The Law That Devoured Itself

On January 9, 2026, a seventeen-year-old boy was shot in the lower back on a sidewalk in Karaj, Iran. He was taken to the hospital. There, according to his father, a refugee in Germany—where, like him, thousands of Iranians have fled the Islamic Republic to rebuild their lives in countries that have made respect for international law—or at least their interpretation of it—a religion—Sam Afshari was shot in the head by Iranian security forces while lying on the operating table. His crime: taking to the streets.

The Iranian government did not deny the facts. It confirmed that its forces had killed protesters that week. What it disputed was the scale: officially 3,117, while international investigators put the death toll at 30,000 to 40,000. Amnesty International described January 2026 as the deadliest crackdown documented in decades¹. Human Rights Watch described bodies arriving in refrigerated trucks at the Kahrizak morgue², piled into bags, some with bullets in their heads—executions of the wounded. Women returned to their families with organs removed to erase evidence of rape. The regime called the dead “rioters” and “terrorists.” It labeled the protests an Israeli-American conspiracy.

The international community did what it does best: issue indignant rhetoric and express its “grave concern.”

The reactions to this military campaign do not reveal an international legal order suddenly put to the test; they reveal an order that, for a long time now, no longer truly constrains those it claims to contain.

Six weeks later, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury and Roaring Lion against the Islamic Republic. Emmanuel Macron spoke of a war “with grave consequences for international peace and security ”³.The UN Secretary-General condemned the use of force. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez—who barred U.S. aircraft from accessing Spanish bases and forced the withdrawal of refueling aircraft from Rota and Morón⁴—stated that the strikes represented an “escalation” and a “violation of international law.”

These reactions, when contrasted with what was actually said and done during the deadly crackdown in January—in short, nothing—should lead us to question the very structure of a system that reacts more swiftly to military action than to the methodical massacre of defenseless populations. The reactions to this military campaign do not reveal an international legal order suddenly put to the test; they reveal an order that, for a long time now, no longer truly constrains those it claims to contain.

The Original Flaw of the Postwar Order

To understand where we are, we must remember where we were supposed to be.

The international legal order built after 1945 was based on a simple moral pact: the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century had proven that unchecked state power was the primary threat to human civilization, and that only a normative framework transcending the immediate interests of states could prevent the return of disaster. The United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: all of these stemmed from a single, immense, and sincere ambition.

That ambition was just. But what is faltering today is not only the law governing relations between states; it is also the law meant to protect individuals from their own governments. These two dimensions are distinct. Yet they have ultimately converged in a single failure: the inability to rein in those who most systematically violate the very norms they invoke.

One sits on the Human Rights Council while executing political prisoners. One brandishes the UN Charter and its prohibition on interference in internal affairs as a shield against any scrutiny of one’s massacres.

From its very inception, the architecture carried within it a flaw that would compromise its effectiveness. Enforcement had been entrusted to the Security Council, whose five permanent members held an absolute veto. This was the price of American and Soviet participation. It was also an admission, from the system’s inception, that the proclaimed universality of the law would remain subordinate to the consent of the powers capable of blocking its application.

During the first four decades of the postwar order, this contradiction was concealed by the brutal simplicity of the Cold War. After 1989, when the end of the bipolar confrontation seemed to pave the way for the universalization of the liberal model, it was laid bare. The 1990s were both the rhetorical high-water mark of the international order and the beginning of its practical erosion. Bosnia revealed its powerlessness. Rwanda revealed its indifference. Kosovo revealed something else entirely: that an action deemed morally necessary could be legally suspect if it did not pass through a paralyzed Security Council. As the architecture became more sophisticated, it guaranteed not so much justice as the impossibility of action.

Authoritarian international law

Tom Ginsburg, a law professor at the University of Chicago, named the phenomenon in the Journal of Democracy: authoritarian international law⁵— the systematic appropriation of legal mechanisms by illiberal regimes, not to constrain themselves, but to delegitimize their adversaries and neutralize the consequences of their own crimes.

One sits on the Human Rights Council while executing political prisoners. One brandishes the UN Charter and its prohibition on interference in internal affairs as a shield against any scrutiny of one’s massacres. One vetoes any coercive resolution. Procedure is invoked not to honor the spirit of the law, but to circumvent its effects. Conventions are signed with no intention of compliance, and the signature itself is converted into symbolic capital. The law is no longer a limit; it becomes an instrument.

The law designed to protect the weak from the strong had been turned into a mechanism that primarily benefited those most willing to violate it.

Russia perfected this art. For twenty years, Moscow used its veto to block any challenge to its own aggression—in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine—while simultaneously invoking international law. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it continued to speak the language of legality, stability, and collective security. Then it retained its seat on the Security Council as if nothing had happened. The structure spoke for it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has developed a variation on the same strategy. For forty years, the mullahs’ regime has claimed the protections of sovereignty and international law while methodically violating them. It has financed, trained, and armed militias throughout the region; destabilized states by proxy; repressed its own people with systematic mass violence; and appropriated the entire vocabulary of resistance, anti-colonialism, and violated legality. Here too, the norm invoked does not bind the one who invokes it. It shields what it should prohibit.

Thus, once again, the law designed to protect the weak from the strong had been transformed into a mechanism that primarily benefited those most willing to violate it.

An asymmetry that has become systemic

What many Westerners cannot grasp—or refuse to admit—is that this asymmetry does not stem from a mere operational accident. It has been exploited, deepened, and sometimes even sought out by regimes that have fully understood the advantage they could derive from a law without real reciprocity. Illiberal states face no internal legal oversight of their external behavior: no free press, no independent judges, no opposition capable of turning an international norm into a domestic political cost. Democracies, by contrast, have internalized these constraints. Independent courts, active NGOs, aggressive media, and opposition lawmakers can invoke international norms to curb or delegitimize state action. The result is an asymmetry that has become structural: international law truly weighs on those who already have countervailing powers, and hardly at all on those who have none.

The law and freedoms that protect open societies thus become, for lack of strategic clarity, easy targets for those who recognize no reciprocity.

Democracies, moreover, have not been immune to this erosion. Their governments have maintained trade relations with the regimes they condemned; their companies have tolerated despots in power when their own interests were served by it. The stability thus obtained became a justification for pragmatism rather than an indictment of its moral cost.

There is a second vulnerability: illiberal states are not content merely to evade constraints; they also work to destabilize societies that continue to submit to them. Funding, proxies, influencers, religious or activist networks, influence campaigns—everything that weakens democracies from within further exacerbates the asymmetry. The law and the freedoms that protect open societies then become, for lack of strategic clarity, easy targets for those who recognize no reciprocity.

Nine former British four-star generals made this case in an open letter last November⁶.Lawfare has become a direct threat to national security. Every British soldier deployed must now anticipate not only the battlefield, but also the legal and media arena that their adversaries are skilled at exploiting.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic was shooting hospitalized teenagers in the head.

There is a historical parallel here—an uncomfortable one, but precise enough to warrant examination.

As for the democracies that could have enforced the principles they proclaimed, they had internalized the norms of restraint so deeply that they could no longer bring themselves to act, even when action had become necessary.

In the 1930s, the world also had an international legal order—the League of Nations, the Briand-Kellogg Pact, the interwar disarmament agreements—built with sincere idealism after World War I. Its architects believed that world opinion, moral condemnation, and a few institutional mechanisms would suffice to deter revisionist powers. They were wrong.

They had designed a system that worked when all parties acted in good faith, and catastrophically when they did not. The League of Nations could reprimand, condemn, and investigate. It could neither restrain Japan in Manchuria, nor stop Italy in Ethiopia, nor prevent Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland. As for the democracies that could have enforced the principles they proclaimed, they had internalized the norms of restraint so deeply that they could no longer bring themselves to act, even when action had become necessary.

The result was not the preservation of peace, but World War II.

The comparison is imperfect—historical parallels always are. But the structural logic is unsettling. Thirty years spent building an elaborate legal architecture, binding for democracies, decorative for autocracies. Thirty years watching Russia invade two sovereign nations. Watching the Islamic Republic massacre its own citizens—in 2009, in 2019, in 2022, and now in the carnage of January 2026, one of the worst atrocities of the 21st century, by any measure. Watching China build a concentration camp system for ethnic minorities on a scale not seen since the 1940s. And yet much of the system’s moral, diplomatic, and media energy has been directed elsewhere.

This brings us to one of the central phenomena of this collapse.

The capture of institutions

Perhaps the most telling example of this institutional capture was the election, in April 2021, of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women—the principal UN body dedicated to gender equality. A regime that enforces the veil through violence, imprisons feminist activists, and executes female protesters took its seat on the world’s leading body for women’s rights. It took the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and the bloody crackdown on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement for ECOSOC to finally vote, on December 14, 2022, to expel Iran—by a vote of 29 to 8—making it the first state in UN history to be excluded from this commission⁷.

The Human Rights Council—which counts Venezuela, China, Qatar, and Cuba among its members—has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries in the world combined. Israel is the only democracy to have been the subject of genocide proceedings before the International Court of Justice. The only country subject to a permanent UN commission of inquiry. This is not the result of impartial scrutiny. It reflects a long-standing political coalition—the Arab bloc, the Non-Aligned Movement, and a significant portion of the Global South—which has made the delegitimization of Israel a constant feature of contemporary multilateral diplomacy.

And this is precisely where the asymmetry reaches its most revealing point. For what distinguishes Israel from Iran, Russia, or China is not the absence of controversy over its conduct—it is the existence of a free, often fierce internal debate over that conduct. The Israeli Supreme Court has overturned military decisions⁸. Serving generals have publicly challenged government policy. Hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets for months in 2023 to defend judicial independence⁹.This is the very definition of a democracy: not a state that makes no mistakes, but a state where mistakes can be identified, challenged, and corrected. None of these conditions exist in Tehran, Moscow, or Beijing.

At the same time, certain organizations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch have applied the terms “apartheid” and “genocide” to Israel in a way that bears an increasingly tenuous relationship to the legal definitions designed to capture the most extreme violations. When these categories are stretched beyond recognition, they cease to name the extreme. They trivialize it.

One of the clearest indicators of the current conflict is the Iran-Russia military relationship and what it reveals about the use of international law as a geopolitical weapon.

The damage is profound and, in a sense, more insidious than what autocrats do directly, because it cloaks itself in the language of law and virtue. By distorting the most serious legal categories, the self-appointed custodians of legal language weaken the entire system. When Israel challenges the legitimacy of the bodies that claim to embody the international order, Moscow and Beijing no longer even need to argue. They need only point to the spectacle.

One of the clearest indicators of the current conflict is the Iran-Russia military relationship and what it reveals about the use of international law as a geopolitical weapon. Iran has supplied Russia with the Shahed-136 drone¹⁰, a loitering munition used to strike Ukrainian residential buildings, hospitals, grain silos, and electrical infrastructure. By any reasonable application of international humanitarian law, these strikes constitute war crimes. Targeting civilian infrastructure in winter to provoke a humanitarian crisis is not a gray area. It is a textbook case.

Russia covered for the Islamic Republic just as it had covered for itself—each protecting the other from the mechanisms designed to hold them accountable, while invoking them against their adversaries at the first opportunity. Moscow described Epic Fury as a premeditated and unprovoked act of aggression—this from the country that invaded Ukraine. Beijing called for an immediate halt to military operations—a government that administers the largest system of camps for ethnic minorities in the contemporary world. The moral authority these illiberal regimes claim is nil. The architecture, however, provides them with a formal platform to exercise it—and a veto to enforce it.

Epic Fury: apparent rupture, ancient fracture

It is true that critics of Epic Fury—and there are serious ones, whose arguments deserve consideration—are correct that that the operation constitutes a departure from the postwar legal framework as it is formally understood. The United States did not obtain authorization from the Security Council. That is true.

But two realities must be stated plainly. First: a functional international law would not leave a state alone to face a regime that has equipped itself with the means to destroy it—through its proxies, its missiles, its nuclear program—without this existential threat itself being classified and addressed by the institutions meant to maintain peace. Second: the war being waged by Israel and the United States against the Islamic Republic is not a war of aggression against a state at peace. Iran has been waging a de facto war against Israel for decades: through Hezbollah, through Hamas, through the Houthis, through its repeated calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Operation Epic Fury does not occur in a vacuum. It responds to a belligerence that the existing framework has been unable to name, much less contain.

Operation Epic Fury does not occur in a vacuum. It responds to a belligerence that the existing framework has been unable to name, let alone contain.

A serious examination also raises another question: what would the alternative have looked like? Referring the matter to the Security Council, waiting for the Russian and Chinese veto, and then pretending to have tried everything? NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999¹¹, the intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, the repeated invocation of the responsibility to protect over the past two decades—all of this has, in fact, constituted a series of precedents that already call into question the scope of the prohibition on the use of force as set forth in Article 2(4) of the Charter. State practice, when repeated and accompanied by the conviction that it responds to a normative necessity, can cause the law itself to evolve. Epic Fury may not be the moment when the law was broken. It may be the moment when its transformation became impossible to ignore.

What is truly broken may not be the very idea of a rules-based order, but the fiction that it ever existed in the impartial and effective form in which we continue to celebrate it. The rules, as applied over the past thirty years, have not been applied equally. The massacre of tens of thousands of Iranian civilians did not shatter this order. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not shatter it. Epic Fury simply made the fracture visible to those who still refused to look at it.

For years, a significant portion of the European elite has operated on a tacit assumption: this order serves first and foremost to constrain American power—and therein lies its primary virtue. The constraints it nominally imposes on Russia, Iran, or China have remained, for the most part, theoretical; those it imposes on the West, however, are real, enforceable, and politically exploitable. This arrangement has offered considerable comfort to governments eager to maintain trade relations with authoritarian regimes while keeping a moral distance from American power. It has been so comfortable for so long that its collapse now feels like a violation rather than a correction.

The most striking evidence that this truth is beginning to sink in among certain European circles came from Friedrich Merz. The German chancellor—whose country, for obvious historical reasons, has made international law the foundation of its postwar political identity—said what the reigning consensus had made almost unspeakable. Europe’s appeals, condemnations, and expanded sanctions have achieved virtually nothing against Tehran. International legal frameworks, he acknowledged, will have little effect on Iran.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung described his remarks as a “long farewell to international law”¹². One analyst accused him of treating international law as a tool of convenience. But what his critics fail to mention is that this instrumentalization has been at work for decades—on the part of those we still pretend to judge. Merz is not abandoning a principle; he admits, with unusual candor, that this principle has already been stripped of its power by those it was supposed to constrain—and that continuing to pretend otherwise now comes at a cost.

The constraints that international law nominally imposes on Russia, Iran, or China have remained, for the most part, theoretical; those it imposes on the West, however, are real, enforceable, and politically exploitable.

In France, Gabriel Attal was even more direct. When asked about the legality of the operation, he said what few European politicians dare to articulate: “International law cannot be a totem of immunity for those who do not respect it and who violate it morning, noon, and night”¹³.The Iranian regime, he noted, did not respect international law when it murdered protesters and students, prevented women from living freely, called for the destruction of a state, and sought to destabilize an entire region by pursuing nuclear weapons.

Emmanuel Macron himself, in his speech on March 3, acknowledged this tension in a sentence that encapsulates the dilemma: the operations were conducted “outside the bounds of international law,” which France cannot approve of—but “History never mourns the executioners of their own people ”¹⁴.

Let us return, then, to the body bags in the refrigerated trucks at Kahrizak—each containing a person who had taken to the streets to say they were tired. Tired of the lies, of poverty, of the hijab police, of rigged elections. Let us return to the doctor who told Sky News¹⁵ that his network of colleagues estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 deaths. To the families forced to say that their children had died as martyrs of the regime. To the bodies buried in mass graves.

Amnesty International itself has made it clear that the impunity granted to the regime’s crimes during previous crackdowns directly made the January massacres possible. The international community’s inaction after 2019 and after 2022 was not merely a passive failure. It was a causal factor. The deaths of January are also, in a strict sense, a consequence of the very framework whose violation so many people mourn today.

International law does not apply on its own. When the states holding veto power in the Security Council are themselves the principal violators of the norms that this body was designed to enforce, it cannot enforce them. What it can do—and what it has done, systematically, for thirty years—is to serve as a legitimacy-laundering machine for autocracies, lending a veneer of legal respectability to regimes whose actual conduct makes a mockery of every principle these institutions claim to represent.

A system of law that can still be reformed

Yet there remains a glimmer of hope. And it would be dishonest to overlook it. Every serious institutional reform has been preceded by a crisis that made the inadequacy of existing arrangements undeniable. The League of Nations failed because it could not enforce its own principles against states determined to ignore them. The United Nations was built on the ruins of that failure, incorporating the lesson — imperfectly, but sincerely — that enforcement required the support of the great powers. The veto was a poor compromise. But it was conceived by men who had just witnessed the deaths of fifty million people and who were nevertheless trying to build something that would prevent a recurrence.

The present moment offers not a certainty, but a real possibility: honestly examining the gap between the value of the law and the institutions meant to serve it.

An honest examination should begin with an admission. The Security Council, the UN system, and an international law that has become so easily manipulated are no longer up to the task. A body where Russia and China hold a permanent veto cannot claim to be a credible guardian of international peace while Russia wages a war of aggression. An institution whose Human Rights Council includes some of the world’s worst human rights violators, while focusing its fury on a single country in the Middle East, has already undermined the moral authority it claims. The legitimacy of international law depends on consistent application; and this consistency requires political will capable of prevailing over those who can currently veto it.

The deaths in January are also, in a strict sense, a consequence of the very framework whose violation so many people are mourning today.

A democratic alliance is possible—comprising countries that genuinely incorporate international legal obligations into their domestic law, equipped with independent judicial systems, a free press, and a civil society capable of holding governments accountable—which could form the core of a reformed order. This order would be more limited than the current system. It would also be more honest about its nature: not a universal system claiming to represent all of humanity, but a coalition of states that have effectively chosen the rule of law as their organizing principle. It would apply its own standards to itself—including to Israel, including to the United States, including its European members. But it would also have the honesty to say that states that massacre their citizens by the thousands have forfeited the right to invoke these standards as a shield against accountability.

This is not a utopian vision. On the contrary, it is a more modest vision than the one we already claimed to embody. But, at this moment, modesty and honesty would themselves constitute real progress.

The current architecture actively encourages bad faith by making it cost-free. A European government can invoke the rules-based order to condemn American strikes while remaining silent on Iranian massacres, because the existing system provides it with the vocabulary of condemnation without demanding consistency. A more honest alliance would not eliminate the temptation of double standards. No human institution will do that. But it could at least remove the structural alibi.

Sam Afshari’s father is in Germany. He testified remotely—because distance is what safety demands when you have lost a child to the Islamic Republic and still want to tell the world about it without disappearing yourself. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have rebuilt their lives in European cities—Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, London—at the heart of societies that spent weeks debating whether the military operation that finally confronted the regime that killed his son complied with international law.

Law is not a suicidal pact. It is not designed to ensure that illiberal regimes—sufficiently protected by the legal framework to violate it with impunity—retain a permanent advantage over those who, for better or worse, continue to abide by it. If it has become that—and the facts now clearly indicate this—then it does not need to be piously defended. It needs to be reformed.

The grieving families of Kahrizak deserve an international order that takes their grief seriously. The protesters in Tehran, Karaj, and Kermanshah deserve institutions capable of keeping their word.

The law that devoured itself has left a void. The only question now is what we will have the courage to build in its place.

1. Amnesty International, report on the crackdown of January 2026. ↩︎
2. Human Rights Watch, report on the massacres of January 2026, documentation of executions at the Kahrizak morgue. ↩︎
3. Emmanuel Macron, message on X, February 28, 2026: “The outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran has serious consequences for international peace and security”; televised address, March 3, 2026 (elysee.fr). ↩︎
4. Statement by the Spanish government, February–March 2026. Spain refused to make its bases in Rota and Morón available to the United States for operations against Iran. ↩︎
5. Tom Ginsburg, “Authoritarian International Law?”, American Journal of International Law, vol. 114, April 2020; “How Authoritarians Use International Law”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 31, no. 4, October 2020. ↩︎
6. Open letter published in The Times, November 11, 2025, signed by Generals Sir Peter Wall, Sir Patrick Sanders, Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, Sir Andrew Pulford, Sir Richard Shirreff, Sir Tim Radford, Sir Richard Barrons, Sir Chris Deverell and Sir Nick Parker. ↩︎
7. Iran was elected a member of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in April 2021, then expelled by an ECOSOC vote on December 14, 2022 (resolution E/2023/L.4), by a vote of 29 to 8—the first state in UN history to be excluded from this commission. See UN News, “Iran removed from UN Commission on the Status of Women,” December 14, 2022. ↩︎
8. See in particular HCJ 2056/04, Beit Sourik Village Council v. Government of Israel (2004), ordering the modification of the security barrier’s route to comply with the principle of proportionality; HCJ 7957/04, Mara’abe v. Prime Minister of Israel (2005). More generally, the Israel Democracy Institute lists some twenty laws invalidated by the Supreme Court since the establishment of the State. ↩︎
9. From January to July 2023, weekly protests drew as many as several hundred thousand people in major Israeli cities against the judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government. ↩︎
10. Iran supplied Russia with the Shahed-136 drone (renamed Geran-2), a loitering munition used extensively against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure since the fall of 2022. See, in particular, the reports of the United Nations Panel of Experts on Iran. ↩︎
11. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was conducted without Security Council authorization. The International Independent Commission on Kosovo described it as “illegal but legitimate.” ↩︎
12. Süddeutsche Zeitung, editorial on Friedrich Merz’s statements regarding the ineffectiveness of international law in dealing with Iran. ↩︎
13. Gabriel Attal, public statement, March 2026: “International law cannot be a totem of immunity for those who do not respect it and who violate it morning, noon, and night .” ↩︎
14. Emmanuel Macron, televised address, March 3, 2026: “The military operations were conducted outside the bounds of international law, which we cannot approve of. The fact remains that history never mourns the executioners of their own people” (elysee.fr). ↩︎
15. Sky News, report on the January 2026 massacres, testimony from an Iranian doctor. ↩︎