal is a further legitimating development with respect to the Palestinian struggle and its Sarajevo Declaration is a clear statement of opposition to Israel’s policies and the complicity of most liberal democracies.[xiii] A further legitimizing development if the courageous civil society efforts to offset Israeli refusal to allow unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid is by way of the Freedom Flotilla initiatives, that also were delegitimizing as far as Israel is concerned due to crude attempts to disrupt the delivery missions, punitively seizing of the nonviolent activists undertaking these hazardous voyages, culminating with their detention and deportation.[xiv]
A further symbolic battleground in the Legitimacy War is being struck by governments mainly in the Global South, so far most noticed by the activism of the Hague Group, which met at Bogotá in July at the invitation of co-chairs from South Africa and Columbia, featuring an opening inspirational remarks by Francesca Albanese and ending with the issuance of a statement signed by representative of 12 governments recommending the adoption of six measures intended to exert pressure on Israel to end the Gaza genocide.[xv] Earlier supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been showing some signs of opposition as evidenced by the ambiguous decisions of France, UK, and Canada to recognize Palestinian statehood belatedly and conditionally and the UK parliamentary inquiry initiated by Jeremy Corbyn seeking an end to British support for Israeli genocide in Occupied Palestine.[xvi]
Israel itself contributed to its rogue status by a series of delegitimating acts, none perhaps more impactful than its combat policies causing severe hunger and massive malnutrition in Gaza, and then cloaked in by fake claims associated with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. This policy has resulted in more than one thousand deaths due to starvation, including young children, and IDF sniper violence at the food delivery sites. Such a genocidal policy provoked large-scale protests including in Western countries. Israel and the US policies associated with the weaponization of humanitarian aid in the cruelest imaginable manner, initially by formally excluding UNRWA and other international actors from aid delivery in Gaza on the unsubstantiated grounds that a tiny fraction of its Palestinian personnel was implicated in the events of October 7 or diverted to Hamas. It turned out after an investigation to be based on flimsy evidence alleging 12 UNRWA staff of an estimated 13,000 collaborated with Hamas in carrying out the attack. Israel succeeded in mounting an effective, punitive propaganda campaign to defund UNRWA, although its humanitarian work of providing health services, education, food, and shelter for many thousand Palestinian refugees despite enduring more than 300 staff deaths resulting from Israeli targeted bombardments of UNRWA facilities.[xvii]
As appalling was its response to criticism for denying international deliveries of desperately needed food was to set up a ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,’ funded and administered by the US together with Israel, relying on supervision by a US ‘private contractors’ (mercenaries) to run the four Gaza food distribution centers inconveniently located in comparison with both the 400 such sites humanely situated and managed for decades by UNRWA in contrast to the IDF lethal violence Palestinians encountered at the GHF sites, which have resulted in more than 1000 deaths among the crowds of hungry Palestinians seeking urgently needed food for their starving families and themselves. This practice was daily reported visually and narrated extensively in previously self-censoring sites by brave journalists that risked being targeted themselves, with an intensifying delegitimizing effect on underlying perceptions of Israeli outrageous benign claims of humanitarian intentions. Israel’s plans to construct a ‘Humanitarian City’ built as a confinement center for Palestinians displaced by Israeli operations during the period of reconstruction is another Orwellian deep dive into the severest forms of repression disguised as ‘humanitarianism.’ Such transparent deceptions accentuate Israel’s delegitimating way of dealing with a resident civilian population forcibly torn from its devastated homeland and deep nationalist attachments to the land of its ancestors. Such an initiative has even been denounced by Israel’s former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.
Also relevant to this recital of delegitimizing policies and practice is Israel’s defiant responses manifested ever since its establishment to authoritative rulings of international law as expressed by the ICJ and ICC, as well as toward majoritarian criticisms of Israel’s failure to respect international law or human rights in numerous General Assembly resolutions and in its rejections of its obligations in international humanitarian law as encapsulated in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation regulating Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories resulting from the 1967 War.[xviii]
In effect, the combination of Palestine’s enhanced legitimacy due in large part due to having international law and morality on its side, as reinforced by Israel’s reliance on complementary delegitimizing policies and practices exhibiting a patterns of behavior evident long before October 7. It can be traced back to the ethnic cleansing inflicted by the Nakba in 1948 and forward to apartheid structures of Israeli practice as analyzed and assessed in a serides of expert studies by the most respected human rights NGOs and by the UN Economic and Social Council of West Asia (ESCWA).[xix] It is highly incriminating that the liberal democracies of the West, priding themselves on anti-racist progress in their own countries and supportive of the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa, remained silent until this day in the face of these persuasive indictments of Israeli racism.
Causal linkages are difficult to establish, but this kind of pushback against Israel’s policies toward Occupied Palestine, have had the tendency to shift the balance of legitimacy decisively during the prior two years in favor of the Palestinian narrative in the Legitimacy War. The early results have been to lead governments supportive of Israel in Europe and elsewhere to start back pedaling, and to lead the citizenries in these countries to shift policies and behavior more strongly in the direction of the implementation of Palestinian rights under international law, especially in relation to the recognition and realization of the Palestinian inalienable right of self-determination. Whether recent trends toward the recognition of Palestinian statehood are an empty gesture meant to convey a concern for Palestinian interests or a long overdue signal of a transformative shift in the approach of Western countries to Israel/Palestinian conflict remains hidden within a smoky crystal ball. In forthcoming diplomacy it may be, as the once promising Oslo diplomacy turned out to be, a trap for Palestinians and a gateway to annexation or Bantuization of Palestinian aspirations.
Concluding Observations
The law/legitimacy nexus is particularly relevant in the course of an anti-colonial struggle, making it of great significance that the settler colonial template has come to displace the earlier Zionist narratives relating to a post-Holocaust sanctuary for a Jewish homeland and a modernizing twist captured in the phrase ‘making the desert bloom.’ The combination of Palestinian rights denied and Israeli wrongs confirmed, gives international law leverage in the legitimacy debate that arises in the course of all self-determination and liberation struggles, and by reference to the historical record shows, contrary to the postulates of the political realists, that the side with the inferior military capability has most often politically prevailed since 1945. The British discovered this in India and Malaya, the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the Americans in Vietnam. Inferior military capabilities of colonized nations were neutralized by the outcome of the Legitimacy Wars, despite the great suffering inflicted in the process, because the nationalism of the resident population was willing to outlast the repressive side due to its deep legal, moral, and psychological beliefs in the righteousness and achievability of their struggle.
This is a lesson of the last 80 years that adherents are incapable of learning because it would entail an abandonment of militarized geopolitics and encourage adherence to a functionally grounded cooperative multilateralism more congruent with the global public good, adherence to international law and morality, and redirecting resources from militarism to mitigating dangers of nuclear war, global warming, energy transition, and ecological instability.
The immediate application of this analysis to the Palestinian ordeal is almost impossible, partly due to its complex interaction with several other daunting issues of international relations. Zionism is not just a dominant ideology in Israel, reinforced by Holocaust nightmares and ultra-religious patterns of justification, that also has so far benefitted from a sophisticated network of overseas influence. Beyond this, the West still covets Western hegemony in the Middle East for its energy reserves, as well as its markets for weaponry and Western goods, and geographical proximity to trade routes. Despite the collapse of European colonialism, the US has led the post-colonial project of imperial exploitation and domination in the region with Israel as a crucial strategic partner. This is not just an economic undertaking, it is an inregral aspect of ‘the clash of civilization’ anticipated by Samuel Huntington in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and still the locus of key fault lines, epitomized by the Palestinian challenge to Israel and Iran’s hostility to West encroachment, and secularism.[xx]
The key question that follows from the Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War is whether a coherent Palestinian nation can still emerge from the hot embers of the Gaza genocide. In the aftermath will the national movement among Palestinians, including those confined to refugee camps for decades, will flourish and avoid being dispersed physically and fragmented politically. In effect, will the remarkable Palestinian sumud, resistance, and resilience be able to regroup and remain sufficiently committed to achieve a pragmatically shaped solution of a quality that brought unexpected constitutional democracy to South Africa?
[1] See report to UN by Francesca Albanese, “From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide,” A/HRC/r9/13, 16 June 2025. Sameur in France. GNQP Statement; SHAPE Statement
[1] Some prominent examples in the Gaza context are the normative encounters between the independent legal experts of the UN Human Rights Council, especially in relation to the last four Special Rapporteurs (SRs) for Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967. For pre-Albanese assessments by three prior UN SRs see Richard Falk, John Dugard, and Richard Falk: Protecting Human Rights in Palestine: Working Through the United Nations, Clarity Press, 2022. Such encounters have been highlighted in the intense friction between SR Francesca Albanese and governments supporting
the reputation of international lawyers and legalism in the context of international relations. By ‘progressive’ is meant that international law is interpreted as a regulative framework rather than a policy instrument subject to double standards in responding to the polices of adversaries and to those of allies and properly criticized as exercises in moral hypocrisy and state propaganda that undermines the reputation of international lawyers and legalism in the context of international relations. See Falk & Hans von Sponeck, Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope, Stanford University Press 2024. In light of the support of Israeli genocide on the part of most liberal democracies, the hopefulness expressed by the title is seems naïve, at least in the short run.
[1] See Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), ICJ interim decisions, 26 January 2024, 28 March 2024. See generally Alexander Wentker, “More and More Disputes on War and Genocide are being Litigated at the International Court of Justice,” Chatham House Report, 4 September 2024.
[1] See Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Princeton University Press, 2016; Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Remaking of Modern Asia, Knopf, 2023.
[1] Relevant here is the focus of the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the international crime. At least for parties to the treaty, this would seem to brand complicity as prima facie participation in the crime. But see Reed Rubenstein, Senior Legal Advisor of US Secretary of State, as warning the ICC that ‘all options are on the table’ if it does not refrain from hostile acts against Israel or the US, governments, states that deny the jurisdiction of the ICC in relation to themselves as non-parties to the Rome Statute establishing the legal framework of the ICC. The Rome Statute in fact claims jurisdiction over non-signatories if the alleged crime occurs on the sovereign territory of a treaty party, in this instance Palestine. Of course, Rubenstein although has a title that suggests a legalist perspective made a purely political, really a geopolitical argument at the UN that is implicitly dismissive of legal relevance. “US threatens ICC: Drop Israel war crimes probe or ‘all options on the table,’Middle East Eye [ https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/united-states-icc-drop-israel-war-crimes-probe-all-options-table]
[1] Hidden here, is the biasing of judgment by the strong influence of special interests as evidenced by the US Congressional bipartisan and shameful honorific welcoming of Israel’s Prime Minister despite his notorious role as the chief and most unapologetic perpetrator of the Gaza genocide. These special interests associated with strategic alignments and economic benefits involve a maximum effort to at the reassertion of Western dominance of the world after the collapse of European colonialism and the end of the Cold War as serving economic interests. In different ways the three recent armed conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran are manifestation of both this urge to dominate and to deter Russia and China from mounting challenges.
[1] Among the most notable challenges of a legalist character have been the South African submission to the ICJ in late 2023, the Hague Group challenge at Bogotá of July 2025, and several UN General Assembly Resolutions seeking international guidance with respect to a mandatory ceasefire and the legal status of Israel role under the 4th Geneva Convention of being the Occupying Power of Palestinian Territories after 1967, including Gaza. On the latter see authoritative near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the ICJ, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Territory, including Gaza,” 19 July 2024. In contrast, the Western liberal democracies of Europe and North America have refused to subject Israel’s response to the October 7 attack to legal scrutiny, and have endorsed and materially supported its genocidal response, unreservedly until a groundswell of civil society protests have induced all of Israel’s supporters except for the US to engage in ‘damage control’ by acting in defiance of Israel wishes such as belated recognition of Palestinian statehood, often accompanied by conditional clauses that would withdraw the statehood pledge or that impose conditions on the Palestinians such as hostage release.
[1] Only one ICJ judge, Julia Subutinde from Uganda, relied on this absurdly distorted reasoning and voted against all of the rulings in the South Africa genocide submission on the ground that since she regarded the dispute as ‘political’ rather than ‘legal’ dispute, and hence, the ICJ lacked jurisdictional authority. It seems absurd and distorted in view of the clearly legal contention that Israel was violating provisions of the Genocide Convention.
[1] by portraying the Hamas attack as worst-case ‘terrorism’ with no account taken of Israel’s numerous and unapologetic violations of international law, including defying the ICJ Advisory Opinion of 2004 on its Separation Wall and violations of the Apartheid Convention(1973) as well as the legal duties spelled out in the 4th Geneva Convention, the context including a punitively interpreted blockade established in 2007 after Hamas’ electoral victory the prior year; Israel’s complacency in view of several reliable warnings of an impending attack from Gaza and its appearance of seeking a pre-planned pretext for activating its obviously planned end game of territorial annexation and Palestinian ethnic and political erasure to be put into operation under the cover of a response to the Hamas attack
[1] The Human Rights Council has 48 thematic and 14 country mandates, each with an appointed special rapporteur, normally serving without compensation for two three-year terms. Special rapporteur can withdraw by resigning at any point, and can be challenged by the Assembly of 47 UN member states for exceeding or departing from the designated scope of the mandate.
[1] For pre-Albanese experience of the three prior SRs see Falk, Note 2. Also, Marjorie Cohn, “Ex-UN Special Rapporteur says Francesca Albanese Deserves Nobel Prize, Not US Sanctions,” Truthout, July 14, 2025
[1] See Gaza Peoples Tribunal issued the Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal on May 29, 2025.
[1] Hague Group, Emergency Conference of States, Bogotá, 2025, attended by 30 countries, addressed by Francesca Albanese, Issued “Joint Statement on the Conclusion of the Emergency Conference on Palestine,” 16 July 2025, committing 13 signatory countries to integration into their domestic legal systems the acceptance and implementation of six concrete measures, including an arms embargo, prohibition of carriage of military equipment to Israel by ships flying their national flag, comply with international law duty to take actions to prevent genocide and seek accountability for all serious international crimes, and seek to accept universal jurisdiction as a national judicial basis for granting victims of Israeli abuses in Occupied Palestine Territories a means to seek legal redress for harms suffered.
[1] The motivations behind these recent various moves by France, Germany, and Canada purporting to affirm Palestinian statehood, in the face of Israeli and US objections, is to revive the failed ‘two-state Oslo diplomacy’ under the less favorable conditions. If ever implement by the present configuration of forces it would likely eventuate in a Palestinian ‘bantustan statelet’ demilitarized and neutralized. Although it might curtail the full realization of the Zionist Project, its proponents would insist that such acts are as far as Palestinian self-determination and identity claims can be acknowledged. Such an outcome would in no way would fulfill the liberation criteria attached to the fulfillment of the Palestinian right of self-determination by authentic Palestinian representatives. This ‘solution’ would leave Israel free to maintain Zionist apartheid views of Jewish supremacy as embodied in the adoption by the Knesset of the 2018 Basic Law. See detailed Chinese Academy Newsletter, “Palestine as a Battleground in the US-France Influence Game,” 28 July 2025, carefully analyzing the French calculations underlying Macron’s declaration of support for Palestinian statehood. Although an incisive analysis it understates the role of domestic pressures in shaping the Macron decision.
[1] See Ian Martin UN, “UNHQ Report of Inquiry into Incidents in the Gaza Strip,” bearing on Israel discrediting attacks and punitive exclusions of UNRWA and other UN Gaza humanitarian aid initiatives.
[1] See especially the two near unanimous outcomes in the ICJ: The Advisory Opinion of July 19, 2024 and the Interim Judgment of the ICJ on March 26, 2024 as cited in Notes 4 & 8. The arrest warrants issued by the ICC have had a delegitimizing impact that exceeds their legal relevance as accountability measures. Unlike the ICJ the ICC is not part of the UN and several important states have declined to become parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty framework governing ICC proceedings, including Israel and the US, as well as Russia and China. Along with other states who are parties, these governments refuse to cooperate with the ICC in relation to the implementation of arrest warrants, which means the ICC remains unable to pursue indictment, prosecution, and punishment phases of international criminal law enforcement.
[1] See Falk & Virginia ; HRW; AI; B’Tselem
[1] Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996, which is a revised version of his much-debated 1993 article in Foreign Affairs in the same year, and notable for substituting China for Islam as the primary adversary of the US and the West after the Cold War.
[1] International law, as is all law, itself is subject to sharp critiques as serving the interests of the rich and powerful in the Global West, including with respect to the subject-matter of war and peace if assessed from the perspective of justice rather than interests. The two world wars and anti-colonial movements of the last century made some impact on this prior experience as did jurisprudential contributions of scholars (e.g. Balakrishnan Rajgopal, Upendra Baxi) from the Global South, giving rise to the TWAIL movement that continues, and seeks to align international law with justice as with the development of right to development, the principle of self-determination, and rights of resistance by peoples subject. Oona Hathaway and Shapiro accord great significance to the Pact of Paris (1928) outlawing aggressive war in their book. And the advent of nuclear age made war prevention a practical imperative for all states, but eventuated in the normalization of this category of weaponry, splitting the governments of the world between a reliance on deterrence and calls for nuclear disarmament signaled by the Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a project of the Global South, so far rejected by leading governments in the Global North. It remains the case that ‘political realism’ controls the foreign policy of leading countries, and reflects the economic and political interests of predatory capitalism, militarized geopolitical calculations, and post-colonial imperialism. The UN after 1945 allowed the ‘winners’ to enjoy impunity for their international crimes (but not the ‘losers’) and to shape the future of world order by continuing to base global security on preserving the freedom of action of the victors in World War II. What has changed is that there now exists an alternative international law discourse, more closely aligned with the public good, that is available to challenge the behavior of geopolitical actors, but not yet influential in shaping the foreign policy of geopolitical actors. Henry Kissinger, the arch realist of our time admitted his annoyance with assistants who reminded him of relevant constraints of international law that he believed should be seen in the formation of war/peace statecraft.
[2] Adopting a ‘regulatory’ perspective toward international law does not ensure justice but only promises consistency in the application of law, and respect for the authoritativeness of decisions by institutions such as the ICJ and ICC that are empowered to resolve legal disputes. Such an understanding of a law-oriented approach has recently been Government indirectly repudiated by the US, perhaps most clearly by its announced sanctions on Palestinian Authority officials because of their role in the ‘internationalization’
of the Gaza conflict by their submissions to the ICJ and ICC, an action described in the sanctioning statement as contrary to ‘the national security interests’ of the US. See BBC coverage,
[1] See report to UN by Francesca Albanese, “From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide,” A/HRC/59/13, 16 June 2025. GNQP Statement; SHAPE Statement
[2] Some prominent examples in the Gaza context are the normative encounters between the independent legal experts of the UN Human Rights Council, especially in relation to the last four Special Rapporteurs (SRs) for Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967. For pre-Albanese assessments by three prior UN SRs see Richard Falk, John Dugard, and Richard Falk: Protecting Human Rights Through the United Nations: , Clarity Press, 2023. Such encounters have been highlighted in the intense friction between SR Francesca Albanese and governments supporting Israel’s military operations in Gaza, dramatically highlighted by sanctions imposed on her, barring entry and freezing private economic assets. See Falk, “Sanctioning Francesca Albanese,” The Nation, July 15, 2025. See also law-influenced initiatives of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal, The Hague Group, and Ahmet Davutoglu & Richard Falk, ed., Genocide in Gaza: Global Voices of Conscience, Clarity Press, 2025. Sanctioning Albanese appears to violate two relevant international treaties binding on the US: Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations; Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations (the Host Country Agreement).
[iii] By ‘progressive’ is meant that international law is interpreted as a regulative framework rather than a policy instrument subject to double standards in responding to the polices of adversaries and to those of allies and properly criticized as exercises in moral hypocrisy and state propaganda that undermines the reputation of international lawyers and legalism in the context of international relations. See Falk & Hans von Sponeck, Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope, Stanford University Press 2024. In light of the support of Israeli genocide on the part of most liberal democracies, the hopefulness expressed by the title is seems naïve, at least in the short run.
[iv] See Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), ICJ interim decisions, 26 January 2024, 28 March 2024. See generally Alexander Wentker, “More and More Disputes on War and Genocide are being Litigated at the International Court of Justice,” Chatham House Report, 4 September 2024.
[v] See Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Princeton University Press, 2016; Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Remaking of Modern Asia, Knopf, 2023.
[vi] Relevant here is the focus of the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the international crime. At least for parties to the treaty, this would seem to brand complicity as prima facie participation in the crime. But see Reed Rubenstein, Senior Legal Advisor of US Secretary of State, as warning the ICC that ‘all options are on the table’ if it does not refrain from hostile acts against Israel or the US, governments, states that deny the jurisdiction of the ICC in relation to themselves as non-parties to the Rome Statute establishing the legal framework of the ICC. The Rome Statute in fact claims jurisdiction over non-signatories if the alleged crime occurs on the sovereign territory of a treaty party, in this instance Palestine. Of course, Rubenstein although has a title that suggests a legalist perspective made a purely political, really a geopolitical argument at the UN that is implicitly dismissive of legal relevance.
[vii] Hidden here, is the biasing of judgment by the strong influence of special interests as evidenced by the US Congressional bipartisan and shameful honorific welcoming of Israel’s Prime Minister despite his notorious role as the chief and most unapologetic perpetrator of the Gaza genocide. These special interests associated with strategic alignments and economic benefits involve a maximum effort to at the reassertion of Western dominance of the world after the collapse of European colonialism and the end of the Cold War as serving economic interests. In different ways the three recent armed conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran are manifestation of both this urge to dominate and to deter Russia and China from mounting challenges.
[viii] Among the most notable challenges of a legalist character have been the South African submission to the ICJ in late 2023, the Hague Group challenge at Bogotá of July 2025, and several UN General Assembly Resolutions seeking international guidance with respect to a mandatory ceasefire and the legal status of Israel role under the 4th Geneva Convention of being the Occupying Power of Palestinian Territories after 1967, including Gaza. On the latter see authoritative near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the ICJ, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Territory, including Gaza,” 19 July 2024. In contrast, the Western liberal democracies of Europe and North America have refused to subject Israel’s response to the October 7 attack to legal scrutiny, and have endorsed and materially supported its genocidal response, unreservedly until a groundswell of civil society protests have induced all of Israel’s supporters except for the US to engage in ‘damage control’ by acting in defiance of Israel wishes such as belated recognition of Palestinian statehood, often accompanied by conditional clauses that would withdraw the statehood pledge or that impose conditions on the Palestinians such as hostage release.
[ix] The sole ICJ judge that bought this absurdly distorted reasoning was the Ugandan judge who voted against all of the rulings on the ground that since it was a political rather than legal dispute the ICJ lacked jurisdictional authority.
[x] By portraying the Hamas attack as worst-case ‘terrorism’ with no account taken of Israel’s numerous and unapologetic violations of international law, including defying the ICJ Advisory Opinion of 2004 on its Separation Wall and violations of the Apartheid Convention(1973) as well as the legal duties spelled out in the 4th Geneva Convention, the context including a punitively interpreted blockade established in 2007 after Hamas’ electoral victory the prior year; Israel’s complacency in view of several reliable warnings of an impending attack from Gaza and its appearance of seeking a pre-planned pretext for activating its obviously planned end game of territorial annexation and Palestinian ethnic and political erasure to be put into operation under the cover of a response to the Hamas attack
[xi] The Human Rights Council has 48 thematic and 14 country mandates, each with an appointed special rapporteur, normally serving without compensation for two three-year terms. Special rapporteur can withdraw by resigning at any point, and can be challenged by the Assembly of 47 UN member states for exceeding or departing from the designated scope of the mandate.
[xii] For pre-Albanese experience of the three prior SRs see Falk, Note 2. Also, Marjorie Cohn, “Ex-UN Special Rapporteur says Francesca Albanese Deserves Nobel Prize, Not US Sanctions,” Truthout, July 14, 2025
[xiii] See Gaza Peoples Tribunal, Sarajevo Declaration
[xv] Hague Group, Emergency Conference of States, Bogata, 2025, attended by 30 countries, addressed by Francesca Albanese, Issued a “Joint Statement on the Conclusion of the Emergency Conference on Palestine,” 16 July 2025, committing 13 signatory countries to integration into their domestic legal systems the acceptance and implementation of six concrete measures, including an arms embargo, prohibition of carriage of military equipment to Israel by ships flying their national flag, comply with international law duty to take actions to prevent genocide and seek accountability for all serious international crimes, and seek to accept universal jurisdiction as a national judicial basis for granting victims of Israeli abuses in Occupied Palestine Territories a means to seek legal redress for harms suffered.
[xvi] As Craig Mokiber has pointed out the idea behind this international move toward Palestinian statehood is the establishment of a ‘bantustan statelet’ demilitarized and neutralized, and by such acts be done with Palestinian identity claims, which in no way would fulfill the liberation criteria of the Palestinian right of self-determination. Leaving Israel free to maintain Zionist views of Jewish supremacy as depicted in the adoption by the Knesset in the 2018 Basic Law. See Chinese Academy Newsletter analyzing the French announced declaration of support for Palestinian statehood
[xvii] See Ian Martin UN, “UNHQ Report of Inquiry into Incidents in the Gaza Strip,” bearing on Israel discrediting attacks and punitive exclusions of UNRWA and other UN Gaza humanitarian aid initiatives.
[xviii] See especially the two near unanimous outcomes in the ICJ: The Advisory Opinion of July 19, 2024 and the Interim Judgment of the ICJ on March 26, 2024 as cited in Notes 4 & 8. The arrest warrants issued by the ICC have had a delegitimizing impact that exceeds their legal relevance as accountability measures. Unlike the ICJ the ICC is not part of the UN and several important states have declined to become parties to the Rome Statute, the treaty framework governing ICC proceedings, including Israel and the US, as well as Russia and China. Along with other states who are parties, these governments refuse to cooperate with the ICC in relation to the implementation of arrest warrants, which means the ICC remains unable to pursue indictment, prosecution, and punishment phases of international criminal law enforcement.
[xx] Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1906, which is a revised version of his much debated articles in Foreign Affairs in the same year, and notable for substituting China for Islam as the primary adversary of the US and the West after the Cold War.
[Prefatory Note: The post below attempts to unravel the problematic relationship between the UN framework of regulating war/peace relations and geopolitical management of global security shaping the design of world order embedded in the post-1945 architecture of world order by the winners of World War II, the five permanent members of the Security Council vested with a right of veto. I am publishing here my edited version of an AI generated summary of my conversations with Pascual Lottaz, founding director of the Institute of Neutrality Studies.]
Abstract
Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, critiques the current state of international law and U.S. militarism, arguing that the unipolar world order established post-1945 is failing. He contends that international law is often ineffective in the realm of global security due to power imbalances, where the most powerful states evade accountability, undermining the law’s legitimacy. Falk emphasizes that the U.S. mismanaged its unipolarity, investing heavily in militarism while neglecting the socio-economic welfare of its citizens. He contrasts this with China’s more cooperative approach to international relations, which prioritizes mutual benefits over militaristic dominance. The discussion also highlights the resurgence of neutrality as a potential counterbalance to aggressive geopolitical maneuvers, particularly in the context of shifting alliances in the Middle East. Falk warns that without a reevaluation of political realism and a commitment to equitable international norms, the world risks further instability and conflict.
The contemporary landscape of international relations is marked by an overwhelming sense of turbulence, exacerbated by the persistent militarism of powerful nations. As the geopolitical order shifts, the role of international law becomes increasingly critical yet disappointingly inadequate. Within this context, discussions surrounding the effectiveness of international law, the implications of U.S. militarism, and the prospects for neutrality and shifting alliances emerge as vital considerations for scholars and policymakers alike. A recent conversation sheds light on these pressing issues, articulating a nuanced understanding of the complexities that define the current state of global governance. Note that the inadequacy of international law is not with the normative framework of rules, principles, international institutions, but with the geopolitical control of global security enforcement and accountability mechanisms.
Law Power and Reciprocity
The effectiveness of international law with respect to global security (war/peace agenda and genocide prevention) is profoundly shaped by the dynamics of power and reciprocity. While international law ostensibly serves as a framework for regulating state interactions, its actual performance in the realm of global security has been deeply disappointing. The principles of reciprocity, which are fundamental to the functioning of any legal system, are eroded by the stark inequalities among states. The United Nations (UN) Charter, established in 1945, institutionalized a system that privileges the powerful, allowing them to wield disproportionate influence over global governance, whether through funding leverage or the veto. This structural inequality has resulted in widespread public perceptions that international law operates more as a tool of the strong than as a genuine system of accountability.
The power imbalance has led to a selective application of international law, where the actions of powerful states are often shielded from scrutiny. The conversation highlighted that this selective enforcement creates a crisis of belief in the law itself. When the powerful are not held accountable, the legitimacy of the entire legal framework is called into question. The discourse surrounding international law must therefore grapple with this inherent hypocrisy, recognizing that the laws crafted to govern global relations often reflect the interests of those who designed them. Double standards undermines belief in international law as occurs when considerations of legality are used to criticize or sanction geopolitical rivals and their friends but denied to exonerate their own actions and those allied. It is this duality that makes a mockery of international law as integral to international relations, and relegates it to the role of state propaganda.
US Militarism and Failed Wars
U.S. militarism has significantly shaped the course of international relations, leading to a series of controversial interventions that have often resulted in political failure. The conversation underscored how the U.S. has engaged in numerous military endeavors that, rather than promoting stability or security, have exacerbated tensions and contributed to cycles of violence. The historical context of these interventions reveals a pattern of hubris in shaping foreign policy, revealing the shortcomings of an uncritical belief that military superiority produces victorious endings of wars. The post-1945 record shows that wars not justified by the law governing self-defense have generally led the U.S.to experience catastrophic outcomes or at best stalemates.
The discussion pointed to the Vietnam War as a pivotal example of this phenomenon. The U.S. ultimately did not win in Vietnam, and the lessons from that conflict seem largely unheeded. Instead, the pattern of military engagement continues, with the U.S. investing heavily in a militarized foreign policy that often neglects the nuances of diplomacy and negotiation, and consistently disregards the sovereign rights and national security of other sovereign states. The ramifications of such an approach are far-reaching, extending beyond the immediate geopolitical landscape to have damaging economic, political, and cultural impacts on the very fabric of American society, where militarism diverts resources away from pressing domestic needs.
The conversation also highlighted the economic motivations underpinning U.S. militarism. The intertwining of military expenditures with corporate interests creates a situation where the machinery of war becomes self-perpetuating. This relationship not only undermines the country’s economic health and democratic ethos but also perpetuates a cycle of violence that is difficult to break, as well as creating a militarist bureaucracy that biased policymaking in the governing structure..
Neutrality and Shifting Alliances
The concept of neutrality is experiencing a renaissance as sovereign governments reassess their alliances in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. The conversation illuminated how historical notions of neutrality are being redefined in light of contemporary challenges. Countries are again viewing geopolitical neutrality as a positive strategic option while exhibiting serious concerns about with the implications of aligning with powerful geopolitical actors, pursuing their national goals that jeopardize the stability of alliance relations.
This reassessment is evident in the strategies adopted by nations such as the Gulf states, which are increasingly recognizing that dependence on U.S. security guarantees may not provide the stability or protection that they seek. Instead, these nations are exploring avenues for independent diplomacy, signaling a shift towards a more complex understanding of neutrality or multiple alignments in the face of emerging threats. Such shifts are particularly evident in Europe and the Middle East.
The conversation also pointed to the dangers of abandoning neutrality, as exemplified by Sweden and Finland’s recent NATO membership. This move illustrates a broader trend where nations are compelled to choose sides in an increasingly polarized world, potentially sacrificing their sovereignty in the process. The implications of these shifting and eroding alliances are profound, as they may lead to heightened tensions and conflict rather than the stability that neutrality historically provided. These adjustments in policy have been particularly affected by Trump’s unilateral transnationalism (‘America First’) evident in responding to the Russian attack on Ukraine and the launching of a second Iran War within calendar year 2025, in one case abandoning European security in relation to Russia and in the other proceeding to a major war with heavy costs without consultation with allies or the receipt of any authorization by internal constitutional procedures or the UN Security Council.
Israel Palestine Media and War Propaganda
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a focal point of international law discussions, particularly concerning the media’s role in shaping narratives around war and legality. The conversation emphasized how the framing of conflict in media discourse often obscures the realities on the ground, creating a disconnect between legal principles and lived experiences. The portrayal of the conflict in mainstream media frequently reflects biases that align with the interests of powerful nations, thus perpetuating a narrative that can undermine the pursuit of justice and accountability.
The conversation also highlighted the significance of international law in this context, noting the challenges faced by those who attempt to hold powerful states accountable for violations. The selective application of international law creates a scenario where the powerful can act with impunity, while those on the receiving end of aggression are often left without recourse. This disparity not only delegitimizes the legal framework but also fosters a sense of hopelessness among those affected by conflict, and relying on their right and will to resist encroachments on basic rights. For the Palestinians, their inalienable right of self-determination.
Moreover, the media’s framing of the conflict often fails to address the underlying legal and moral questions that should guide international responses. The discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must therefore evolve to encompass a more robust understanding of international law and its application, recognizing the urgent need for accountability and justice in the face of ongoing violence.
Conclusion
The conversation encapsulates the complexities and challenges facing the international legal order in an era marked by U.S. militarism, shifting alliances, and the urgent need for a reevaluation of neutrality. As the world grapples with the consequences of historical injustices and the failures of powerful states to act responsibly, the role of international law becomes more critical than ever. The discussions surrounding the effectiveness of international law, the implications of unipolarity, geopolitical management of global security, and the necessity for a renewed commitment to neutrality reflect a broader call for a reevaluation of how states engage with one another in an increasingly interconnected world endangered by reckless militarism and multiple forms of inequality.
The future of international law hinges on the recognition that it must serve as a genuine mechanism for the regulation of behavior of governments and the accountability of leaders, corporations, and financial institutions rather than a propaganda tool for the powerful. Only through a commitment to equity, reciprocity, and genuine dialogue can the international community hope to address the pressing challenges of our time and move toward a more just global order. As nations navigate the complexities of their relationships with one another, the lessons learned from past conflicts and the ongoing struggles for justice should inform the path forward.
Trump’s miscalculations relating to Iran’s capabilities together with a confusing by boastful claims of that U.S. attacks beginning on February 28 were a glorious success. President Trump seemed to be acting on the implicit premise that the militarily superior political actor automatically sets the terms the ending active warfare while making a transition to peaceful relations. This line of reasoning recalls the 1945 peace diplomacy at which the the winners of the war on the battlefield estabished a framework for peace that reflected this substance outcome. It was expresssed in seveeral domains. Perhaps, most noticeably in structuring the United Nations by giving the five winners of World War II permanent membership and a right of veto in the Security Council, the only organ of the UN system with authority to decide (not merely recommend) and to enforce (and not be in the position of the International Court of Justice that can decide but dependent for enforcement on the Security Council. This winners/losers framework was even more vividly exhibited by the war crimes trials held at Nuremberg and Tokyo. In these judicial proceeding only the international crimes of the losers were subjected to prosecution and punishment while the winners awarded themselves unconditional impunity. Such an outcome in the Japanese trials was aptly dubbed ‘victors’ justice’ by the historian Richard Minear in a book with that title.
The unarticulated premise of Trump’s diplomacy in the Middle East has also proceeded on a basis that only the victors in international armed encountered were entitled and empowered to dictate the terms of restored peace. The central fallacy such an approach relying on the analogy to 1945 peace building arises because of the deeply questionable boast that the outcome in Iran somehow resembles the Allied victory in the World War II sense. For starters, Iran does not accept the outcome as as a defeat as did the Axis powers in 1944-45 in instruments of surrender. Nor are such bizarre claims supported even among mainstream Western commentators who generally regard Iran as the winner, not only by not giving in the Trump demands but by the effective retaliatory measures that have inflicted high costs on the aggressors as well as on the stability of the international system. view by many Western assessments of the outcome.
Beyond cost-benefit calculations, we should never forget that Iran was the victim of unprovoked aggression, and was not the aggressor as were Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1945. This alone should serve to disqualify aggressor governments from framing peace arrangements, not only legally, but by giving weight to populist ideas of legitimacy. The United States somewhat understood this when in 1975 it accepted political defeat in Vietnam and only sought from diplomacy a graceful exit. The aggression, occupation, regime change, and state-building in the Iraq War of 2003 did give the world a bland foretaste of Trump’s reckless launching of the two Iran wars of the last year. Such betrayals of law and legitimacy were highlighted by the criminal attack on Iraq dramatized by the trial of Saddam Hussein, the deposed head of state and steadfast opponent of the US/UK aggression. These betrayals also illustrated brazen instances of absolute impunity for aggressors, somewhat accentuated by the criminal prosecution of Iraq’s head of state, admittedly a wrongdoer but for crimes unrelated to the defense of the sovereign rights of Iraq.
In this second Iran War now in its fourth month, there is further distortion of a rule of law approach to the outcome of recourse to aggressive war clearly prohibited by Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The aggressor although widely perceived to be the loser of the war insists without yet saying so on being treated as the victors were in 1945. There is this glaring normative difference. In the current context only Iran has the right of self-defense, as delimited in Article 51 of the Charter as it was massively attacked in a manner aggravated by the head Oman mediator’s statement that a negotiated settlement of the dispute concerning Iran’s nuclear program was on the verge of success. And yet the victim of aggression is being subjected by the Trump diplomacy with a take it or leave it ultimatum with a direct threat of a genocidal resumption of the war if Iran rejected what the aggressor was prepared to offer. The victim of aggression is thus expected to confront potentially dire consequences if it refuses the demands of the aggressor.
The extremity and vulgarity of such bullying threats challenge the Iranian leadership to be the adult in the room. Quoting Trump’s language suggests unprecedented departures from the canons of diplomacy to such a one-sided, bloody, extent as to be themselves instances of international crimes associated with prohibited threats. Whether or not enforceable as violations of international law these threats are the clearest possible instances of illegitimate diplomacy.
Trump said the following:
— April 4
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
–April 7
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote. “However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran.”
This style of diplomatic terrorism partially worked in Gaza with the connivance of others either too weak or insufficiently motivated to challenge the geopolitical bully. Even the UN was induced to support unanimously the Gaza application of rewarding an extreme instance of lawlessness and punishing further the extreme victimization of the Palestinian people. Iran’s distrust of such a diplomacy in light of this style of diplomacy combined with the background of the 2025 12 Day War which was paused after its goals of destroying Iran nuclear program were falsely proclaimed as achieved, representing an easy and quick victory for the combined aggression of Israel and the United States.
In this later instance Trump insisted in public utterances that Iran was also ‘defeated’ in the first days of the war, claiming the destruction of its virtually its entire naval and missile capabilities. In effect Trump’s diplomacy relied neither on rational arguments, international law rules, nor a genuine diplomatic process. Instead, it has relied for over three months on a weird, unprecedented mixture of irrationality, bullying on-again, off-again threats of state terrorism, inflated and premature claims of victory. It even advanced claims that its the assassination of the Supreme Leader of Iran on Day One of the aggression had produced a regime change in the form of new leadership ready to accommodate U.S demands (the Venezuelan model), a claim that turned out to be totally misleading. In actuality, after this assassination of a civilian, religious leader Iran enjoyed greater support from its population and continuity in its resolve to resist aggression and to devise means of retaliating (Hormuz and U.S. military bases in. Gulf) that exhibited strike capacities making a mockery of Trump’s boast of their destruction.
Trump’s premature victory claims was soon ridiculed as a further monumental miscalculation, overlooking Iran’s learning experience from the June 2025 12 Day War that Western ceasefire diplomacy was an entrapment mechanism. Applying these lessons from the past this second Iran War dragged on ruinously for the world economy. The US Government forced to appreciate the formidable economic and political impacts of Iran’s retaliatory measures, especially the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of internationally traded oil and gas passed through as well as a vital fertilizer supply chain on which many countries in the Global South depended upon to sustain agricultural productivity and food security for often food vulnerable populations.
In other words, Iran’s failed to blink in response to Trump’s genocidal threats, and hence the US faced a Plan B imperative to retreat being the only effective and least undignified way to cut losses. But this was not to be. Instead of a prudent step back, Trump beset by frustration and fury sought victory by means of bluffs and onr-sided demands disguised as negotiations that Iran, while skeptical, went along with as long as vaguely heading for some sort of mutually acceptable agreement. The only deescalation on the US side was to drop its earlier demands for regime change and an immediate agreement curtailing Iran’s nuclear program.
Current Observations
Beyond its international criminality, the Iran War was never even authorized domestically in the manner contemplated by the US Constitution, much less the UN Charter. It was also never justified at the outset by an explanation of the policy. It has become increasingly more unpopular with the citizenry as its adverse affordability effects st home were experienced. At the same time this partial backdown by Trump infuriated both Iran MAGA hawks wanting corporate access to Iranian oil and diaspora Iranians deeply resentful that regime change in Tehran was no longer on the diplomatic agenda.
Iran, long the rational actor in the encounter with the West on its side seems unwilling to settle for anything less than permanent normalization with both of its adversaries. Understandably, it resists an Israeli style ‘ceasefire’ that continues to violate Iranian sovereignty and views the stoppage of large-scale attacks as only a pause in an ongoing belligerent process rather than as an acceptance of seeking paths to a peaceful future. In view of this past and justified distrust of the US and Israel, Iran seems sensibly determined to insist on a framework of rules and peacekeeping forces committed to the avoidance of a third aggressive war against Iran after a passage of time to regroup. Iran also is demanding a lifting of sanctions and unfreezing of its frozen foreign assets so that it can resume normal state/society relations. Iran seems flexible about agreeing to negotiate at some future time a solution as to the stockpile of the enriched uranium in Iran’s possession. It is quite remarkable that despite the sustained hostility by Israel, including the assassination of nuclear scientists and others, Iran has not addressed the dangers and double standards embedded in the Euro-American indulgence of Israel’s unregulated and covertly acquired arsenal of nuclear weapons.
If the US can be persuaded to drop its threats and bullying, Iran seems willing to commit not only to the opening of the Strait of Hormuz but adding to the future stability of navigational rights of passage. This would be a notable contribution to the public good in relation to the highly interactive character of the world economy, both as to supply chains, inflationary surges, and currency markets. Such an outcome becomes daily less likely if the US continues to punch below the belt to win the peace after its most dangerous global misadventure in more than a century has managed to lose the war.
A Metaphoric Summary
This second Iran War epitomizes the limits of military power in this historical period. This has been previously illustrated by the victories of the militarily inferior side in the most notable anti-colonial wars since 1945. Whether the 20th century nationalist struggles of India, Indochina, Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria, and South Africa are considered, and variations taken into account, the weaker side militarily controlled the political outcomes, although suffering great losses on its journey to liberation and victory. This is a lesson that the United States and Israel seem unable to learn, believing against the evidence that as in earlier times the militarily superior side always wins wars. The quip attributed to Stalin, ‘how many divisions does the Pope have?’ is illustrative of this militarist mindset deeply embedded in the obsolete consciousness of elite foreign policy advising geopolitical actors.
In the interplay of Iran and the United States there is a metaphorical rendering of the two sides that sheds light on how the conflict has unfolded since Trump reascended the presidency in 2025. The diplomacy that is playing out at present pits an experienced poker player against a veteran chess player. Trump by bluffs in the form of threats seeks to intimidate opponents with better cards, while threatening so convincingly that they fold their better hands rather than wait and see whether the bluff is backed up by a hidden winning hand. Iran quietly measures its rational options under circumstances where the options of the two sides are visible to all. The poker player acts by hidden impulses, as well as assessments of the other, often with impatience. The chess player calculates by analyzing what the opponent is aiming to do, countering with defensive moves while also probing weaknesses to gain an advantage that will if it holds create checkmate opportunities.
In real life, most often a subtle mixture of bluffs, threats, tactics, and capabilities are deployed, with more or less skill, and less rationally in times of change where secrecy and technological innovation play leading roles. Ideas are also crucial. For instance, anti-colonial victories became possible when nationalist ideologies and patriotism were seen as providing callings to resist foreign encroachments. Also, vitally important were the longer, deeper willingness of a people defending their homeland to make sacrifices and prolongs the struggle to the point that the foreign invader become inclined to make transactional assessments of whether the gain is worth the pain.
Iran seems motivated to endure the pain of prolonged resistance, while the US is impatient to cut loose from a poorly calculated launch of an expensive, failed war, blocked only by its autocratic leader who seems psychologically incapable of admitting defeat and grabbing the option of a graceful exit, which would requires the US to impose credible constraints on its warmongering partner.
[Prefatory Note: The post below are my modified responses to questions posed by the Quds News Agency, a Palestinian youth journalistic network. The Iran War was widely rationalized after the fact as ‘a war of choice’ as if recourse to war continues to be a discretionary option in the 21st century. Iran’s resilience also suggests that non-defensive warfare is becoming a lose/lose venture in many contemporary situations, as well as radiating harm far beyond the national boundaries of the sovereign space that is the geographic locus of the combat zones, a sign of how interconnected the world has become with respect to reliable supply chains.]
The Zionist regime is facing serious crises within the occupied territories, including internal disputes, reverse migration, lack of security, and psychological problems. As you know, the Zionist regime, in addition to the war with Iran, is also heavily involved in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. The Zionist regime violates the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon on a daily basis. How do you evaluate these ceasefire violations and crises?
Israel, as led by the Netanyahu coalition adheres to an extreme version of Zionist ideology, which is committed to ethic supremacy for Jews, denial of Palestinian statehood in their own homeland, while pursuing expansionist river to the sea territorial goals by recourse to apartheid and genocide, with an outcome in Gaza of ecocide. Israel has been consistently defiant of international law as embodied in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation as well as authoritatively enunciated by the International Court of Justice in a series of strong, highly professional legal assessments, supported by a large majority of the participating judges, including several from countries whose governments are complicit in many of Israel’s crimes.
Israel is paying an increasing reputational cost and pushback for these policies flagrantly in violation of international humanitarian law and universally shared ethical values. Israel has succeeded apartheid South Africa in becoming the leading pariah or rogue state in the world. Yet shamefully it continues to retain unconditional support from many Western liberal democracies, most prominently from the United States Government in an increased contested policy domains in which pro-Israel support is opposed by an emergent majority of the American people. In recent months it has been losing support from major European countries that had been complicit supporters of its genocide in Gaza.
Another way of viewing these developments is to observe that Palestine has already won the Legitimacy War for the high legal and moral ground in this encounter between the Zionist movement and the ancestral majority Arab population. In recent settler colonial situations the winner of the symbolic Legitimacy War has generally taken precedence over the battlefield military superiority of the colonial power. The French learned this lesson in Indochina and Algeria. The United States has unfortunately failed to learn a similar lesson from its experience in the Vietnam War. There is every indication that the Zionist leadership of Israel pays no attention to the relevance of the Legitimacy War in its policy calculations or to the outcomes of most political conflicts in the post-colonial world, where nationalist resistance has politically outlasted coercive foreign encroachments on territorial sovereignty that inflicts devastation and massive casualties but fails to overcome resistance until it finally withdraws in the face of combat fatigue and a rise in opposition in the metropole.
I believe that Israel faces a dismal future unless, as now seems unlikely, it repudiates Zionism, becomes a normal secular state, and respects international law and morality, and upholding with sensitivity in the context of the long suppressed Palestinian inalienable right of self-determination.
It is significant that genocidal settler movements enjoyed considerable political success prior to the adoption of the Genocide Convention of 1948 under the shadow of the Holocaust. The most spectacular examples are the breakaway white British colonies, above all, the United States, but less dramatically and more ambiguously, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that remained members of the British Commonwealth, yet dispossessed native populations with equal or even greater fury.
Many international analysts and experts believe that the United States and Israel failed to achieve their goals in the war against Iran, and Iran emerged as a new superpower. What is your opinion? To what extent do you consider Iran to be the winner of this war?
Iran is emerging from this aggressive war initiated by the US, joined by Israel, stronger and more respected, feared regionally and globally. Iran is hardly ‘a superpower’ except in the sense of showing great resolve in resisting foreign, geopolitically motivated intervention, and yet surviving decades of punitive actions by Israel and the United States. This makes Iran so far ‘the winner’ in this war started on Febuary 28th by its unexpected ability to completely frustrating the aggressors states in their efforts to gain a painless victory by devastating Iran sufficiently by its ‘shock and awe’ tactics to produce a qick political surrender. Additionally, for the second time in a year Iran has endured devastating violations of its territorial sovereignty causing severe losses to the people of the country as well as unwarranted harsh sanctions. The deliberate assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab causing an estimated 200 deaths at the outset of the war highlight the experience of a militarily one-sided war in which the aggressors are only indirectly and marginally subject to military retaliation. Such combat tactics underscored the unwillingness of the aggressor states to conduct their military operations in a manner that would facilitate a diplomatic off ramp from its gross miscalculations of Iran’s will to resist and capacity to inflect discrediting harm to the region and the entire world by its defensive option of closing the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic.
This unanticipated closure of Strait of Hormuz demonstrated the extent of miscalculation on the part of the aggressor states, causing widespread hostility to the war in the U.S., especially severe for the poor everywhere and countries dependent on supply chain reliability from the Gulf region for their energy and fertilizer needs. Such an economistic combat tactic by Iran has somewhat evened the balance in the struggle, although the United States and Israel have been spared retaliatory devastation and even major economic harm. It is likely that the outcome of the Iran War will send Western war planners to revise the tactics relied upon by the geopolitical pursuit of strategic interests.
Some media outlets are reporting on the Zionist regime’s moves to drag the United States into war against Iran again. What is your assessment? Will the US and Israel war against Iran resume again?
In the context of autocratic leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu it is hazardous to predict what course the future will take in relation to Iran. Trump has exhibited an inability to admit political defeat and has often managed to conceal his setbacks by wildly exaggerated claims of success as he did in the early days of the Iran War. He seems to have confused exaggerated early US reports of devastating losses inflicted on Iran’s military capabilities with a victorious political outcome. When the Iranians refused to play along, demonstrating retaliatory capabilities by strikes against US military bases in the region, and later by the Hormuz closure, Trump reacted with genocidal threats and crude expletives. When Iran still showed no signs of wavering, Trump backed off, but did not cease his bluff diplomacy by pretending the war was over and it ended with an American victory. At the same time, incoherently Trump continued to utter threats directed at Iran coupled with derisive comments about their diplomatic proposal to end the war permanently. Trump is a typical display of childlike pique called Iran’s politely conveyed proposal ‘totally unacceptable,’ and insultingly discarding it as ‘garbage.’ Quite characteristically, Trump offer no counter-proposal in accord with diplomatic protocol rather in a rhetoric associated with master/slave hierarchical relations.
Where this will lead is impossible to forecast, although the present stalemate does not make me hopeful about what lies ahead.
With respect to Netanyahu the situation is somewhat different. Since the October 7 attack on Israel border villages, Israel has pursued a policy of absolute security for itself, no matter the costs to other societies in the Middle East. Such a policy has led to sustained genocide in Gaza, unrestrained settler violence in the West Bank, the Gazafication of southern Lebanon, and an insistence on the pursuit of its own goals in Iran as distinct, and more farreaching, than those of the US. Israeli goals seek regime change in Tehran, the total abandonment of Iran’s nuclear program, and an end to positive relations with regional pro-Palestinian Islamic movements in the region.
From the experience in Gaza, we should at least learn that Israeli ceasefires operate, at best, as temporary deescalation moves rather than signaling the end of violence. I would be happily surprised if Israel refrains from resuming its war against Iran, with or without the US, which seems improbable so long as Iran emerges as a stronger regional actor than it was before February 28th.
If genuine peace is to replace Western hegemony in the Middle East it must include a process of genuine denuclearization starting with Israel, and concluding with the establishment of a multinational nuclear free zone throughout the Middle East, with compliance monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Accompany this imperative step would be the establishment of a regional framework that gave due participation to Palestinian representation and established mechanisms promoting regional development.
1. From the perspective of international law and the Geneva Conventions, how do you assess Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, including elementary schools, universities, and hospitals — facilities that enjoy special protection under international humanitarian law? Specifically, how do such actions constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute?
Israel has ignored international law since its inception in 1948, including the legal obligations of an Occupying Power in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Such an assessment has been validated by the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion of July 19, 2024, Legal Consequences of Israel arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem. This authoritative rendering of international law in a highly professional manner, called for the withdrawal by Israel from these Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 within one years, a judicial determination overwhelmingly endorsed by the UN General Assembly.
Several years before the Gaza attack on Israel border villages of October 7, 2023 Israel was widely regarded as guilty of the distinct crime as specified in the 1973 Apartheid Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, considered binding on all states. This legal assessment was made in a series of independent studies and reports under the auspices of the UN and leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
2. As a leading scholar of international law, how do you view the systematic nature of Israel’s attacks on civilian infrastructure? Do these actions, particularly the targeting of schools and universities where children and young people were present, meet the legal definition of crimes against humanity?
It is a fundamental norm of international law that the targeting of civilian infrastructure is not only unlawful, it is a war crime, if sustained it is a crime against humanity. Israel has repeatedly targeted schools, hospitals, and heritage sites resulting to severe physical damage but also in many deaths and injuries. This unacceptable pattern of war crimes has been aggravated by the blockage of humanitarian aid causing widespread disease, starvation, and malnutrition. There is little doubt that any objective international criminal court would find these combat tactics to constitute crimes against humanity.
3. The United States continues to provide military and political support to Israel. From the standpoint of international law, to what extent is the US complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Under the principle of “universal jurisdiction” and the doctrine of command responsibility, can American officials be held legally accountable for their support of actions that violate international law?
International law is somewhat vague about the degree to which crimes of a perpetrator also produce criminality for governments that act in complicity by the supply of weapons, munitions, funds, and intelligence. The Genocide Convention (1948) and the Apartheid Convention (1973) both impose an obligation on parties to the convention to take steps to prevent such crimes and to punish perpetrators, and seem susceptible to being interpreted as extending accountability to governments and individuals that knowingly lend support, even by way of incitement to commit such crimes.
The Gaza Tribunal, the UK Gaza Tribunal, and Canadian Inquiry into Canadian Responsibility all acted on the legal premise that complicity was a crime for which those guilty should be held accountable.
4. You have previously characterized certain actions by Israel as “genocide.” Based on the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the definition of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention, do you believe the scale and nature of Israeli attacks on Gaza — including the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the siege, and the prevention of basic necessities — legally satisfy the elements of the crime of genocide?
I have no doubt that the behavior of Israel in response to the October 7, 2023 assumed a genocidal character in Gaza (as well as later in the West Bank and South Lebanon) that would produce judicial findings that Israel was guilty of violating the Genocide Convention. The Gaza Tribunal at its public session and in its prior Sarajevo Declaration both occurring in 2024 responded to expert witnesses and survivor testimony with a clear understanding that Israel’s actions as well as those of the complicit Western states constituted genocide. The ICJ is proceeding from its 2025 Decision on Interim Measures that the evidence before supported an inference of ‘plausible genocide,’ but a final judgment will to be rendered within the months ahead to give an authoritative reasoned response on the central question of genocide.
5. What is your assessment of the role and performance of international judicial bodies — particularly the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the ICJ — in addressing Israel’s violations of international law? In light of the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli officials, why has the international community failed to enforce these rulings, and what steps are needed to ensure accountability?
. Important
The ICC is a weaker institution that the ICJ due to it resting on the Rome Statute that provides a treaty framework for its operations. Important countries, including the US, China, Russia, and India, as well as Israel have refused to become parties to the treaty and regard its issuance on November 21, 2024 of arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister,BenjiminNetanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant as without a proper legal foundation. Also, the ICC proceeds only against individuals and was formally established outside the UN system.
Nevertheless, the ICC proceeded in a highly professional manner and came to legal conclusions that enjoy the approval of most international law experts. Sadly, there is no way of enforcing its judgments without voluntary compliance or independent UN action. So far, the political will to implement the arrest warrants is lacking.
6. You have served as a UN Special Rapporteur. From your experience, why has the United Nations system, particularly the Security Council, been unable to effectively uphold international law regarding Israel’s actions? What structural or political obstacles within the UN prevent meaningful action against powerful states and their allies?
There are two main reasons why international law has not been effectively implemented in relation to Israel. First, Israel enjoys the support of the liberal democracies of the West to the extent that the political will to enforce international law even in relation to genocide is not present. Secondly, the UN Security Council is the only political organ with enforcement authority, and its behavior is subject to a veto, which was cast on milder ceasefire resolutions, and was not presented for action to the Security Council in anticipation of a veto.
7. Regarding the future of negotiations: The current ceasefire in Gaza has been announced, but many fear it is fragile and temporary. In your view, what are the prospects for these negotiations? Under what conditions can a ceasefire be transformed into a sustainable and just peace? Do you believe that the current diplomatic efforts in Islamabad and elsewhere have the capacity to produce a legally binding and enforceable outcome?
The Trump diplomacy leading to a ceasefire and setting forth a plan for the future of Gaza is a mockery of international law and morality. It rewards the Israel government for committing genocide, while punishing Palestine by inflicting a diplomatic process that denies its right of self-determination. The fact that the UN Security Council endorsed this outcome unanimously (although China and Russia abstained) in SC Resolution 2803 and was applauded by the UN Secretary General for doing so are shameful acts of submission to geopolitical pressures exerted by the US on behalf of Israel.
8. Finally, from the perspective of international law, what are the rights of the Iranian people and other nations in the region to defend themselves against aggression? If Israel violates the ceasefire and renews its attacks, what legal recourses and defensive measures do regional states have under international law, particularly under Article 51 of the UN Charter concerning the inherent right to self-defense?
These are complex questions that deserve detailed responses that are not possible in this format. Briefly, Iran is the victim of an unprovoked aggression prohibited by Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, making Iran entitled to act within the full scope of the right of self-defense as set forth in Article 51.
Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire to which it agreed upon, and has not been called to account. Palestine as a widely recognized state entity is entitled to act in self-defense, although it lacks the capabilities to do so. Other actors would be entitled to help defend Palestine in the spirit of collective self-defense but none have chosen to do so, except in an indirect way by South Africa through its ICJ initiative to allege Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention.
[Prefatory Note: My poembelow is intended as a sequel to an earlier poem Royalism in America, written in support of the No Kings protests of was a dramatic success as measured by turnout and public outrage directed at Trump’s abusive de-democratizing policies in America. It gave scant attention to the toxic harm inflicted on worldwide others and to the kind world order that would sustain peace, development, and justice. Economistic militarism has posed serious challenges to peace, Global South sovereignty, ecological resilience, and non-exploitative development ever since 1945. This degenerate behavior has been carried to extremes in the Gaza Genocide and exhibited by the War of Aggression launched on February 28, 2026 by the United States in partnership with Israel, itself following the open imperial revival of Monroe Doctrine imperial claims over Latin American sovereignty, and inalienable rights of self-determination. We who deplore ICE and what is represents, must also deplore the prolongation of Western militarism and what it means for life of children and civilians worldwide. We must stop climbing the escalation ladder that is one miscalculation away from a nuclear inferno.]
Future No Kings Protests: Weeping and Resisting in Global Solidarity
Trump’s Perverse Dualism: Contra Benevolent Internationalism and Pro Geopolitical Internationalism
[Prefatory Note: I write with a sense of urgency, a time when the human species is in great peril. The Second Iran War moves us closer to an abyss of unknowable depth. It is a time when the peoples of the world are our best hope, with neither the geopolitical actors, nor the UN, nor respect for law, morality, and decency are capable of resolving the multi dimensional global crisis and promoting a justife-driven future for humanity. The alternative to struggle is depaor. As the future is unknowable we owe to those we love and all humanity to carry bright torches that light the way forward.}
An Unlawful War
On February 28 Trump embarked on a war against Iran, deliberating targeting its Supreme Leader, a girls school and calling openly for regime change. This aggression has been sanitized as a ‘war of choice’ in the mainstream press as if such an option exists in the domain of international law. This sugar-coating language seeks to divert attention from the massive breach in international law. The UN Charter couldn’t be clearer. Its core and most vital norm is set forth in Article 2(4), which without any qualification prohibits all uses of international force except in the exercise of self-defense against a prior armed attack.
In shallow efforts to legal justifications, pro-war hawks have called this unprovoked attack on Iran amid negotiations to end the threat of war ‘a war against Iranian terrorism,’ ‘a preventive war against an imminent Iranian threat to U.S. national security,’ and ‘a regime-changing humanitarian intervention.’ These are polemical talking points but not serious attempts to offer a rationale that remotely attaches a reputable argument as to the ‘legality’ of recourse to war.
Somehow Trump gave the game away when he declared that he supports international law so long as he is the final arbiter of what is lawful or not. The precedent being set by the U.S. in launching this war of aggression against Iran will long live in infamy, and not only for its victims, but for any hope of a sane, peaceful, law-abiding future for international relations. The Iran War coming after the Venezuelan military operation is a further sign that America’s support for internationalism has been replaced by a 21st century variant of imperial geopolitics.
Withdrawing from Benevolent Internationalism
I
In the first week of the New Year the White House released a largely neglected memorandum announcing U.S. withdrawal from 66 ‘international organizations’, 31 of which are situated within the UN System. Another 35 were independent of the UN dedicated to the functional tasks of global scope. In addition to ending participation, this withdrawal also means no more U.S. funding. This would disastrously limit the capabilities and performances of these organizations, whose work is vital in so many areas of international life. Such an initiative, although unprecedented, should come as no surprise. Donald Trump has never made a secret of his hostility to internationally cooperative arrangements established to address practical global concerns, whether it be climate change, disease control, cultural heritage, economic development, human rights, enforcing piracy on international waters and most of all, the management of global security and international conflicts.
The White House alleged that these organizations “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.” An accompanying memo elaborated on “bringing to an end..American taxpayer funding” and how such actions contributing to the wider Trump effort to “restore American sovereignty.” These misleading abstractions hide the true motivation behind this regressive series of moves.
The veil of deception surrounding this deliberately dramatic move against what might be called ‘global wokism,’ (the liberal extensions of domestic commitments to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ + reliance on cooperative international arrangements + support for the UN and human rights). The Orwellian double-speak of the Trump Memorandum was somewhat clarified in a statement issued on the same day by the ever-dutiful Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. It had this candid heading, “Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations.” In the text Rubio elaborates that these organizations favor global governance and are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” In other words, this anti-internationalism should not be sugarcoated as a revival of outmoded traditional U.S. isolationism. It is a matter of clearing the path that impedes Trump’s brand of narcissistic imperialism as set forth in the National Strategy of the United States, which was released in November 2025.
The concluding words from Rubio also express the Trump ethos that this wholesale withdrawal from internationalism is an unmistakable message that the US Government rejects any international entanglement that requires funding or dilution of American sovereignty:
“We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.”
Trump’s Geopolitical Internationalism
What the Trump leadership does not tell the world is that the U.S. has its own preferred manner of dealing with threats to its economic and political interests as amply illustrated by the recent Venezuela military intervention, the threats to unleash an unprovoked military aggression against Iran, and the Greenland gambit best interpreted as a menacing new form of territorial piracy.
In effect, these MAGA moves are rationalized as a repudiation of the woke liberal ‘global leadership’ style of American foreign policy that exerted influence by its participation in and funding of bipartisan internationalism. The argument, not without certain merits, is that the Obama/Biden geopolitics should not be romanticized as global benevolence, the virtues of ‘a rule-governed international order,’ or an embrace of fiscal conservatism. In this spirit it is responsible to recall that U.S. pre-Trump military spending was ten times greater than the next ten states, and devoted in large part to maintaining U.S. global dominance rather than national security as traditionally understood. To be sure, it is a glaring example of MAGA hypocrisy exposed by Trump’s seeking and obtaining from Congress a 50% increase in the US peacetime military appropriation, to a staggering total of $1.5 trillion.
A considerable amount of the bloated military budget will be used to pay the high maintenance costs of 850 military bases all over the world, a posture hardly consistent with the Trump claim to reduce American foreign policy ambitions to their earlier hemispheric dimensions, which itself overlooked U.S. colonizing adventures in the Pacific region that peaked at the end of the 19th century. The smaller pre-Trump military budgets proved sufficient to finance regime changing interventions and costly failed state-building and market-oriented undertakings most visibly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Trump predecessor Joe Biden’s Cold War nostalgia was not restrained by military budget constraints. He most revealingly chose war rather than diplomacy in the context of the Russian attack on Ukraine, and like Trump could find even less to criticize in Netanyahu’s genocidal approach to Gaza.
Trump’s refusal to expend US dollars to fund cooperative approaches to global issues, whether involving bettering economic and social conditions of others or working to control disease, food security and climate in ways that benefit the U.S. exhibits an extremely shortsighted and dysfunctional view of national interests. True such international activities go against Trump’s electoral pledge to contract the role of the state or to curtail the dangerously expanding national debt and certainly not to reduce militarist geopolitics. While defunding internationalism the Trump military budget is the highest instance ever of peacetime military spending. It can neither be justified by national security nor of benefit to the lives of the great majority of Americans.
As the National Security Strategy released by the White House in November 2025 explained, American foreign policy would henceforth reembrace the discarded Monroe Doctrine as expanded by the addition of the Trump Corollary. This bundle of initiatives was immediately dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, giving Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics its due. This formal statement served as a clumsy doctrinal prelude to the attack on Venezuela as well as added threats directed at Cuba and Colombia to expect similar treatment if they don’t do what Washington demands. Even more radical in its implications were strong assertions that non-hemispheric actors were expected to refrain in the future from economic and infrastructure involvements in Latin America. Obviously, this was a thinly veiled warning to China to downsize, if not eliminate, its extensive investment and trade relations throughout Latin America. The message to non-hemispheric actors was henceforth to avoid economic, social, and political Latin involvements or else expect hostile pushback from Washington’s commitment to ‘hemispheric preeminence.’ Time will tell whether this grandiose claim of control over Latin America will spark a new cycle of national resistance to such a brazen contraction of the right of self-determination of these countries as conferred by Article I of the Human Rights Covenant of Political Civil Rights. It is also remains to be seen how China and other countries will respond to this outright interference with their freedom to engage in peaceful relations with Latin America.
This mass withdrawal from international cooperative problem-solving also is a virtual admission in this Trump Era that the U.S. has opted for ‘transactionalism’ and post-colonial imperialism. The most salient feature of this tectonic shift away from Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America as brazenly announced to the world, and especially to the Hemisphere, including more shockingly to Canada, is that the U.S. is giving priority to its strategic ambitions free from discarded liberal pretenses of respect for international law and the United Nations. It seems to be telling the world that its only guide when it comes to foreign policy in the future will be the warped and personalist amorality of Donald Trump. In the future, Latin America can expect to be treated as an exclusive U.S. ‘sphere of influence,’ perhaps more accurately known as ‘a sphere of dominance.’ If such is the case, the closest recent resemblance is to the Soviet relationship to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
A Second Look at U.S. Withdrawal from Internationalism and Pre-Trump Resistance to Latin Economic Nationalism
In this sense the withdrawal from the 66 organizations is a gigantic step away from the U.S. engagement with the liberal approach that served as a bipartisan guide to American foreign policy and the projection of its blend of hard and soft power ever since 1945. The previous posture of American foreign policy avoided the arrogant Trumpian language of ‘preeminence,’ adopting as an alternative approach to the bipartisan post-Cold War euphemistic language of ‘global leadership.’ This earlier terminology also did not play by the rules of respect for the sovereign rights of states. It too was guilty of geopolitical disregard of legal constraints when it served strategic national interests. It resorted to regime change by covert interventions throughout the Cold War on behalf of its free market ideology and in opposition to economic nationalism by elected leaders or in the aftermath of popular revolution. This pattern of covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954 generated and orchestrated A coup against a democratically elected government that was alleged to have Communist leanings, and more concretely threatened the interests of United Fruit Company, nationalizing some unused land owned by this powerful corporate investor.
This pattern of a more overt justification for promoting regime change that combined an ideological rationale with underlying hostility to economic nationalism shaped the U.S. response to the Cuban Revolution a few years later. The U.S relied for many years on harsh economic sanctions while lending mar support to counterrevolutionary Cuban exile proxies in a series of failed attempts to duplicate its earlier success in Guatemala. Castro’s leadership in Cuba was delegitimized by liberal American leaders at the time as ‘incompatible’ with ideals and values of the hemisphere yet seemed more directly motivated by a toxic opposition to economic nationalism taking the principal form of nationalizing Cuba’s sugar industry by a mixture of hardline foreign policy hawks and coup-minded Cuban exiles. In a shameful continuing display of heartless foreign policy annual one-sided votes in the UN General Assembly favor ending sanctions against Cuba that have persisted for more that 60 years after the Castro ascent to power, causing severe economic hardship for the population.
The U.S. also lent covert encouragement to the 1973 anti-Allende Pinochet coup in Chile. It also carried out in 1989 a lawless intervention in Panama centering on the kidnapping of the de facto head of state Manuel Noriega and forcibly bringing him to the US to face criminal charges of drug trafficking. The self-serving code name for the intervention was Operation Just Cause officially defended as needed for the protection of U.S. economic interests, enforcement of drug trafficking, and for the security of the Panama Canal.
These were peculiar ways of expressing neighborly good will, to say the least, covertly carried out or ideologically asserted as elements of Cold War ‘containment’ geopolitics. This anti-communist veneer masked accompanying economic motivations to crush Latin nationalism and thereby promote the interests of US corporations to uphold the security of private sector investments that had long exploited Latin resources. This pre-Trump strategic militarism was never limited to the Western Hemisphere as many American regime changing and state-building ventures were carried out in Asia and the Middle East. The arc of US interventionism after 1945 stretches from the CIA engineered overthrow in 1953 of Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in Iran and its replacement by the authoritarian Pahlavi Dynasty to the Venezuelan undertaking in 2026. In both cases the common strategic stakes were to ensure that the vast oil reserves of these two countries were managed for profit by U.S. corporate energy giants.
Before Trump US foreign aid, support of the UN, and assorted initiatives such as the Peace Corps were in fact idealistic features of American foreign policy. Yet all along such policies had a hybrid character. They served also as PR ploys to pursue covertly the warrior and economistic sides of U.S. ‘global leadership,’ that is, covert means to prevent countries in the non-Western world from moving toward either socialism or economic nationalism. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine Era, which was preoccupied with resisting European intervention, the Cold War period and its aftermath represented a geopolitical reset that was rooted in Atlanticism, pitting the West against the non-West in alliance with Europe, as given salient expression in the NATO alliance.
This alliance originated as a collective defense arrangement designed to deter alleged Soviet expansionist ambitions toward Europe but revealingly has limped along for more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its original justifying rationale. It should not be overlooked that principally the main NATO members after 1993 joined in their complicity toward Israel’s genocidal policies in Occupied Palestine. This was convincing testimony that the Atlanticist coalition that existed during the Cold War broadened its agenda to encompass Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, redesigning containment to validate the post-Soviet civilizational containment of Islam. Such policies fulfilled Samuel Huntington’s prophetic expectations that the Soviet collapse would produce a ‘clash of civilizations’ rather than ‘an end of history.’
Beyond Hemispheric Preeminence
Atlanticism is currently being redefined by Trump as okay so long as it submits to his efforts to control coercively ongoing confrontations with the non-West shifting their ideational locus from Communism to Islam, with Iran currently in the U.S. gunsights. As mentioned, the distinctive features of Trump’s overtly nihilistic geopolitics, despite its declared intentions, will not be confined to the Western Hemisphere. As metaphor, and sign of political pathology, Trump’s absurd fantasy that if the Bureau of Peace administering Gaza is ‘successful,’ whatever that might come to mean, it will emerge as the peace-building center of yet another ‘new international order.’ In that event, the UN will be cast aside as weak, wasteful, and ineffectual, a relic of the old order that will be replaced by the strong, efficient, and effective Bureau of Peace as administered from Washington. This outlandish project can be understood as an institutional equivalent to Trump’s anger that he was robbed of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that he alone richly deserved.
Looked upon more objectively, if a Nobel War Prize existed, Trump would surely deserve to be the leading candidate, and likely recipient.
Where is Trump’s Foreign Policy Headed?
In effect, Trump’s anti-internationalism should be reinterpreted. The U.S. is certainly retreating these days from the Atlanticist neoliberal globalist model of world order. This disappoints and worries those who continue to value the U.S. global leadership role, however blurry its nature, as the only feasible alternative to chaos, economic crisis, and Western decline. In contrast, what Trump seems to be now proposing is undisguised American unipolarity as qualified by transactional calculations of national advantage. This is the message to Europeans as evident in the leveraging of tariffs as a policy instruments to punish and reward, most recently softened somewhat by Rubio’s ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ speech that seemed to delight the European audience attending the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Rubio’s well-chosen words were received as reassurance that after all Europe would not be cut loose to fend for itself and could still rely on partnering with the U.S. so long as it let Trump run the show. The standing ovation given to Rubio at the end of his speech seem best understood as an unexpectedly servile display of fealty by the leadership of Europe to U.S. global imperialism
My suspicion is that, despite such appearances to the contrary, the Trump worldview might be slouching toward a ‘beautiful’ geopolitical bargain with America’s two geopolitical rivals: China and Russia. Its enactment would involve enlarged spheres of influence reciprocally accepted, and a trilateral management of global security. The UN would be diminished, if not relegated to the status of serving minor functional issues, a kind of ‘petty internationalism’ with tight budgetary constraints. It would be naïve to suppose that such a world order arrangement would benefit the majority of the world’s peoples or address the global public good as specified in general terms by the Preamble of the UN Charter, but we should all know by now that these goals were never endorsed by Trump.
A preferable alternative architecture for a new order exists but is hampered by the inter-civilizational rivalries now flourishing to block suitable attention to the agenda of benign internationalism focusing on nuclear weaponry, climate change, xenophobia, developmental equity, racism, human rights, fashioning regulatory frameworks for weapons, AI, robotics. Such a future is also treated as irrelevant by the ‘political realists’ who wield influence in the inner sanctums of the reigning geopolitical actors. Such thinking, however outmoded, continues to dominate the foreign policy elites of almost all major countries undermining any present prospects for generating a new world order animated by promoting the global public good. The most that can be hoped for in the near future is a more prudent and responsible realism that becomes sensitive to the limitations of militarist geopolitics. Thus, adaptation to the changing global setting is confined to rearrangements of ill-fitting and often antagonistic ‘parts’ rather than finally affirming the politics of the planet as an organic ‘whole,’ which seems alone capable of preserving a humane and resilient future.
[Preliminary Note: Responses to Qs addressed to me by a Turkish journalist, Murat Sofuoğlu, affiliated with TRT World. My responses have been modified.]
What do Epstein’s ties with the high and mighty say about Western ‘elite’ structures?
These ties reveal networks of power and influence that has long been shielded from legal accountability, and even moral scrutiny. Epstein’s network of friends and associates gives to the wider public some sense of the lure of decadence with regard to sexual gratification. After Epstein’s first conviction of criminal abuse revealed in graphic detail in the batch of documents so far released. The dimensions of predatory sexuality, victimizing young women and old men, are convincingly confirmed in a documentary film titled Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. The film also reveals a total absence of empathy for the helpless victims of these unlawful and despicable forms of sexual gratification with teen-age innocent girls drawn by money and deception from poor and vulnerable families. Exposure to these patterns of behavior by those who sit comfortably atop skyscrapers of corporate, financial, and political power influence enjoy an almost automatic entitlement to back alleys of collective narcissism apparently treated as if normal, an ethos that appears common among economic and political elites. Even when the shielding fails, as it did in the Palm Beach Epstein operation of his sanctuary for upper class pedophile. It was only the uncommonly conscientious investigations of the high and mighty that local law enforcement and dutiful police officials built a criminal case against Epstein. Even then the wheels of justice barely turned. Rather than the right to mount a defense during ‘a day in court’ such gilded perpetrators are generally able to intimidate, bribe, and threaten those representing the state as prosecutors and judges face hurdles that evidence alone cannot overcome. One lesson to be learned is that money and class often speak louder than law in such high-profile situations, even in the United States where the rule of law is sanctified in public discourse.
In an interesting presumably coincidental preview of the Epstein saga was the mainstream movie, Eyes Wide Shut, starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise illustrating a tamer more religiously framed hideaway for rich and powerful sexual predators. Significantly, the sexually abused women were adults, compensated as if prostitutes, and without any political linked agenda as underlying Epstein’s habitual escapades on his provate Caribbean island and New York and Palm Beach mansions. Yet a suggestive similarity is the coercive suppression of any divulgence of such goings on in public space. Whereas Epstein equipped his various homes with sophisticated surveillance systems to ensure confidentiality by blackmail evidence to disgrace any informer or insider, the film relied on outright thuggery as threat and violence as needed. Confidentiality was achieved by keeping the guest list to a trusted coterie of carefully vetted rich and powerful had every social and material incentive to keep the events securely under wraps.
2. Why do so many rich and powerful people need underage girls for their sexual satisfaction? What does this say about these powerful people?
As suggested, it is less the illicit need than a carefree demonstration of impunity for what occurs in the collective privacy and confidentiality provided by Epstein’s supposedly secure and luxurious playgrounds. It comes to an abrupt end at the undisclosed cost of surveillance, which created a different set of vulnerabilities to blackmail than the risks of being exposed held accountable for the criminal exploitation of underage girls, who often are scarred for life by the experiences of pleasuring older men, and have no off ramp by way of resignation from high visibility career positions. Epstein’s fastidious management pf the predatory sexual behavior of guests, as is now well-established. was monitored by a sophisticated network of cameras apparently installed and even managed by Mossad agents. In effect, a punitive system to safeguard privacy and confidentiality, perhaps further reinforced by threats of physical retaliation to anyone daring to expose linkages between sexual gratification oblivious to law with the exertion of political influence among the rich and powerful augmenting Israel’s leverage in the United States. As yet, there is no reliable information on whether Epstein’s extraordinary wealth was owed in part to these Israeli ties, but the frequency with his interactions with the former Israel Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, is to say the least, suggestive of a principal/agent relationship.
3. Does this show something is profoundly wrong in Western political and financial power networks?
More investigative work is needed to disclose whether there are equivalent non-Western outlets for the sexual appetites and political maneuvers of the rich and powerful. In one sense, Epstein’s files do not indict the West as such. It seems primarily an American class phenomenon, with exceptions made for such transnational Western elite public figures as Prince Andrew and Ehud Barak, Israel’s former Prime Minister, and unlikely prominent intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, and even Stephen Hawkins whose associations did not necessarily involve participation or even knowledge of the lurid sides of what I call Epstein’s entrapment network. The participation by Americans was more salient than the involvement of Europeans, and certainly than non-Western upper echelons. This is tentatively confirmed by the contents of some leaked and unredacted files detailing the multiple, as yet unspecified involvements of the Epstein network with such eminent public figures as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
4. How do many ordinary people, who want to have a quiet family life with their partners and kids, perceive Epstein’s links with big politicians and rich people?
I suspect there is great diversity of response, although the public majority culture is portrayed by the media as one of moral outrage. In a few high-profile instances, the disclosures to date have resulted in some prominent resignations and disavowals by such academic celebrities, as the former Harvard President, Larry Summers, and the wild-eyed ultra-Zionist controversial professor and lawyer for controversial criminal defendants, Alan Dershowitz, and by corporate billionaires and celebrity lawyers. It appears that those who identify as Republicans overwhelmingly are in denial or minimize the engagement, especially of Trump with the Epstein phenomenon. This minimization is reinforced by the selective release and redaction of files that might incriminate Trump or MAGA adherents. So far there has been a bureaucratic coverup that has limited the impact of the release of what should be in political culture that still upheld the rule of law on ‘ordinary people’ as shaped by partisan party politics, with Democrats far more appalled than either Independents or Republicans.
Epstein was an unusual figure for such a dark role, harboring seemingly genuine interests in higher education and technological innovations along with his strong, yet still vague and shadowy attachments to Israel. He befriended and managed to somewhat implicate Noam Chomsky, a critic of Israel and bitter adversary of Dershowitz. Chomsky’s image the most admired and influential public intellectual of our time has been tarnished by his murky connections with Epstein who seemed a financial advisor and friend of Chomsky and his wife. What remains blurry is the extent to which Chomsky was deliberately attracted to be a friend or to be rendered vulnerable a high-value target of Israeli intelligence.
There is also an element of governmental power at play in this unfolding Epstein affair. The fact of Trump is America’s most unabashedly autocratic president further bolstered by a Republican grip on Congress and the Supreme Court, and of course, the Executive Branch has so far led to the shielding of some, the exposure of and would have been handled somewhat differently if a liberal, upstanding president was in the White House such as Barack Obama, although even Obama refrained from any legal scrutiny of highly controversial behavior of his predecessor, George W. Bush, widely believed to have authorized interrogation practices in Iraq and elsewhere, that violated human rights and the International Convention on Torture (1984), ratified by the U.S. in 1988, and at least 173 countries..
In concluding it may be the highly relevant to note the degree of moral hypocrisy on matters of family loyalty and sexual mores that exist in the U.S. as distinguished from its European soulmate states, which seem more comfortable acknowledging the frailties of human nature. By no means is this meant directly or indirectly as a partial exoneration of those who conspired in their own entrapment within ‘Epstein’s World.’ Nor does this whitewash ordinary people who brush morals and law aside in favor of loyalty to a political party or national leaders. The loudest chant of American constitutionalists has long been that we are ‘a country of laws, not men’ now only overheard as a dissident whisper.
5. Do these ordinary people question the legitimacy of the system they are living under these powerful people’s influence? If so, would you project a significant popular challenge against the existing political/financial system?
A growing number of ordinary citizens in the United States are shocked by the ugly spectacle of the Epstein disclosures, but this may lead in the short-run, at least, to greater repressiveness of independent media and oppositional critics rather than to significant reforms, must less a systemic challenge to the deep roots of the Epstein crisis in the inequalities currently wrought by wealth and political power. There are various forms of corruption evident in most countries of the world, and this is accompanied by moral hypocrisy that effectively shields private behavior from public scrutiny. In the U.S. context the present declining popularity of Trump’s second term leadership may embroil him and other establishment figures in belated attempts to impose criminal accountability for ‘statutory rape’ of underage girls, a crime that in the U.S. has no statute of limitations.
So far, the Republican Party has privileged party loyalty to moral and legal accountability with respect to Trump and his friends and associates. Whether the widening cracks in this support structure will withstand further disclosures is of course uncertain. We can expect that Trump will do his best to divert attention even if this means a costly and dangerous second attack on Iran even more unprovoked that the first attack of a year ago.
What we do know with some confidence is that the Epstein files will continue to preoccupy both elites and ordinary citizens for some time to come, at least in the United States. It should also have the international effect of casting additional doubts about the U.S. attachment to liberal values of human rights and democracy, and of course about the claims of moral superiority associated the creed of American Exceptionalism, persuasive as a public philosophy in the US yet dismissed with increasing cynicism elsewhere in the world.
[Prefatory Note: My Responses to An Egyptian Journalist, Muhamed Abd Elaziz 15 Qs on International Law, Gaza, Personal Experience, and many other topics. My most comprehensive interview on current international maladies, 2/20/2026}
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1- Throughout your long career in international law, what was the moment when you felt your work made a real difference?
It is hard to say what qualifies as ‘a real difference.’ In my opposition to the Vietnam War as a scholar of international law I think that I made some difference in the public discourse, especially after years of unexpected resistance by the Vietnamese people inspired by their charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh. On my return to the USA from my first of two wartime visits to North Vietnam in 1968, I conveyed to the US Government peace proposals more favorable to US interests than what was negotiated by Henry Kissinger several years later. The media gave my trip and proposals prominent attention.
Similarly with respect to the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 that brought the Islamic Republic of Iran into power, especially as a result of media quotations of my generally supportive opinion of the popularity and legitimacy of the anti-Shah movement.
After I became active in promoting solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for their basic rights my views were excluded from mainstream thinking in the media, Congress, and even in academic circles, although it did not prevent me from being active on oppositional media platforms and among peace/justice civil society groups. My activism climaxed with an unexpected appointment by the UN Human Rights Council to be the Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine (2008-2014), which gave me an important venue to advance my views, although it was accompanied by defamatory campaigns to discredit my role as an independent expert reporting on Israel’s systemic violations of International Humanitarian Law and commission of Crimes Against Humanity.
I continued to write books and opinion pieces that expressed my commitment to progressive causes within the US and the world, with abiding efforts to promote denuclearization of international relations, ecological resilience, and anti-colonial/anti-imperial geopolitics, as well as the promotion of US foreign policy position more compatible with the global public good and greater sensitivity to moral imperatives.
2- Which international conflicts do you think were mishandled?
This is a big topic, and I can only give a short response. In my view the peace diplomacy in 1945 and after the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, the Ukraine War, and the October 7 Palestinian attack on Israel’s villages close to the Gaza border were handled particularly poorly from the perspective of sustainable peace, human rights, and the pursuit of world order and global governance reform..
After 1945, the US gave up on a crucial treaty effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, it oversaw the design of the UN in ways that kept the management of global security under the control of geopolitics rather than Rule of Law, and at first took a non-committal stand against European colonialism. After the Vietnam War, it failed to appreciate that in most instances the legitimacy of anti-colonial warfare prevails in wars overcoming the possession of military superiority by the colonial side and its allies. Its foreign policy elites dedicated themselves to eliminating the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ by which public opinion in the US opposed intervention and wars fought with no perceived or convincing national security justification; it is generally believed that the Vietnam Syndrome was overcome by the rapid, casualty-light and inexpensive Iraq War of 1991.
After 1945, the Global West, led by the US was far more concerned with preparing for conflict with the Soviet Union than it was with creating a world order respectful of international law and devoted to the global public good. The result was to identify national interests with militarized geopolitics, an expensive and risky arms race, an ideological conflict between market economics and socialism, and producing internal repression of political dissent. After the Cold War, positive modifications with respect to nuclear weapons, climate change, UN reform could have been undertaken, but was effectively resisted by Kissingerian realism premised on beliefs associated with hard power historical agency,
After 9/11 the US without any consideration opted for a global war of terror rather than seeking a more stable framework resting on respect for the sovereignty of states in the Global South, a stronger UN, and cooperative frameworks for the enforcement of criminal law. Instead the US resorted to high tech tactics killing many innocent civilians, displaying no respect for territorial sovereignty in its reliance on drones, shock and awe tactics, with the goal of stricter management of security subject to US global dominance of a unipolar world order.
After the Ukraine War, rather than recourse to diplomacy and a negotiated compromise, to which Russia was receptive, the US-NATO led response chose to wage a geopolitical war against Moscow at the expense of Ukraine and its people. Now four years later the various parties seem unwilling to negotiate in good faith, allowing the killing to continue. It seems likely the war will end as it might have four years earlier by an exchange of negotiated concessions and security reassurances.
After the October 7 attack on Israel launched from Gaza, Israel initiateded a genocidal assault with the backing of leading Western countries, with spillovers to the West Bank and region. The genocidal strikes continued killing at least 80,000 Palestinians and were implicitly linked to the Israeli quest for ‘Greater Israel’ that called for the erasure of any Palestinian resistance, either by ethnic cleansing or total victimization. The nature of the alignments on either side of this conflict exposed the Islamophobic reflex of the leading Western liberal democracies and the heartless quest for Jewish primacy in Israel even if meant institutionalizing a harsh version of apartheid.
3- How do you see the state of human rights internationally today?
The observance of human rights has declined in recent years, especially in the liberal democracies of the West, but also reflecting authoritarian and xenophobic trends throughout the world, and in virtually all leading sovereign states. The voluntary adherence to the norms of international law with respect to human rights has also been negatively affected by the failure to address Israeli apartheid and genocide, and the widespread repression of pro-Palestinian solidarity protests and policy initiatives. The internal curtailments of human rights in the leading liberal democracies has also set back all efforts to increase compliance with human rights legal stardards.
4- How would you assess the current role of the United Nations in resolving existing conflicts, such as those in the Middle East or Palestine?
The UN is weaker than it has ever been since ir was established in 1945. This partially the result of the UN’s inability to protect the Palestinian people, and others, from Israel’s defiance of international law, highlighted by the refusal to respect Palestinian basic rights, above all, the right of self-determination, related rights of resistance to its denial in this kind of settler colonial context, and reaction to Israeli uses of force against several neighboring countries. This has been dramatized by allowing Israel and the United States to oversee in a manipulative manner the current ceasefire arrangements and control the future of Gaza, institutionalized in the shameful Board of Peace, which rewards the perpetrators of genocide and severely punishes its victims.
5- If you could change one previous international decision, which one would it be and why?
It was the decision back in 1945 to entrust the management of global security to non-accountable geopolitical actors, accorded an exemption from a legal duty to comply with the UN Charter. A closely related decision, important symbolically and substantively, was to impose accountability for war crimes only on civilian, military, and corporate leaders of the losers in World War II, coupled with the refusal to allow legal scrutiny of the crimes of the winners. The winners were expected by the American prosecutor, Justice Jackson to adhere in the future to the standards imposed on the losers at Nuremberg but consistently failed to do so with impunity.
6- Is it possible for the Iran nuclear deal to be revived and for Iran, the US, and Israel to live in peace?
It seems doubtful so long as the US steadfastly supports Israel’s patterns of hegemonic security policies applied not only to the Palestinian people, but to neighbors that either are sympathetic with the Palestinian ordeal, most notably Iran, or are perceived by Israel’s leaders to pose future obstacles to its goals of hegemonic regionalism. Peace in the region also depends on the West giving up its ideas about prevailing in an inter-civilizational struggle between the Islamic Middle East and the Christian West, a current struggle whose deep psycho-political and economistic roots can be traced back to the Christian Crusades of earlier centuries.
For regional peace to prevail in the Middle East to six interrelated steps must be taken: self-determination for Palestine, Israeli renunciation or drastic revision of Zionist ideology seeking ‘Greater Israel’ and regional hegemony; ending all US sanctions imposed on Iran; Israel’s giving up its nuclear weapons capability coupled with a monitored treaty to make the Middle East a nuclear free zone; the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that critically examines the various versions of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 forward to the present; s negotiated cap on military spending and sales by Israel; a Declaration of Coexistence based on ethnic equality, and signed by both Heads of State and reinforced by a pledge of Permanent Members of the Security Council to suspend. any use of the veto in connection with any recurrences of the Israel/Palestine conflict. .
7- In your opinion, did the US and Israeli strikes succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Of course, it is impossible to know with any precision, but all signs suggest that Iran has restored its enrichment facilities, which may both enhance its defensive capabilities and make it more vulnerable to further (unlawful) attacks by Israel and/or the United States. There is no justification in contemporary international law with respect to preventive war, including to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weaponry.
8- Do you think the current Iranian regime is facing an existential challenge, and how do you see the future of the Islamic Republic?
The Islamic Republic has proved remarkably successful over the decades in opposing external and internal opposition to the stability of national governance and to the protection of its rights as a sovereign state. Iran has been unfairly dealt with respecting its nuclear program, given Israel’s and the US hostility, threats, and uses of force since 1979. It is the core example of the doctrinal application of the clash of civilizations hypothesis that assumed policy relevance throughout Atlanticist region in the post-Cold War global setting. Trump’s pro-Israeli diplomacy has intensified the challenge of military attack and regime-changing interventions, but his transactualism could also lead to some kind of pragmatic agreements that would include a long-deferred normalization of relations with the Islamic Republic. Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics includes a willingness to make abrupt and unexpected policy shifts.
9- Did the IAEA play a secret role in revealing the uranium enrichment levels to Israel and the US?
It seems the IAEA was the victim of Western geopolitical manipulations, but it is difficult to set forth reliably the fully story without access to the classified inner activity that led to these irresponsible IAEA reports on the restoration of Iranian enrichment capabilities.
10- What do “ICC” and “ICJ” need to have stronger enforcement mechanisms?
The ICJ to be stronger at the stage of enforcement would benefit from a curtailment of the P5 right of veto in all instances where the issue is one of ICJ enforcement. The GA could also urge compliance or even the imposition of sanctions, not with the force of a legal obligation, but as a moral duty.
The ICC, which unlike the ICJ, is not part of the UN System and relies on the treaty framework of the Rome Statute for its operations has currently no means of enforcement beyond the voluntary compliance of non-parties, which include the three leading geopolitical actors of our time, Russia, China, and the United States. A strong GA resolution might produce various kinds of pushback by sovereign governments and civil society actors that could increase pressure for both compliance and success. An alternative would be a UN Charter amendment giving the GA authority to enforce the judgments of both international tribunals. Such an innovation would depend on the P5 to recommend unanimously that such an amendment be adopted..
In the end, the political will of major states would be decisive in many instances, either to induce compliance or to support non-compliance. At present, most governments are resistant to obligations that encroach on national sovereignty, but in this setting of enforcing ICJ (including Advisory Opinions) and ICC decisions have a greater formal claim if the state in question is a member of the UN or a party to the Rome Statute.
11- Did Israel try to win you over to its side during your time as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine?
No, they made no attempt after losing their opposition to my appointment as Special Rapporteur at the Human Rights Council. Their entire effort during the six years I served as an unpaid UN appointee was to discredit me as an objective observer, accusing me of ethnic bias in repeated defamatory smears. Sadly, the UN exhibited little support even when I was detained in an Israeli airport prison facility while on a UN mission seemingly responsive to inflammatory comments from UN Watch, an NGO that devotes its energies and resources to the aggressive and often unscrupulous defense of Israel against critics, resorting to lies and insults. It is a sign of UN weakness that UNW is neither disciplined in its behavior or more appropriately delisted by the UNOSOC as possessing UN representational credentials.
12- How do you see the changes in Gaza and the entire Middle East since 7 October?
Although the future is unknowable, especially given a variety of factors, and hopeful possibilities should not be excluded from the political imagination although the present circumstances make the near future looks dark from perspectives that favor constructive responses to Palestinian grievances, greatly aggravated by Israel’s recourse to genocide for more than two years, flagrantly violating the Genocide Convention. The entire world witnessed in real time the horrifying daily images of the cruelty of the genocide, as well as Israel’s defiant posture, and the shocking civilizational support Israel received from the white Christian world on the first few months after October 7. At the same time, Trump is mercurial leader capable of making abrupt changes in the US role, already somewhat evident clinging to a two-state solution contrary to Israel’s wishes, although vaguely promised, and then only to be realized at some distant point in the future. It does appear to counter Israel’s present drive to establish Greater Israel as soon as possible. However, such a pledge is not without its contradictions. These are mainly shown by the absence of US criticism of Israel’s indulgence, if not encouragement of settler violence in the West Bank, an approach more consistent with de facto annexation than of any serious effort to demand that Israel policies meet the preconditions for establishing a viable Palestinian state. At present, without even the courtesies of deception, Israel seems more determined than ever to make any form of Palestinian statehood less and less feasible or desirable.
Besides this, Israel and the US pay no attention to the 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion clearly obligating to withdraw from all three Occupied Palestinian Territories, a judicial outcome endorsed overwhelmingly by a GA resolution.
. 13- Do you see President Trump’s plan as an American occupation of Gaza?
It is a somewhat original joint colonizing vision to be implemented by a multi-state ‘Board of Peace, advantageous for Israel, punitive for the Palestinians, and under the uncontested partisan leadership of Donald Trump. It is in my view a disgrace that the UN Security Council unanimously endorsed the Trump Plan in SC Res 1803, which is a symbolic vindication of Israel’s genocide and a further punitive framework for the indefinite subjugation of Palestinians to a blend of ethnic cleansing and a harsh version of apartheid. Whether the outrageous Trump idea of supervising the reconstruction of Gaza to be the Riviera of the Middle East is situated somewhere on a policy spectrum linking predatory disaster capitalism to imperial geopolitics, and hopefully it is the imperial fantasy of a displaced realtor, and like many such flights of fancy, never to be realized. .
14- During your meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, what exactly took place between you? How would you describe the impact of that encounter on you?
In Jannuary 1979 I was accompanied by Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, and Donald Luce, an anti-war religious leader, accepting an invitation from Mehdi Bazargan, the Interim President of the Islamic Republic, asking me to form a small delegation to visit Iran so as to have direct contact with the revolution and its leaders during the climactic days that were on the verge of producing victory for the popular movement of opposition to the Shah. During our time in Iran the Shah abdicated as his downfall as Iran’s leader became the only unfinished business of the victorious revolution. It was a perfect moment to have this conversation with symbolic leader of this revolution that surprised the world by its successful resistance to the Shah’s repressive apparatus.
While we were still in Iran, just prior to Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran, we were told that because our visit was viewed as a success we were told that as a surprise reward we were being offered the opportunity to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini on our way back to the United States at his exile residence in a suburb of Paris/.
We had rhe meeting sitting in a circle within a large tent on the lawn of his residence. We covered many topic of lasting significance, but the one that remains uppermost in my memory was Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial questions to us as to whether, unlike in 1953, the United States would accept the will of the Iranian people and be open to normal diplomatic relations, which was his preferred future provided it was not a ruse to induce the new leadership to drop its guard.
We also inquired about the wellbeing of the Jewish minority, and his response was reassuring: “Judaism is an authentic religion, and if Jews do not involve themselves as agents of Israel, it would be a tragedy for us if they left Iran.” I came away from our several hours sitting on the ground in the tent with the distinct impression that Ayatollah Khomeini’s had a distinct preference for a peaceful diplomatic future with the West. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, this has remained ‘the road not taken’ and to quote the renowned American poet, Robert Frost’s final line of the poem,.’and that has made all the difference.’
There is much else of interest that transpired at that meeting, including our impressions of this charismatic historic religious leader, but that would unduly lengthen my response, and will be saved for another occasion.
15- Why did you receive death threats for several years after your New York Times article titled “Trusting Khomeini,” and how did you deal with it?
Of course, I do not know the true motivations of those who transmitted death threats. It was more than disagreement with my assessments. I suspect it was to make me fear the consequences if I did not remain silent in the future. These threats did not alter my strong conviction that the US Government should at least test the willingness of Iran’s new leadership to act in accord with this stated desire for normal diplomatic relations based on mutual respect and shared benefits. It was an opportunity missed to demonstrate that the US was ready to grant legitimacy to the outcome of internal national struggles to shape the political identity of a sovereign state, an essential feature of the right of self-determination.
Because the road taken by all US leaders was one of confrontation and hostility toward the Islamic Republic, not in keeping with a rational assessment of US national interests,, it challenged the new leadership in Iran to give the highest priority to regime security and territorial defense. Whether these preoccupations were responsible for the harsh and seemingly intolerant policies of theocratic governance is impossible to discern. Interpreting whether the decades that followed might have been different if the US and Israel had not constantly Iranian historical anxieties about the past is a matter of pure speculatiom. Perhaps, a more convincing picture will emerge if Iranian policy insiders offer a careful analysis of how the security threats and destabilizing policies spearheaded by Israel, backed by the main members of the Atlanticist political community that emerged after World War II, turned governance into an understandable obsession with national security and regime stability.
16- Do you believe the George W. Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks? Do you possess any information that you haven’t previously published?
I am not an expert on the ongoing debates about what really happened on 9/11, but I do know that there are many loose ends and unanswered questions in the official version of the alleged Al Qaeda attacks. There is no present receptivity in Washington to opening the issue to objective scrutiny by an independent international commission of inquiry.
I have not seen any convincing evidence of active complicitly by George W. Bush beyond the well-established facts of complacency in the face of warnings of some kind of terrorist attack. The immediate launch of the Great Terror War was a regressive response, but consistent with the policy impulses of the ‘foreign policy elites’ that control the shaping of US national interests. An additional source of suspicion arose because the US was being pushed by Israel to adopt an anti-Iraq position in the Middle East. It is doubtful that the 2003 Iraq War would have been launched without the camouflage of the 9/11 attacks, which provided a falsely constructed rationale for engaging aggressively against any adversary of the United States, especially in the Middle East. It is worth revisiting ‘the clean break’ neo-con manifesto drawn up with encouragement from Israeli leaders in the 1990s.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 