In the late 2020s, we hear increasingly of the demise of international law and “the rules-based international order.” Donald Trump’s use of force against Iran and Venezuela and threat to use it against Greenland, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are widely seen as representing a turning point in international relations, linked to the rise of authoritarianism in domestic politics. No episode in the new world disorder speaks more to this sense of change than Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which Trump has also played a major role. It is over Gaza that the USA has most definitively rejected international law, even sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its judges. Yet many IR commentators, like Western political leaders, see Trump’s threat to the transatlantic alliance as the key dimension of international change, and increasingly argue for an alternative to Trump’s USA without confronting it over Gaza. Indeed, most of the leaders who are being forced to confront the need for such an alternative are themselves complicit in the Israeli-US genocide. Gaza therefore appears to be the Achilles’ heel of the idea that the liberal order can be salvaged from the Trumpian onslaught. The reason for this is that although international order and international law both have broader foundations than the norms and laws around genocide, the public international morality of the West has come to centre on them.

*Originally published February 2026. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

The “lessons” of the Holocaust have become a prime narrative foundation of Western ideology, shared to a remarkable degree by leaders across the political spectrum. Yet in the last two years, not only has an international order centred on the lessons of the emblematic genocide of the 20th century been responsible for the emblematic genocide of the 21st century, but Western governments, from the USA to Germany and the UK to Canada, have also used the Holocaust (and the linked priority for preventing antisemitism) to justify their support for and participation in the Israeli genocide. The consequences of this are proving severe. Internationally, the broad Western complicity in the genocide ties Europe to Trump, helps block Southern states from supporting Europe’s cause over Ukraine, and drains support from international law. Domestically, Western complicity separates centrist governments from the progressives and minority groups which are necessary components of successful coalitions to prevent Trumpian far right parties from gaining power, as they are poised to do across Europe.

Genocide was not supposed to play this role in world politics. When the great UN powers drafted the Genocide Convention after the Second World War, they saw it as criminalising the racism of the defeated powers, not their own or their allies’ violence. It was “a promissory note not intended to be cashed,” as historian Mark Mazower puts it, and duly receded to the margins of world politics during the Cold War. Even when genocide consciousness revived in the Post-Cold War years, over Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, it was assumed that the problem was one of second-tier regimes and armed movements, in relatively marginal states. Critics of Western policies argued that the problem was their failure to prevent these actors committing genocide – a feature not a bug, Samantha Power famously argued, since non-intervention actually was the policy. The solution was therefore more committed involvement by the “international community,” and new norms like the “responsibility to protect.” States upped Holocaust commemoration partly in order to symbolise this commitment.

This Post-Cold War consensus now lies in tatters. The states that were supposed to lead the prevention of genocide are not only failing to prevent it; they are actively perpetrating it. “Never again” has been shown to be a mantra, not of universal protection, but of the protection of Jews alone, cynically invoked to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. The ideas of “the Holocaust” has been so hollowed out by being harnessed to genocide, argues Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, as to devalue consciousness of the Nazi extermination programme and the real threats to Jews today - as has the idea of antisemitism, argues Holocaust scholar Barry Trachtenberg.

The sense that we are in a new age of genocide is not only due to the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the extensive complicity of Western leaders in it. The 2020s have seen genocidal violence continue in Myanmar, where the remaining Rohingya continue to be persecuted after the large expulsions of 2017; in Azerbaijan, where the remaining Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2022; in Ethiopia, where systematic violence against........

© E-International