When Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu commenced their attack on Iran last weekend, they didn’t bother to consult the UN Security Council. Unlike George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was no effort to cobble together a ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ Trump didn’t even seek authorisation to declare war from Congress, something mandated in the US constitution. If any thought was given to international law, it clearly didn’t bear out in events on the ground.
Of course, an unprovoked attack on another country’s sovereign territory is considered a crime of aggression under international law, prohibited in the UN Charter and defined at length in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This current war on Iran, along with the 12-day war of last year, is most likely illegal according to the international system of rules and norms established by Western powers following the end of the Second World War.
Despite these facts, it has been troubling to see prominent international lawyers, UN officials and others rail against Trump’s war on this basis, without mentioning the Iranian regime’s own litany of well-documented violations of international law. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for instance, released a watery statement on 1 March condemning “the use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliation by Iran across the region” on the grounds that it “undermine[s] international peace and security” and violates the UN Charter.
Europe’s response to the war struck a similar tone. Foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas issued a statement on 2 March calling for “maximum restraint, protection of civilians and full respect of international law, including the principles of the United Nations Charter, and international humanitarian law.”
There was not a word here about the Iranian regime’s many decades of violating the UN Charter, including sponsoring terrorism and stoking conflict in neighbouring countries such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen, nor the gross violations of human rights committed by the regime against its own people, which experts have described as crimes against humanity.
Indeed the immediate trigger point for this current conflict was the protests inside Iran which began in December 2025 and were brutally suppressed in the most devastating way in January 8-9 by the Revolutionary Guard, Basij militia and other forces. On the orders of Supreme Leader Khamenei, an estimated 30,000 unarmed civilian protesters were massacred in the streets of Iran’s towns and cities, setting in train a series of events in which Trump, who had promised to help the protesters on social media, decided to strike. Where was Guterres and where was international law when this bloodbath was unfolding?
What we are seeing in Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran is the disintegration of the last remnants of the international rules-based order and the precarious dawn of a new era of might-is-right in international affairs.
You might start the clock with Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, or even earlier with the US invasion of Iraq, but the regrettable fact remains that the UN has become an irrelevance. Many countries pay lip service to the international system while ultimately following their own narrow self-interest, whether that be Australia indefinitely detaining asylum seekers in offshore detention facilities in contravention of international law, or China reinterpreting the Convention for the Law of the Sea to seize control of strategic islands in the South China Sea.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, on the back of the seizure of Crimea in 2014, showed that when a world power has a thirst for expanding its territory, there is very little which the international rules-based system can do to stand in its way. The lack of any mechanism of enforcement, and the fact that Russia can use its veto to thwart attempts to impose costs via the Security Council, meant that the United Nations, European Union and other countries and institutions still invested in the international system were reduced to issuing the usual bland statements of condemnation and calls for restraint.
Indeed, it has seemed in recent years that international law has been acting as a restraint on those countries, mainly in Europe, which continue to hold firmly to the rule of law, but not to malign actors like Russia and Iran, who have felt emboldened to brazenly violate international principles without consequence. An uneven playing field has emerged in which the bad actors do whatever they like, while well-meaning nations neuter their own ability to respond in kind.
This is the lens through which we should perceive the mealy-mouthed condemnations by Guterres and others of the American strikes on Iran. Of course we would all prefer a world in which every country stuck to the rules and in which international law was applied in a fair and balanced fashion, no matter which nation was responsible for its violations. It is important however not to mistake this utopian vision for the hard-nosed reality of international affairs today.
Mr Guterres: If you are happy to stand back and denounce the illegal war on Iran, most likely conducted to achieve the illegal objective of regime change, but you have nothing to say about this same regime’s massacre of tens of thousands of its citizens just weeks earlier, you are contributing to the erosion of the very international system you claim to uphold.
The United Nations and the international rules-based order has failed Iranians, as it has failed Uighurs in China, Rohingyas in Myanmar and the entire civilian populations of Sudan and Ukraine, among so many others. If in calling out the United States you fail to hold the Islamic Republic to account for its crimes against its own people, you are at best misdiagnosing the problem. At worst you are complicit in it.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a Research Fellow in Security Studies at Australia’s Macquarie University and is the author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.
