As the tragic consequences of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran continue to accumulate, one hears a cry of desperation: Are we witnessing the “death of international law?”

It is a reasonable question. But there is a more important one: Can we use this crisis to re-imagine an international legal regime that works for more people?

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and America’s acts of aggression against Venezuela and Iran have certainly marked a low point for the “rules-based order” — the web of conventions, treaties and other legal norms crafted to govern the conduct of states since World War II. Even more telling has been the resigned acquiescence with which longstanding champions of international law have responded. Last month, as illegal U.S.-Israeli military strikes began in Tehran, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz captured the sentiment of many, declaring: “Categorizing the events under international law will have relatively little effect. This is especially true when these classifications remain largely inconsequential.”

Such fatalism is well-founded. Today’s violations of state sovereignty stand out for their scale and frequency. Political leaders have abandoned even the pretense of respect for what Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, disdainfully calls “international niceties.” Miller’s world is one “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Repeatedly breaching previous red lines — threatening fellow NATO members and calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza — makes possible what was once unthinkable.

Even in the years immediately after the U.N. Charter outlawed aggressive war in 1945, international law rarely carried much political weight among those who could ignore it. The mid-20th century was littered with great-power abuses, from the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to U.S.-sponsored coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. These violations reflected the priority given to national security and regional dominance over legal principles. At the height of the Vietnam War, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson famously expressed the supremacist sentiment: “We are the number one nation. And we are going to stay the number one nation.”

Nor did international norms fare much better after Sept. 11, 2001. As Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School observed nearly a decade ago, “in the first 17 years of this century, the self-proclaimed leader of the liberal order invaded two countries, conducted air strikes and Special Forces raids to kill hundreds of people it unilaterally deemed to be terrorists, and subjected scores of others to ‘extraordinary rendition,’ often without any international legal authority.” That record, he concluded, “speaks for itself.”

But this is not to say that international law is meaningless. Many rules — governing trade, fishing, the environment and organized crime — are obeyed much of the time, precisely because predictability and peaceful dispute resolution often serve state interests. The Montreal Protocol, adopted in 1987, succeeded in phasing out 98% of ozone-depleting substances in the Earth’s atmosphere, saving millions from skin cancer. For the same reasons, most states do not invade one another. Doing so invites others to do the same to you.

What’s different today is the open, proud defiance of restraint. In Trump’s first term, it was already clear that his foreign policy was “defined by hostility to the overall project of international law,” as legal scholar Monica Hakimi put it. But this time around, the president has stated plainly: “I don’t need international law.”

The Trump administration’s contempt for fundamental norms has provoked much hand-wringing. But it should serve as a wake-up call for those concerned about a world without rules. The United Nations has long warned that without international law, “there could be chaos.” Now that we know what that looks like, we have a chance to build a broader constituency for what has long been the province of a narrow professional and academic elite.

By enveloping the wider Middle East in war, tearing down alliances and sowing economic uncertainty, Trump has unwittingly reminded us why we needed international law in the first place. Concepts like international “aggression,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide” were conceived, not as theoretical constructs, but as practical tools to address genuine atrocities that the world hoped would “never again” occur.

But if international law is to gain more credibility, the lawyers and diplomats who make and use it must do a better job of showing how it helps ordinary people, whether in regulating armed conflict or governing civil aviation. Given America’s current assault on the international project that it has led for 80 years, reformers outside the United States may be best placed to lead this effort.

It is not a small challenge. We will need more consistent enforcement of legal rules, an end to double standards that exempt privileged actors and states’ re-commitment to a law for all, not for the few. We also should bring distant international courts closer to the victims and survivors they serve, make the international bar more diverse and globally representative and improve public outreach, including by conducting on-site international trials with broad participation.

It would be a perverse, though welcome, twist if today’s lamentations over the fate of the rules-based order became an impetus for rejuvenation and reinvention. Trump may not need international law, but it may turn out that international law needed Trump.

© The Japan Times