Imagine you are living in 1945. Twice in the last three decades the world has convulsed in unprecedented, previously inconceivable spasms of violence. One hundred million people, half of them civilians, were killed. On one side, two ancient and profoundly civilized nations treated neighboring peoples, ethnoreligious minorities, and prisoners of war with a savagery that left the rest of the world gasping. And at the very end, the freest and professedly most humane nation of all introduced a weapon so destructive that it has numbed judgment and frozen hope. The only possible conclusion from the last three decades is that war is an incorrigible human habit and that future wars might well be—indeed, are in the very long run bound to be—utterly, even terminally, catastrophic.
What do you do? There is no foolproof solution. No institutional arrangements, however wise and universally accepted at the outset, can keep humanity from committing collective suicide. As Thucydides observed long ago, the strong do what they wish, until they are opposed by the equally strong and greedy; at which point, if they both have weapons of mass destruction, they blow each other, the weak, and the earth itself to bits.
Nevertheless, you and other terrified people write a charter, a global constitution, a declaration of interdependence, setting out an international legal regime that seems to offer the best hope for indefinite survival. Its key feature is a solemn universal pledge to renounce the use of force except under strictly defined conditions: as a response to the actual (not merely threatened) use of force by another state or as authorized by the world’s highest deliberative body, the Security Council of the new United Nations Organization, to which every nation and political movement is obliged to submit disputes for authoritative resolution. Every nation in the world eventually signs this new constitution and pledges to be bound by it. It seems promising.
But it soon becomes clear that some nations—the great powers, the five permanent members of the Security Council—signed with their fingers crossed, insisting on a right to veto any Security Council resolution and thus to evade international restraint on their own use of force. Notwithstanding the moral prestige of the UN Charter, the strong were still entitled do what they wished. Taxes, an American tycoon once sneered, are for the little people. International law, it appeared, would be for the little nations.
Still, there were two reasons to hope: publicity and prudence. Diplomacy would no longer be conducted entirely in secret. States could now be forced to give reasons, to defend the indefensible, and be made to feel the sting of disapproving world opinion. And surely the mere existence of the United Nations would remind even the most lawless of the great powers of the organization’s ultimately prudential rationale: to serve as a brake on the apparently irresistible tendency toward interstate conflict, with its increasingly world-threatening consequences.
It failed. All the great powers deserve blame, above all the United States and the USSR. When the North Korean Communists attacked the South Korean dictatorship in 1950, the United States obtained permission from the Security Council to intervene, but only because the Soviet Union was temporarily boycotting the Security Council over an unrelated matter. All Security Council authorizations are issued with a time limit and require reauthorization. U.S. general Douglas MacArthur wasn’t having any of that. He was not authorized to invade North Korea but did so anyway, regionalizing the war and escalating casualties enormously. Nor was Curtis Le May authorized to bomb every single structure on the entire Korean peninsula to the ground, as he boasted of doing. A few years later, the USSR undertook the first of several unauthorized invasions of its own in Eastern and Central Europe, though these were mere police actions compared with the colossal destructiveness of the American onslaught in Korea and Indochina. But only a few years after the United States left Indochina (its invasion of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos never authorized by the UN), the USSR launched an unauthorized and very destructive invasion of Afghanistan. A decade after they left, defeated, the United States invaded Iraq without Security Council authorization, launching an unsuccessful decade-long war that—along with a parallel U.S. war in Afghanistan and a financial crisis caused by Wall Street greed—has probably destroyed the United States’ global economic hegemony for good. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a grim epilogue; by then, no one thought of asking the Security Council’s opinion.
Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalculable suffering. It is flatly, unambiguously illegal. Every year the UN General Assembly votes, virtually unanimously, to require the United States to end it. But Florida’s electoral votes are far more important in Washington than international law. The U.S. embargo of Iran is also illegal—embargoes and blockades are acts of war, which can only be authorized by the Security Council. And every year since 1967, the General Assembly has voted—again near-unanimously—to require Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied. But thanks to unflagging American support, Israel, too, can ignore international law, on the West Bank and, apocalyptically, in Gaza.
As a result of this long and abysmal history, international law now has no force whatever. Previous U.S. administrations pretended to care about it and regularly ignored it. The present administration does not even pretend to respect law, domestic or international. A culture of law-abidingness is no more comprehensible to President Trump and his goon squad than quantum entanglement.
One of the cardinal documents of the American Red Scare of the 1950s was Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover, a jeremiad against domestic and international Communists. Many Communists were indeed deceitful, in no small measure because they were relentlessly and unlawfully persecuted by fanatics like Hoover. But the real masters of deceit in American public life have been Republican politicians since Nixon. The Moral Majority, welfare Cadillacs, Willie Horton, Bush v. Gore, the Swift Boat campaign, “Stop the Steal”—nearly every Republican electoral victory at the national level in the last sixty years has been underwritten by one or another enormous lie.
The latest example of Republican mendacity is a large and colorful poster released on the morning after Trump’s recent attack: “Thank You, POTUS, for Ending 47 Years of War by Iran Against the United States.” Forty-seven years ago the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran. It is a convenient year to begin the Republicans’ dishonest, truncated account of U.S.-Iran relations. Here is a fuller one.
In 1909, the British founded the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Roughly 80 percent of the profits from its operation went to Britain. The Iranians, since it was their oil, felt this was unfair. In 1951, they elected a scholarly and mild-mannered liberal, Mohammed Mossadegh, who in addition to introducing a social-security system and progressive taxation, nationalized the AIOC. The British were outraged and complained to the power then running the world, the United States, which has always taken a dim view of smaller countries attempting to assume control of their own resources. In 1953, the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, arranged a coup to replace Mossadegh with a more cooperative ruler, the Shah, who undid Mossadegh’s initiative. The Iranian people were miffed—they had, after all, voted for Mossadegh—so the CIA helped the Shah establish a secret police organization, the Savak, to suppress dissent.
Eventually Iranians’ discontent with America’s puppet ruler could no longer be contained. The Shah was deposed and a popular cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from exile to lead the new government. Immediately, the United States broke diplomatic relations, initiated sanctions, and began looking for ways to strangle the new regime at birth. The next year, the ailing Shah went in search of the kind of health care that only the fabulously wealthy can afford. Henry Kissinger, always a friend to tyrants, interceded with Jimmy Carter, and the Shah was admitted to the United States. Once again, the Iranians were miffed. Some young hotheads occupied the U.S. embassy, probably assuming that a great many nefarious anti-Iranian plots were being hatched there, and took fifty-odd employees hostage. Their year-long captivity became an American national obsession and has never been forgotten—unlike the millions of tons of bombs and millions of pounds of bomb clusters and other explosive devices dropped on Indochina or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions in the following decade.
The United States did not have to wait long for revenge. Iraq had a border dispute with Iran, so the United States encouraged its faithful ally Saddam Hussein to attack, helping him develop chemical weapons and supplying vital battlefield intelligence. The subsequent war took a million Iranian lives. Still, Iran won, so the U.S. sanctions were intensified, including an embargo on medical supplies, with severe health consequences. And now, Iran’s predictable reaction to the two-hundred-plus nuclear weapons possessed by its bitter enemy Israel—namely, to take at least the first steps toward a nuclear weapon of its own—have led to bombardment, assassination, and sabotage by Israel and the United States.
In short, the Republicans’ “47 Years of War by Iran Against the United States” is perhaps more accurately titled “73 Years of War by the United States Against Iran.”
Criticism of Trump’s Iran aggression has followed a familiar pattern. Like most liberal or conservative criticism of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, it has been largely unprincipled. “Goals not clearly enough articulated”; “no exit strategy”; “insufficient coordination with Congress and allies”; “what about unforeseen consequences?”; “don’t put American boys (and girls) in danger”; “we cannot afford another war.” All true enough. But suppose the attack on Iran succeeds brilliantly, at very little cost (to us) and with all its criminal purposes completely fulfilled. What will The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and the Democratic Party say then? Will they applaud? Or will they meekly venture: “Well, yes, it was a crime. if you’re being technical. But that word is so…moralistic!”
Now imagine you are living in 2045. Thankfully, the United Nations has not been replaced by Trump’s bogus and now-forgotten Board of Peace, but the United Nations is no more authoritative now than it was in 2026, and the U.S. attack on Iran in that year was not the last act of criminal aggression by a nuclear-armed superpower. India and Pakistan have fought several low-level wars, in one of which Pakistan fended off defeat by using a low-yield nuclear weapon. India, fortunately, did not retaliate. China finally decided that the United States had squandered so much of its military, economic, and diplomatic power that it was safe to invade Taiwan. The United States blustered but could do nothing; China already possessed naval superiority and was approaching nuclear parity. On several occasions, suicide bombers with nuclear devices have come close to penetrating Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; Israel has responded by threatening an all-out nuclear strike against any nation suspected of sponsoring, or even harboring, the terrorists. But since the several million Palestinians it expelled from the West Bank and Gaza have scattered to every country in the Middle East, too many nations are suspects. In 2040, Kim Jong Un responded to a coup attempt by blaming South Korea and threatening it with nuclear destruction. The United States made obligatory threats in return, but the leaked minutes from a National Security Council meeting during the crisis revealed that Kim was believed to have enough missiles to wipe out Los Angeles and San Francisco in addition to Seoul, so no U.S. retaliation was planned. Fortunately, Kim was distracted by the 2040 Winter Olympics, which North Korea was hosting.
Artificial Intelligence has not doubled or tripled the Gross Domestic Product, as promised, but it has produced one unexpected benefit. Since it was neither possible nor necessary to enhance the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the Pentagon and other military establishments have contracted with AI companies to produce chemical and biological weapons of fantastically increased potency, with greatly streamlined delivery systems. So far only the three leading military superpowers, China, the United States, and Israel, are thought to possess these weapons. But given the failure of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, no effort will be made to halt their spread. Obeying treaties, like obeying international law, went out of fashion many decades ago.
The case for international law is simple and stark. Given the human proclivity for collective violence and the existence of limitlessly destructive weapons, we must minimize interstate conflict. All of human history suggests that this will be very hard. We have relied so far in the nuclear age on deterrence and mutually assured destruction. Several widely reported accidents (see, for example, Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine) should have shaken our faith that the complex chain of command and communication on which deterrence relies will not break down. If it does, the mutuality of destruction will be no consolation at all. Much better to begin building the mutual trust that emerges from decades or centuries of self-restraint, of difficult fidelity to common norms—to international law.
It is true that even deterrence and mutual assured destruction look like the wisdom of Solomon compared with the willfulness and mindlessness of the Trump administration. It is also true that tens of millions of Americans would reject any inroads on U.S. sovereignty, even if all other countries accepted similar constraints. The myth of self-sufficiency, a relic of the frontier era, retains a stubborn hold on many Americans’ imagination. It is a primitive species of individualism, radically opposed to Christian—or Jewish or Islamic or Buddhist or even Romantic/humanist—humility before the fragility of life and the frustrations of interdependence.
A turn away from this imperial arrogance would be a conversion like no other in American history. It must begin with a firm commitment to international law, now despised and rejected, but in the long run the only sure road to mutually assured survival.
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