The Illusion Of International Law In A World Of Power Politics |
The international system is not a legal order. It never was. Beneath the language of charters, conventions, and treaties lies an anarchical reality that every state eventually confronts: there is no authority above the powerful, no enforcer capable of compelling the strong, and no institution that functions when the states that built it choose to ignore it.
The United Nations Security Council exists to maintain international peace and has been used by the United States as a veto machine, casting approximately ninety vetoes since 1945, more than half of them to shield a single country from accountability. The International Court of Justice ruled Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory illegal, but it was ignored. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister, and the United States Congress threatened to sanction the judges personally. The NPT's disarmament obligation has not been honoured once in fifty-five years. The IAEA certified Iranian compliance twelve consecutive times, and Iran's declared facilities were bombed. Every institution designed to protect weaker states from stronger ones has been neutralised, bypassed, vetoed, or threatened into irrelevance the moment it became inconvenient to the powerful.
Iran has lived this truth not as theory but as operational reality for forty-seven years. It signed the NPT and was sanctioned. It accepted inspections and had its declared facilities bombed using the coordinates its own compliance provided. It negotiated the JCPOA in good faith, complied fully, and watched the agreement torn up unilaterally by a state that faced no consequence for doing so.
It came to Islamabad and reached the closest point of agreement in nearly half a century, and a naval blockade was announced to jeopardise the talks. It observed a ceasefire, and American warships entered the strait during that ceasefire. Every act of compliance produced a worse outcome than the act before it. Iran's good faith was not rewarded. It was exploited: each concession used to gather intelligence, each declaration converted into targeting coordinates, each negotiation used to position military assets for the next strike.
Against this record, one must examine who is actually making the demands placed on Iran, because the demand does not originate where it is publicly presented. The United States insists Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons. That position alone has legal grounding under the NPT. But Washington goes further; it demands that Iran cannot enrich uranium even for civilian purposes.
Civilian enrichment is not prohibited. It is an explicit right guaranteed under Article IV of the very treaty Iran signed, which the treaty itself calls the inalienable right of every signatory. The demand is not that Iran comply with the NPT. The demand is that Iran surrender rights that the NPT specifically grants to every other signatory, without question. And this demand does not originate in Washington. It originates in Tel Aviv.
The nuclear weapon made North Korea's behaviour more calculable because a state with something real to lose becomes a state with a rational incentive to avoid destruction
The nuclear weapon made North Korea's behaviour more calculable because a state with something real to lose becomes a state with a rational incentive to avoid destruction
Israel cannot tolerate a nuclear-capable Iran, not because Iran would attack Israel, a nuclear-armed state with American backing, but because Iranian deterrence would end Israel's freedom to attack Iran without consequence.
To understand why, one must look at what has happened to every state in the Middle East that chose independence over compliance. The pattern is not coincidental. It is comprehensive. Iraq was invaded, Saddam hanged on camera, and the country fractured along sectarian lines that no government has since reunified.
Libya's Gaddafi was killed on camera, his country replaced by warlord territories hosting open slave markets. Syria has been bombed by Israel more than two hundred times in a single year and when the moment came, regime change was administered with precision: Bashar al-Assad was removed and replaced by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a figure with a documented history in jihadist networks including ISIS, repackaged overnight as a legitimate leader and embraced by Washington and Tel Aviv as the acceptable face of a compliant new Syria.
Lebanon has been invaded, bombed repeatedly, and left economically collapsed. Gaza has been erased. In every case, a different pretext was offered. The pretext changed with each country. The outcome was always the same: a strong, independent state entered the targeting sequence, and a fragmented, divided, externally dependent wreckage came out.
It was not only the states that were targeted. The leaders of regional resistance were systematically hunted and killed. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's Secretary General for three decades killed in Beirut in September 2024. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political bureau chief assassinated in Tehran in July 2024 while attending a presidential inauguration, struck inside a supposedly secure location in Iran's own capital.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's most senior nuclear scientist killed in November 2020 by a remotely operated satellite-controlled machine gun on a highway outside Tehran. Qasem Soleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander killed by a United States drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, on the soil of a third sovereign country, without declaration of war, without trial, without any legal process.
Together they constitute a programme: the systematic elimination of every leadership capable of organising regional resistance. The division of these societies was not a side effect of the destruction. It was the objective: fracture the national identity, institutionalise the division, ensure that no reconstituted state can ever again threaten the regional hierarchy that Israel sits atop.
Iran is the single exception, the only country in the region that remains a coherent government with an independent foreign policy. That is what cannot be tolerated. Not the bomb. The coherence. The resilience. The refusal to fragment.
There is a question the architects of the non-proliferation regime have never answered honestly: by what measure is a state deemed responsible enough to possess nuclear weapons? If the measure is restraint, holding a deterrent without using it offensively, then North Korea has demonstrated more nuclear responsibility than the state most loudly demanding Iran's disarmament.
Since acquiring nuclear weapons in 2006, North Korea has not invaded a single country, bombed a single neighbouring state, assassinated a single foreign leader on foreign soil, or occupied a single metre of another state's territory. The nuclear weapon made North Korea's behaviour more calculable because a state with something real to lose becomes a state with a rational incentive to avoid destruction. That is deterrence functioning as theorised.
The only remaining question is whether Iran will continue to live in the world the NPT describes or whether it will finally live in the world the NPT has revealed
The only remaining question is whether Iran will continue to live in the world the NPT describes or whether it will finally live in the world the NPT has revealed
Now apply the same measure to Israel. Since 1947, Israel has initiated military operations against Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Palestine simultaneously. It has assassinated foreign officials in Dubai, Damascus, Beirut, and Tehran. It has bombed nuclear facilities in three countries. It has occupied territory from four neighbours in violation of over a hundred United Nations resolutions spanning six decades.
It possesses nuclear weapons outside every relevant international treaty and faces no inspection, no sanction, no accountability. This is not the profile of a responsible nuclear state. It is the profile of the most militarily aggressive state in the post-war international system: reckless, hawkish, and fundamentally destabilising, with no defined endpoint and no international authority capable of constraining it.
A critical distinction must be made. Pakistan's nuclear programme is the clearest example of deterrence functioning as the theory intends. In 1971, India dismembered Pakistan; East Pakistan ceased to exist. When India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, Pakistan confronted a nuclear-armed neighbour across an unresolved Kashmir dispute with no great power patron willing to intervene.
Pakistan's nuclear programme was the only available equaliser: specific, regional, and defensive. Since the 1998 tests, every crisis—Kargil, the 2001 standoff, Mumbai, Balakot, and the May 2025 confrontation—has pulled back from intensive escalation. Nuclear deterrence stabilised a region between two conventionally unequal military neighbours. It is the textbook case.
Iran faces something categorically different: not a regional adversary but a nuclear-armed state backed by the world's superpower, actively bombing its territory, assassinating its scientists, blockading its ports, and demanding it surrender rights the NPT explicitly grants.
NPT Article X grants every signatory the explicit right to withdraw when extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme national interests: three months’ notice to the Security Council, nothing further required. North Korea invoked Article X in 2003. It withdrew, developed nuclear weapons, and today receives summits.
Iran's case is stronger than North Korea's was by every measure: two actual wars against its declared territory, scientists assassinated, declared facilities bombed using coordinates its own compliance provided, a ceasefire violated, and negotiations ended with a blockade. Every threshold the treaty's own language identifies as justifying withdrawal has been exceeded, documented, and repeated.
History does not record what Iran's leaders decided. It records what the international system taught them consistently, repeatedly, and without exception. Iran's Supreme Leader issued a fatwa, a binding religious ruling declaring nuclear weapons haram: forbidden under Islamic law, prohibited as a threat to humanity.
Iran is the only state in this debate with a theological prohibition against the weapons it is accused of pursuing. The United States dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations and gave itself permanent nuclear status. Israel maintains the Samson Option, an explicit doctrine of nuclear use even in non-nuclear conflicts against non-nuclear neighbours, and has never signed a single relevant treaty.
Yet it is Iran—the state with the religious prohibition, the signed treaty, the accepted inspections, and zero weapons—that is bombed. The fatwa was a statement about the world as it should be. But Iran does not live in the world as it should be.
It lives in the world as it is: an anarchical system where moral principle provides no protection, religious prohibition carries no deterrent weight, and legal compliance supplies only the coordinates for the next airstrike. The only remaining question is whether Iran will continue to live in the world the NPT describe,s or whether it will finally live in the world the NPT has revealed.