Rebuilding International Law

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

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When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took the stage at Davos earlier this year and decried the old order, which used international law and regulations less as a universal prescription and more as a “pleasant fiction” designed to maintain American hegemony or preferential impunity, analysts were quick to praise him for his candid disposition. Yet to those who aren’t thoroughly enmeshed in the world of the G7, Davos, and Western European capitals, this was largely old news. Successive decades of increasingly intense crises, from Iraq in 2003 to Russia’s extended invasions of sovereign Europe to an annihilationist US-backed Israeli war on Gaza, had already exposed the limitations of the so-called rules-based international order. Rather than admit this and try to build something new, however, there are those who respond to these failures not by examining their causes but by insisting, with increasing desperation, that the alternative must be worse.

This is where a large segment of American liberalism finds itself today: mourning a “rules-based international order” that was never quite as rule-bound as advertised, defending multilateral institutions that spent decades allowing themselves to be hollowed out with minimal pushback, and waiting for Trump to simply go away so the old arrangements can be quietly restored. They won’t be restored. And the most honest account of why not, and what to build in their place, is the exact sort of conversation the American left to center left needs to be having right now.

Trump’s second term has done more than just disrupt the rules-based international order. It has revealed what that order’s limitations were: a set of arrangements calibrated primarily to extend American power and insulate American allies from any sort of accountability. For the likes of the Palestinians, Sahrawi, and Kurds, it has meant the indefinite deferral of fundamental questions like the right to self-determination, dignity, and human rights that this postwar system nominally promised to secure. The collapse has been dramatic and visible. Trump’s withdrawal from multilateral frameworks, his contempt for international institutions, his nakedly transactional approach to alliances with countries such as Denmark and Canada—these are undeniably real. But they did not come from nowhere. They are the logical end point of a decades-long pattern in which the US treated international law as a resource to be invoked against adversaries and a constraint to be discarded when inconvenient to friends.

The question for us is not how to restore what existed before January 2025. The question is whether we have the political and intellectual honesty to diagnose what failed and the vision to build forward. Because what is happening around us right now—the Gulf in flames, Israeli occupation of three separate countries at once, shipping halted at the Strait of Hormuz, American allies openly questioning whether DC respects Greenland’s sovereignty or will keep to its promises elsewhere—these are the result of Trump accelerating the implosion of something that was already largely broken.

UN reform

Liberals ought to begin their vision of reconstruction with the United Nations. The standard liberal take on the UN is essentially a truism: It is imperfect, yes, but it is the only global forum we have, and Trump’s contempt for it is destructive. This is of course indisputable, but it doesn’t really say much about what we want in the grand scheme.

The Security Council’s veto structure, which grants five states, frozen in the power arrangements of 1945, the unilateral ability to block any resolution on any subject, is not a minor technical deficiency. It is the mechanism by which the most powerful states in the world have systematically exempted themselves and their clients from accountability. The United States has used its veto to shield Israel from consequences dozens of times. Russia has used it to protect the likes of the now-overthrown Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. China has used it to bury accountability for its treatment of the Uyghurs. The veto is not a mere flaw that sometimes produces bad outcomes. It is a design feature that has in practice made multilateral conflict resolution impossible in the modern day.

The gap between the Security Council’s nominal function and its actual operation is now so wide that it has become too embarrassing for even its defenders to ignore. The body that was charged with maintaining international peace and security cannot pass a resolution on the very conflicts that are destabilizing the global order, because the states most responsible for those conflicts hold a veto over its proceedings and can hold out indefinitely until the best moment to act has passed. The rare instance in which this was not the case, the UN intervention in Korea, occurred only because of the Soviet boycott of the United Nations’ institutions at the time the vote commenced.

A serious reform agenda starts with expanding the Security Council’s permanent membership to reflect the actual weight of the world as it exists today, not as it existed in 1945. Brazil, India, South Africa, Nigeria, and Indonesia: These are states that represent billions of people and entire continents but have no permanent voice in the body that nominally governs the use of international force. Their inclusion is a prerequisite for any Security Council whose decisions might carry genuine legitimacy in the Global South, where most of the world’s people live and where until recently most of its conflicts were fought. It should be remembered as well that membership in the Council has changed in the past, with the USSR’s seat going to Russia and the Republic of China’s going to the People’s Republic of China. Reform would be a healthy development in a new century.

The more important element, though, is either the abolition or severe restriction of the P5 veto. A threshold-based system that requires a two-thirds supermajority of the expanded Security Council to override any veto would not eliminate great-power influence, but it could help prevent any single state from unilaterally immunizing itself or its clients from collective judgment. The unquestionable veto, in its current form, is not a safeguard of global security. It is a guarantee that global security will be managed in the interests of the powerful at the expense of everyone else. American liberals who claim to support the international order while defending the veto as a cornerstone of American self-interest are defending a key mechanism that helps make that order less stable.

These are not new ideas, having long been pushed for by UN reform groups and posited as possible ways to modernize the structure of our global institutions. Recently, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called¹ for both the expansion of the Security Council and the curtailment or outright abolition of the P5 veto. These are ideas that ought to be seriously contended with.

The Abraham Accords and a Metternichian foreign-policy consensus

It is worth pausing on the Gulf, because what is happening there is indicative of errors that stem from the policy consensus that both parties, for various reasons, had invested in. Since the collapse of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians and the consolidation of an increasingly apparent one-state reality, the US has sought to recalibrate the balance of power in the region through multiple frameworks. The Obama administration attempted to consolidate the regional system by reaching a sort of understanding with Iran via the JCPOA, but this faced significant backlash from Washington across the political spectrum and was ultimately torn up by Trump. In turn, the Trump administration, after failing in its own right to reach a solution to the question of Palestine, developed the architecture of the Abraham Accords. The thesis of the Accords, that the Middle East is full of apolitical people who have no ambition of their own and do not wish to control their destinies, has proved to be completely wrong.

The Gulf Arab states, especially the UAE and to a lesser extent the rest, signed on to a logic that told them they could purchase security and prosperity by accommodating an American-Israeli regional vision while deferring the Palestinian question indefinitely. In the end, they got the shattering of a hard-won détente with Iran, missile strikes on their oil refineries, drones over their cities, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the wholesale destruction of Gaza, the continued annexation of the West Bank, the total decimation of the villages of south Lebanon,² and even more Israeli occupation of Syrian territory. What’s more, the belief that US military bases guarantee the Gulf’s security is being challenged every day by Iran. The Gulf’s citizens, who had largely felt insulated from the region’s catastrophes, the ones traditionally paid for by Syrians and Yemenis and Lebanese and Palestinians, are discovering that geography and politics are not so easily separable.

The normalization-without-resolution framework didn’t just fail to resolve the Palestinian question. It in fact actively destabilized the entire region, suppressing the most active political questions in favor of an obsessive securitization framework. Rather than address human-rights abuses in countries like Bahrain and Egypt, the United States looks the other way and even provides weapons so long as these countries are friendly toward Israel. This logic was not just embraced by Trump but affirmed repeatedly both before and after his first term by other presidents. Biden spent a significant amount of his term trying to expand the Accords with a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, despite having previously promised to keep both Saudi Arabia and Israel in check. Now this arrangement is being stress-tested under live fire, and it is not meeting its initial expectations of stabilizing the region. Arab regimes that feared Israel’s radical disposition and unchecked ambitions before this war will not be reassured watching the destruction of Iran. They understand, in ways that Washington still seems unable to process, that they could be next, and that they can’t rely on the United States to enforce any red line toward Israel.

Those who still speak of the Abraham Accords as if they were some major diplomatic breakthrough must grapple with their failures to actually provide any of the things they were nominally meant to: They haven’t brought Israel and Palestine any closer to peace—quite the opposite, in fact. They haven’t enabled a US pivot to Asia, and they haven’t fostered some deeper liberalism. An antipolitical alliance structure can’t do any of these things.

Binding America to the laws it helped write

One of the most persistent responses to Carney’s speech at Davos, which pointed at the very notion of the rules-based international order itself, is to proclaim that the entire edifice of international law is something to be done away with. The argument at its best can be compelling when it dismisses international law as an instrument of Western hegemony, which is more often used as a cudgel by the powerful than as a universalizing and binding principle. In the grand scheme, though, the argument is only convincing on a superficial level, and it would be a mistake to abandon the framework entirely. Instead, we ought to further push upon the contradictions and press for universal applicability.

On the surface, international law is already meant to be universal. And that universality, however hypocritical in its current-day application, is the ground on which movements and states can demand consistency and extract real concessions. The authors of the UN Charter and the Helsinki Accords were not thinking of themselves as forever bound to these universal frameworks of human rights. But they nevertheless provided legal, political, and discursive inspiration to colonized and subjugated people across Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The legal element is noteworthy. The illegality of the Iraq War did not stop the war, of course. But it became a powerful political fact that shaped both domestic and international opposition, undermining American credibility. It also incurred long-term costs in legitimacy that are still being paid in places like the Middle East and Africa. The question is whether international law is more useful as a terrain of struggle than the alternative, which is pure anarchy. And the answer to that should be obvious given what has transpired in places like Eastern Europe and the Middle East over the past five years.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and therefore is not subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is true that China and Russia, as well as rising powers like India and Indonesia, are not parties either, but it is indisputably odd to be the host of the UN and not be bound to its associated institutions. The US has historically treated the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as a venue for grievances against adversaries, and not as a body whose decisions bind American conduct. This is, in the most precise sense of the term, American exceptionalism: the belief that the legal frameworks the United States promotes for the rest of the world do not apply to the United States itself or to those who operate under its protection. To quote Wilhoit’s Law, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

For example, the ICJ’s 2024 advisory ruling on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory was one of its most unambiguous. The occupation, in its entirety, is illegal under international law, and states have obligations to bring it to an immediate end. The Biden administration attempted to dissuade³ the court from ruling this way, and then dismissed the ruling after it was issued.⁴ The Trump administration went further, applying sanctions⁵ against those who investigate American allies at the ICC. What is especially frustrating about this is how little of the liberal foreign-policy establishment has been willing to say plainly: This is wrong, and it needs to stop.

A forward-looking liberal foreign policy would commit to full American participation in the ICC and ICJ, including acceptance of their jurisdiction over the conduct of America and its allies. This would require passing laws in Congress that codify these commitments and formally enter the US into these institutions. It would enforce those institutions’ decisions consistently, without the asterisk that currently exempts Israel, the UAE, and any other state that flies the flag of American strategic interest at a given moment. And most importantly, it would give the international community the knowledge that there won’t be a dramatic back-and-forth on basic international and legal principles.

It is important to note here that while international law is limited in its utility, limited does not mean nonexistent. In spite of inconsistent European responses to ICC arrest warrants, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears the enforcement of an outstanding warrant enough to plan around it, choosing his flight routes in such a way that he avoids landing⁶ in any signatory state. The constraints of international law are real even when imperfectly enforced, precisely because the costs of invocation are not zero. Making those costs more tangible and real, consistently and without prejudice putting the might of American power behind them, is the work that a serious American foreign policy would take on. It would also, incidentally, give us a way to prosecute those who are currently wreaking havoc in Iran.

The norms that come with the very existence of the United Nations, as well as membership within it, can’t simply be sloughed off despite their largely symbolic nature. By having established a body that is first and foremost tasked with the maintenance of the world’s affairs, the postwar powers correctly conceded that the old way of doing things was no longer sufficient. Pure might makes right, and spheres of influence, with no recourse via diplomacy or multilateral engagement, led humanity into two cataclysms in less than three decades.

It is true that the UN has many members in it that do not respect the Charter, let alone the basic rights of all people, but the absence of the UN and of international legal norms would not serve to change anything for the people living under those conditions. Turning inward primarily has the effect of making it more difficult to intervene even in a strictly humanitarian context. The UN, odd and malnourished as it is, can be a viable tool for addressing problems before they turn into the kind of catastrophes seen in the 20th century.

The argument against American participation in these bodies is invariably that it would constrain American power. This is correct. Constraining the unilateral exercise of American power in favor of internationally adjudicated standards is the point. By tying the king’s hands, so to speak, the US is able to provide the international community with the necessary assurances that there will be a baseline level of stability and commitment from Washington on the global stage. The alternative, an America that designs the rules and exempts itself from them, is not a stable foundation for anything. It is what produced the conditions for Trump’s demolition of American credibility in the first place. We’re seeing it when the president tries to bully Denmark⁷ into conceding Greenland. We’re seeing it with the frequent threat to annex Canada. And we’re seeing it in Trump’s personalist, corporate Board of Peace.⁸ But the credibility problem is not his alone. It is the accumulated consequence of decades of selective enforcement, and it will not be solved by restoring the selective enforcement that preceded him.

It should also be noted that a baseline of stability on the part of the United States would be of self-interest as well. Can anyone really argue that the JCPOA’s birth and its immediate death produced anything of real substance for Washington? Since the US has been unable to demonstrate its capability to commit long term, its status both as mediator and as guarantor has declined rapidly and in real time. Reversing this is necessary to maintain America’s relationships with Europe and East Asia, and to solve the extant problems in the Middle East and North Africa.

In line with these principles, a liberal foreign policy ought to endeavor not just to use the executive suite but also to reassert Congress and its role in policymaking. Passing binding legislation that cements US participation in international treaties not yet signed and that constrains executive war powers would go a long way toward reaching these goals.

Old problems, new solutions

No single issue illustrates the bankruptcy of American liberal foreign-policy thinking more clearly than Palestine—and, by extension, the broader Middle Eastern framework⁹ of which it has been the central unresolved question for eighty years. It represents a failure not only on the regional level but also on the conceptual level. And it has always had the potential to be replicated elsewhere.

The ironclad American commitment to Israel’s security, as currently practiced, does not just mean a commitment to Israel’s existence or to the security of its people. It means a commitment to insulating the Israeli state from consequences for its conduct regardless of what that conduct is. This is not a policy that has produced stability. It has produced two and a half years of genocidal violence in Gaza, the rapid de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, the invasions of Syria and Lebanon, and a regional order so obviously unmoored that the Trump administration felt comfortable proposing¹⁰ to outright ethnically cleanse Gaza and south Lebanon and hand them over for resort development.

The two-state solution, as an aspirational slogan that requires no concrete action, has been the preferred vehicle for deferring this reckoning. Born out of a reinterpretation of United Nations Security Resolution 242, America’s rhetorical support for two states costs nothing and obligates nothing, which is exactly why successive American administrations have promoted it while enabling the opposite¹¹ in practice: maintaining settlements without meaningful pushback; vetoing Palestinian representation at the UN; recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital”; and, in the Biden-Trump years, pursuing regional arrangements based on the idea that Palestine is solely an internal Israeli matter. What should replace this framework is not a vague recommitment to the same sloganeering but a human-rights-based approach¹² that starts from a clear set of baseline demands: no racial domination, no permanent subjugation, no annexation of occupied territory, no apartheid. These are not even new demands. They are the minimum content of the international legal standards the United States claims to support.

Concretely, this could mean the following: unilateral recognition of the State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, support for Palestinian accession to the United Nations, sanctions and travel restrictions on Israeli ministers who perpetuate conditions of apartheid or espouse genocidal rhetoric, a comprehensive trade embargo on settlement products, and support for the enforcement of the ICJ’s advisory opinion on the occupation’s illegality. Such actions need not prejudice the parameters of a final status agreement between the two nations, but they would bring the American position in line with the international standard and would also boost the credibility of the United States among those countries historically skeptical of its role as mediator. These are in fact mainstream positions, consistent with the international legal consensus, and they should be the baseline of any liberal foreign policy that claims to take human rights seriously.

Building from below, not from above

The final element of a genuinely forward-looking liberal foreign policy is the hardest one for a political establishment trained in the logic of great-power management to internalize: A truly durable order can only be built from civil society up, not from diplomatic summits down.

It’s easy to overlook, but the European Union’s most significant contribution to postwar stability was not its trade arrangements or its institutional architecture—though these matter. It was the investment in the organizations of civil society: independent media, civic education, anticorruption infrastructure, labor-focused movements, and minority-rights groups, which all created constituencies for liberal democratic governance at the ground level. Where this investment happened seriously and sustainably, it helped provide a lasting transformation. Where it was shallow or overrun by what were considered to be more immediate strategic interests, as in the case of Western Sahara or Palestine,¹³ it failed.

American foreign policy has very few structures for this. What it has instead is first and foremost a security-assistance framework, an economic-development framework that routes money through governments rather than societies, and occasional pro-democracy rhetoric that is immediately undermined when a strategically inconvenient uprising occurs. The result is a world in which American allies can be autocracies¹⁴ and American adversaries can be democracies,¹⁵ and American foreign policy adjusts to accommodate whatever arrangement serves the existing power hierarchy.

While Palestine is one of the more compelling cases of this, there are other, perhaps even more striking examples. In countries like Bahrain and Egypt, the US looked the other way when the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring were crushed and authoritarianism surged. Liberal dissent was suppressed without any real pushback from the American center left. Likewise, US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020 in exchange for normalization with Israel was a grave violation of our obligations under international law and a betrayal of Sahrawi civil-society groups that have championed their right to self-determination. Since then, the US has gone further and embraced¹⁶ the Moroccan preference for resolving the conflict via an autonomy plan that does not fulfill all the rights of the Sahrawi people.

A civil-society-centered approach would redirect a meaningful share of American foreign assistance toward independent institutions: press-freedom organizations, labor-rights groups, community-organizing infrastructure. It would take seriously the idea that what produces stability is not the right security arrangement among governments but the right set of conditions for people to govern themselves with dignity. This goes hand in hand with discussions of reviving USAID, which provided much-needed humanitarian support on a medical and food-security level. Reasserting the country’s role on that front while also providing new services in the broader political context would be a vital way to move beyond the current impasse.

What reconstruction Looks Like

What the moment demands is a coherent alternative vision—not just a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo but a genuine reconstruction of American engagement with the world on a different and more equitable set of terms. There’s no need to withdraw from the systems as such, or to buy into the idea that nothing good can be done. Instead, we must seriously engage with what the US has fallen short on, and where our actions have not met our words. The steps outlined above are just some of the many ideas that have been floated for bridging these gaps.

Trump has not failed to stabilize a world order that was working; he has accelerated the collapse of an order that was already crumbling under the weight of its own limitations. This does not mean that nothing positive was born out of the postwar system but rather that the system needs to be updated, in ways that bring the principles closer to the application.

Reassembling the pieces of these systems and reorienting them to produce better outcomes will not be easy, and it will take more than one presidential cycle, but committing to them from the outset will provide a coherent pathway for reconstruction. It will provide a bedrock for an international coalition of democrats to disrupt the march of authoritarianism. And, if successful, it will help stabilize the world in a manner that enriches the lives of those who have traditionally been left out in the cold under the post-1945 order.

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