There is a question that now hangs over British foreign policy like an unpaid invoice: what, precisely, does Keir Starmer mean when he invokes “international law”? The phrase has become the Prime Minister’s all-purpose escape clause, deployed with the reflexive certainty of a barrister citing settled precedent. But the past twelve months have revealed something rather more troubling than legalism. They have revealed a government that applies international law selectively, interprets it opportunistically, and abandons it quietly when the political weather shifts. The result is not the rule-based order Starmer professes to champion. It is strategic incoherence dressed in a silk gown.

Consider the sequence of events. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure — a campaign that killed the Supreme Leader, targeted command-and-control networks, and provoked a cascade of Iranian retaliatory strikes across the Gulf. Washington asked to use British bases. Starmer refused. His Attorney General, Lord Hermer, advised that participation would violate international law — specifically, that the strikes did not meet the threshold of self-defence under the UN Charter. The Prime Minister told the nation he would “not commit our military personnel to unlawful action.”

Forty-eight hours later, after Iran launched missiles at Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait — hitting airports, hotels, and coming within 800 yards of British personnel at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus — Starmer reversed course. He authorised the use of Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford for “specific and limited defensive purposes.” The legal basis had apparently shifted overnight from impermissible aggression to collective self-defence. What had been unlawful on Saturday was lawful by Sunday evening. The law had not changed. The missiles had.

One might argue — and Starmer’s defenders have — that circumstances genuinely altered the legal calculus. Iran’s indiscriminate retaliation against states that played no part in the initial strikes did, on one reading, create a fresh basis for defensive action. But this is precisely the point the Prime Minister’s critics have been making all along: international law in the domain of armed conflict is not a crystalline code to be read off a statute. It is a contested, evolving framework shaped by the practice of states and the political interests of those interpreting it.

Natasha Hausdorff, the international lawyer, has argued that Israel and Iran have been in armed conflict for decades — rendering the “imminent threat” question largely moot. Others insist the pre-emptive strikes lacked Security Council authorisation and therefore violated Article 2(4) of the Charter. Both positions are lawyerly, defensible, and ultimately political. Starmer’s pretence that one reading is simply “the law” and the other is not is the evasion of a man who prefers process to judgment.

The Iran episode, however revealing, is merely the latest chapter in a pattern that has defined this government since its first months. Start with the Chagos Islands. Starmer’s decision to cede sovereignty of the archipelago to Mauritius — including the strategic jewel of Diego Garcia — was justified explicitly on international legal grounds. Lord Hermer called it the fulfilment of Labour’s promise to put international law at the heart of foreign policy, citing the 2019 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. Advisory being the operative word: the ICJ opinion was non-binding. Britain had explicitly refused to consent to the Court’s contentious jurisdiction over Commonwealth disputes, and the advisory opinion route — which the General Assembly used instead — carried no binding force. The UN General Assembly resolution that underpinned the opinion rested on a general principle of non-partition during decolonisation — a principle that, as Lord Biggar, Oxford’s former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, has noted, is nonsensical when applied without regard to political prudence, security, or the wishes of the displaced population itself.

The Chagossians, forcibly removed between 1968 and 1973 to make way for the American base, were scarcely consulted. They are now bringing a legal challenge accusing the British government of perpetrating a “crime against humanity” by compelling them to abandon their homeland under the terms of the very deal that was supposed to vindicate their rights. The Maldives has lodged its own objection, asserting territorial claims that supersede those of Mauritius. The deal’s ratification has been pulled following pressure from Washington. The Pentagon has signed long-term operational contracts at Diego Garcia under British sovereignty, without any apparent assumption that a sovereignty transfer is required or imminent. Starmer’s claim that the deal was legally necessary to secure the base’s future now looks, at best, like a misjudgement and, at worst, like an act of strategic self-harm cloaked in jurisprudential virtue.

And then there is the EU Reset. In May 2025, the government agreed to dynamic alignment with EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary regulations — a commitment to adopt Brussels’ food safety, agricultural, and pesticide rules automatically as they evolve. This was marketed as a sensible, technocratic measure to reduce border friction. In reality, as David Collins, Professor of International Economic Law at City St George’s, University of London, has pointed out, dynamic SPS alignment may place the UK in breach of its obligations under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The CPTPP, which the UK joined after years of negotiation, mandates that food safety measures be based on science, international standards, or risk assessments. The EU’s regulations frequently fail that test — its restrictions on gene editing, GMOs, and pesticide residues often exceed Codex Alimentarius benchmarks without scientific justification. By binding itself to EU rules, the UK constrains its ability to honour equivalence requests from CPTPP partners, exposing itself to arbitration under Chapter 7 of the agreement.

The irony is excruciating. A government that surrendered sovereign territory on the basis of a non-binding ICJ opinion, that refused to support its closest ally on the grounds of Charter compliance, and that lectures the world about the sanctity of the rules-based order has simultaneously entered a trade arrangement that may violate the very treaty obligations it has most recently undertaken. As Kemi Badenoch put it, with characteristic directness: “Throughout the Chagos debates, Keir Starmer has tried to hide behind the cover of international law; now the Conservatives are exposing that his shameful surrender may be illegal.”

What emerges from this tangle is not a principled foreign policy but a series of lawyerly improvisations, each internally consistent within its own narrow framing but collectively incoherent. Starmer does not apply international law. He curates it. He selects the interpretation that aligns with the political outcome he has already chosen — whether that is distancing Britain from American military action, appeasing the ICJ, or re-entering the EU’s regulatory orbit — and presents it as though the law left him no choice. This is the barrister’s trick: to make contingent judgment look like logical necessity.

The deeper problem is that this approach corrodes the very framework Starmer claims to defend. International law derives its authority not from enforcement — it has almost none — but from the consistent practice of states. When a major Western democracy applies it selectively — rigidly where convenient, flexibly where embarrassing, and negligently where it conflicts with domestic political priorities — the signal to the rest of the world is not one of principled restraint. It is one of strategic unreliability. Trump’s barb that “this is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with” was characteristically blunt, but it captured something real: the perception, now widespread among allies and adversaries alike, that Britain under Starmer will always find a legal reason not to act.

In financial economics, we have a concept for this. It is called a “put option on inaction.” The holder of such an option benefits from the right, but not the obligation, to do nothing — while the cost of doing nothing is borne by everyone else. Starmer has constructed a political portfolio in which international law functions as a perpetual put: it protects him from the downside risk of decision while offloading the strategic consequences to allies, partners, and the citizens whose security depends on a government willing to exercise judgment under uncertainty. The problem with such a portfolio, as any derivatives trader knows, is that the premium eventually comes due. And it is being called in now — by Washington, by the Gulf states, by the Chagossians, and by the CPTPP partners who will shortly discover that Britain’s word is worth less than its treaty signature.

Germany’s Friedrich Merz has begun to break free of this European habit of legalistic paralysis. He has stated openly that international law “should not protect Iran.” Australia and Canada looked at the same facts as Starmer and reached a markedly different conclusion, publicly backing the operation as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Even Macron, who initially said the strikes fell outside international law, joined the E3 commitment to “necessary and proportionate defensive measures.” Starmer remains stuck, caught between the instincts of a human rights barrister and the demands of a Prime Minister whose country’s citizens are sheltering in basements across the Gulf.

The question is no longer whether Starmer believes in international law. He plainly does — in the way a clever advocate believes in the brief he happens to be holding. The question is whether he believes in anything beyond it: in strategic judgment, in alliance credibility, in the moral seriousness required to distinguish between law that serves justice and law that shields injustice. So far, the evidence suggests he does not. And that, for a nation that once wrote the rules, is a far graver breach than any he has yet been accused of.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)