Aftermath of US-Israeli air strikes, Tehran, March 3, 2026. Photo courtesy Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons.

The Third Gulf War marks an epochal change in international politics. Global affairs have entered a period of unprecedented flux. Accustomed patterns that have endured for decades are being jettisoned in weeks, while what until recently was considered unthinkable has now become inevitable. Above all, the order established after the end of the Second World War is now shifting. In 1945, following the most devastating war in history, humanity came together to establish the Charter international system, with the United Nations at its heart. This system is based on the fundamental norm of sovereign internationalism—the balancing of national autonomy with global cooperation. It is this arrangement that is now unravelling.

The Charter order was never intended to be a world government, nor did it claim to be one, but it did establish what is legitimate in international affairs. It set normative, even moral, guidelines for relations between states. These norms are now not only flouted with impunity, but increasingly disregarded altogether.

All this is vividly evident in the Third Gulf War. The decapitation strike against the Iranian leadership, launched by Israel and the United States on February 28, 2026, broke every fundamental norm of international law. Assassination brazenly undermines the principle of sovereign statehood and repudiates the entire tradition of statecraft since the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648. That norm has now been eroded. The murder of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other leaders, was conducted with total disregard for the lives of innocent civilians caught in the bombing, including family members. This repeated the pattern long established in Israel’s punitive and destructive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. The assassinations in effect became a declaration of war, ignoring the protocols that had previously been considered standard procedure when initiating hostilities against a sovereign state. The next day, a school was hit in a double-tap strike in Minab, killing at least 175 civilians, including more than 100 schoolchildren.

In the following weeks, Israel and the US pounded not only military targets but also civilian institutions and infrastructure. At the same time, following the launch of missiles towards Israel from Hezbollah positions, Lebanon was subjected to an extraordinary bombing campaign in which whole apartment blocks were destroyed, and over one million people were displaced from their homes. At the time of writing, southern Lebanon has been cut off from the rest of the country, its population effectively expelled. Settler violence in the occupied West Bank has also intensified.

In response, Iran attacked US military bases, energy installations, airports, and civilian structures across the region, in........

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