1. After the genocide in Gaza, we did not expect 2026 to be a year of peace. The biggest desire of Trump, “the great peacemaker,” was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But his first statements after the attack on Venezuela and Maduro’s abduction show that the peacemaker was just a mask behind which hid a warmongering old man who was as excited about the military operation as a child who had just opened his New Year’s gifts. “It was an excellent plan and many excellent military personnel and excellent people,” Trump told the New York Times. “It was a brilliant operation.”  The legal language was left to others—ministers and government officials—who explained that Maduro would be “brought to justice” for corruption, drug trafficking, and narco-terrorism. Oil and minerals shine brighter than the Nobel Prize.

As the United Nations and many state leaders argue, Trump’s raid violated several rules of international law, first and foremost Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter. The Charter allows the use of force only after authorization by the UN Security Council or in self-defence. Venezuela neither prepared nor was able to attack the US. Therefore, the invasion constitutes the “crime of aggression and the use of unjustified force” against another state, the highest crime according to the Nuremberg verdict. The violation of international law with the attack on Venezuela justifies Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, and will be used as a precedent by China when it decides to attack Taiwan. In other words, we have Trump’s “Putinization.” It began with the onerous terms he imposed on Ukraine in the agreement to end the war and continues with his constant references to his great friend and leader Putin. The invasion of Ukraine has been condemned by the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin, as it has for Netanyahu. However, both are free, travelling and meeting with their friends. Netanyahu comes and goes to the US, while Greek PM Mitsotakis meets him and triumphantly proclaims their close relationship. The precedent set in Venezuela may be repeated in Greenland, Panama, or Cuba.

So, is there an international rule of law that governs international relations, as liberals and international law professors swear? Do we have a system based on legal rules that supersedes the calculations and interests of states? Unfortunately for weak states—such as Ukraine Palestine and Venezuela—this is not the case. International law differs from national law on all critical issues. It is lenient and compliance depends on the goodwill of states. There is no global government or legislator, no courts to interpret it, and no police force to enforce it. We saw this recently with the International Court of Justice’s ruling ordering an end to the Russian attack. But the decision was tossed into the trash bin by Putin as did Netanyahu like many before them. From an academic point of view, international law is not a complete legal discipline. It resembles the controversial analyses of experts in international relations, which often do not differ from sophisticated journalism. As Marti Koskenniemi put it, “The international lawyer is considered naive philosophically and politically suspect. He is either a utopian socialist or a fan of free market cosmopolitanism.” For Perry Anderson, “on any realistic assessment, international law is neither truthfully international nor genuinely law.”[1]

2. To examine this rather striking statement from a leading intellectual of the left, let us concentrate on the genocide in Gaza and the role of law. A strict hierarchisation of life was evident in the killing of civilians. 1,200 Israelis were killed by the atrocious Hamas attack on 7 October and around 600 soldiers had died during the Gaza operation by the end of April 2024. Over 70,000 Palestinians had been killed during the same period, including 20,000 of children. The Palestinians had no effective anti-aircraft defences and there is no hiding from the bombing. Israeli action in Gaza is only euphemistically ‘war’. From Homer to the twenty-first century, war has had an element of uncertainty; the mighty might lose or suffer casualties. Hegel argued in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the fear of death gives war its metaphysical value by confronting combatants with the negativity that encircles life and helping them rise from daily mundane activities towards the universal. In this sense, the Gaza bombing is not a war but a type of hunting. One side is totally protected while the other has no means of protecting itself. Can the law stop or humanise war or the Israeli killing campaign?

2. Post-WWII international law has moved on a spectrum between realistic pragmatism and legalistic formalism. At one end, international law is not a sacred text, it has no right answers. It provides a ‘professional vocabulary’ for conducting arguments. At the other, an international rule of law has gradually developed. It is distinct from politics and places constraints on power and the powerful. Its rules have internal consistency and coherence, and their disregard by the Great Powers is not the result of weaknesses in the law but of contingent political factors militating against full compliance. What does the war in Gaza tell us about international law and its theory?

3. When the stakes are the highest—war, killing and dying—international law, like foreign policy, economic argument and military strategy, becomes one more consideration governments take into account. It can be wheeled out when it supports their interests and discarded if it creates real or imaginary constraints. The Israeli government turned up at the ICJ for South Africa’s case against it; but Netanyahu called the genocide charge ‘outrageous’ while welcoming the court ‘upholding’ Israel’s right of self-defence. The US claimed at the time that it has not found any incident of Israeli violations of IHL; but Israel states that the ICC should not issue arrest warrants and anyway a prosecution would not affect its actions. The idea that a little more or a little better law would release us from strife, war and atrocity is the noble lie of international relations. The old motto inter armes silent leges still holds. The law as a technical means of resolving or humanising conflict works until and unless one of the parties decides against it. When raison d’état speaks, the law falls silent; if it keeps speaking, it gets shut up or seriously cut down to size.

4. What does this disregard for international law tell us for the practice? International law is both more and less law-like than its domestic counterpart. On the one hand, the absence of a global legislator and of an effective court turns international law texts into the ultimate but indeterminate reference point. International lawyers enjoy an ‘interpretative pre-eminence’. They have greater authority in deciding the meaning of the law than domestic lawyers who defer to higher authority. Their practice is closer to the Protestant tradition of sola scriptura, the free interpretation of holy texts unlike the Catholic authoritative renditions by the Church. The international lawyer is the lawyers’ lawyer, someone who spends a lifetime poring over the text of treaties, travaux préparatoires and the few ‘soft’ decisions of international tribunals.

5. The combination of the belief that right answers exist in law with despair about the general indifference or disrepute accompanying their discovery marks the dilemma of the legalist. The ICJ may order Russia or Israel to stop the war or change their conduct but nothing much happens. The pragmatist’s problem is the opposite: the law does not provide right answers; the solutions must be sought in context. But the context is complex and ever-changing. The more certain the law, the weaker its power when a strong state disagrees with it, as the ICJ decision shows. Uncertain, indeterminate law is a better tool for the great powers. The right to (preventive) defence says very little about its means; it is the preferred law of Israel. The hasard professionnel of international lawyers is that they are the ultimate exponents of a law whose power is in inverse proportion to its certainty. This combination of interpretative pre-eminence and political irrelevance shadows the debates of international lawyers like Hamlet’s ghost.

6. Marti Koskenniemi answered Anderson’s devastating critique of international law by arguing that the law of the UN Charter and treaty-making diplomacy, what I called the law about the liminal aspects of war, occupation, killing and dying. But what he calls “the legal infrastructure of global capitalism”, laws that regulate “social life by distributing rights and duties, powers and vulnerabilities to groups across the world…they form a ubiquitous and immensely powerful aspect of the way we are all ruled.” [2] Trump’s interactional policy of “gunboats, helicopters and oil” combines the two aspects of international law: The public law of the strong and the private law of the rich. Swords and capital, tanks and banks (or oil companies). 

7. Can progressive international lawyers influence the decision to start war (jus ad bellum) or the conduct of war (jus in bello)? Tony Blair on the eve of the Iraq war turned legality into a tool of legitimacy. Blair disregarded and manipulated legal advice to offer a legal gloss to what he had already decided. This was a rare occasion in which academic legal expertise seemed to acquire immediate political significance. A few senior British and Australian international lawyers wrote to The Guardian arguing that the planned military action was illegal. They were criticised by the pragmatists for undermining the critique of formalism, to which they were committed, by using international law as if it could give right answers and stop war. But formal arguments can be put to political use. In a debate carried out in terms of legal expertise, the lawyers can use their status and knowledge to construct anti-war arguments. In the debate about the war in Gaza, international lawyers should but did not join their voices with the global anti-war campaign by giving technical arguments against the murderous and genocidal conduct of the war. Lenin said that he would use the rope capitalists sold to him to hang capitalism. We can still use the law to try and stop unlawful wars and invasions or resist war’s murderous results, even if we know that it will not succeed. Maduro will be convicted, the Venezuelan oil will be taken by American companies. We can mobilise people around the hypocrisy of international law. But we must also use it to delegitimise power and capital. We must try the impossible to achieve the possible.

But next time you hear some good meaning international lawyer enthuse about the “international legal order” and the “liberal rule of law”, please tell them to align their ideals with the reality of the world.

[1] Perry Anderson, “The Standard of Civilisation”, New Left Review 143 (2023).

[2] Marti Koskenniemi, “The Laws that rule us”, New Left Review 154 (2025).