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International law is dying. We’ll miss it when it’s gone.

International law is dying. We’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Welcome to the jungle.

Connor Echols
Jul 07, 2025
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International law is dying. We’ll miss it when it’s gone.
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Generated by Clark McGillis using ChatGPT 4o.

A raucous debate has emerged in Washington since the US carried out its bombing campaign against nuclear sites in Iran. Hawks have lauded the strikes and urged the US to keep doing more of them. Doves have demanded deescalation and thrown their hopes behind President Trump’s efforts to negotiate a comprehensive deal with Tehran. Trump, characteristically, has left both doors open, arguing for diplomacy one day and new airstrikes the next.

Largely absent from this debate has been any serious question about whether the attack was even legal. At most, members of Congress have protested the strikes by pointing to domestic law. But not a single American lawmaker has raised the issue of international law. While the Trump administration asserted in a letter to Congress that its attack was “consistent with international law,” it never bothered to explain how.

This striking show of indifference toward international law has drawn little attention from American elites. A few legal experts have attempted to fill the void with educated guesses. Drawing on Trump’s letter to Congress, former Pentagon lawyer Brian Finucane concludes that the justification is likely “collective self-defense of Israel.” But, Finucane writes, such an explanation would require an imminent threat to Israel stemming from Iran’s nuclear program, which neither the US nor Israel has provided evidence of. And they don’t seem to be under much pressure to provide such evidence—not from Congress, not from mainstream media, and not, by and large, from the liberal and progressive commentators who use that media as their platform.

This widespread apathy epitomizes the sorry state of international law today. Eighty years after the signing of the United Nations Charter, which banned nearly all forms of war, we’re witnessing what may well be the terminal decline of the post-World War II system. A cynic might ask if this really matters. After all, hasn’t international law always been pretty weak? But critics with this mindset underestimate how powerful international law managed to be as a force for limiting conflict and protecting global stability. Whatever complaints people may have about the postwar order, one thing is clear: We’ll miss it when it’s gone.

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When it comes to war, there are two main bodies of international law. The first, often called “international humanitarian law”, is a patchwork of treaties that govern the practice of war and ban especially repugnant means of combat, like the use of chemical weapons or torture. The second, the one that comes into play with actions like the recent attacks on Iran, is that of the UN Charter. Under that body of law, it is illegal for countries to wield “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This near-total ban on war is a keystone of the postwar order. The only exception to this rule is in cases of self defense, either in the form of a direct response from a state that has been attacked or of an international response approved by the UN Security Council.

Skeptics of international law often scoff at its provisions and point out that, unlike in domestic law, there is no real mechanism for enforcing them. This is misleading in two important ways. The first is that international law does, technically, have an enforcement mechanism; the UN Security Council can authorize the use of force. At times, it has done just that, such as when it approved a defensive campaign to save Kuwait from Iraq in 1991. It’s true that such decisions require a consensus among great powers, which often leads to gridlock. But a world with an imperfect enforcer is surely better than one with no enforcer at all. If the mechanism sometimes fails, that’s not because it cannot succeed or shouldn’t be strengthened.

The second, and perhaps more consequential, point is that enforcement with firepower is only part of what makes a legal regime effective. In practice, both domestic and international law derive much of their power from norms—our shared beliefs about how the world should be. These norms shape our daily behavior far more than any actual enforcement mechanism. To understand how this works, we can ask a simple question: Why didn’t you drive yourself home from the bar last night?

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