Dr Joanna Rozpedowski is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and international law scholar based in Washington, DC.

At the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Switzerland and the Munich Security Conference in Germany, a striking rhetorical current ran through the discussions of great-power rivalry and shifting alliances: the suggestion that international law, alongside the once-unassailable “rules-based international order,” now amounts to little more than a mental “abstraction” based on a trivial consensus. A language of idealism that defined the normative landscape post-World War II is poorly suited to the logic of transactionalism, pragmatism and hard power politics we have now decisively entered, argue the North Atlantic and European elites and the Trump administration faithful.

The implication is clear: in a world defined by fierce geopolitical competition between the US–EU–NATO alliance and its China–Russia–BRICS counterpoint over contested spheres of influence and denial, legal norms are mere rhetorical devices rather than binding constraints. And as such, they can be imagined away at will, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently attested.

Labeling international law an “abstraction” serves a strategic purpose. It deliberately lowers expectations of compliance, normalizes selective adherence or overt violation, and provides political cover for conduct that might otherwise invite vehement condemnation or censure. Our Western political establishment now argues that any significant restraint on state action, otherwise guided by the cold and calculating logic of power, must be effectively neutralized. Within weeks, we have moved past the “fake media” narrative and, by a seeming political elite consensus, entered an ever-contested realm of fake laws and contrived norms.

There is, however, at least one problem with this make-believe framing. If international law and, by extension, those pesky “international rules” were truly an abstraction — an inert, inconsequential and powerless invention of humanity’s “better angels of our nature” and its more humane imagination — no one would deign to sanction the people who invoke it or weaken the institutions that wield it.

Sanctioning international courts

Exhibit A: The International Criminal Court (ICC), born out of the 1998 Rome Statute, was established to investigate and prosecute individuals — including heads of state and commanders in the field — for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.

It exists not as a philosophical proposition or a suggestion, but as a lived reality with which states, using the preponderance of modern military might and violence against human beings in the line of fire, must reckon. The ICC is a treaty institution with 125 state parties, a defined jurisdiction, a prosecutor and a bench of 18 judges. Its operations are textual, procedural and institutional, and its case load — given abhorrent and ongoing violations of international law — is expanding.

In early 2025, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on ICC officials in connection with the Court’s opening of preliminary investigations into alleged war crimes in Gaza. This investigation touched on the conduct of both Israeli officials and, potentially, US personnel, deeming the court’s actions an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security. The sanctions included asset freezes and travel restrictions targeting the Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as judges and staff involved. 

Sanctions, too, are not rhetorical gestures but material instruments of economic and political coercion. They are instruments that require legal authority to impose, bureaucratic infrastructure to administer and diplomatic finesse and capital to defend. Governments do not reach for such concrete and tangible tools against noumenal fictions and phantoms.

This was not Washington’s first such attempt at confrontation and intimidation, however. During his 2017–2021 term, the Trump administration targeted the ICC’s investigation into the situation in Afghanistan by imposing sanctions on then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and restricting the visas of Court personnel — before the Biden administration rescinded those measures in 2021. The pattern suggests not that the Court was then and remains now an illegitimate or irrelevant notion, but that it is compelling enough to provoke repeated and escalating state responses.

Silencing the messenger

Exhibit B: The same logic applies to the treatment of United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to report on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories. In a series of reports and public statements, Albanese characterized Israeli military conduct in Gaza as constituting grave violations of international humanitarian law, including findings she described as consistent with genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The response, rather than engaging with and rebutting serious and substantive legal claims, called for punitive measures, her removal, her sanctioning or the termination of her mandate, and dismissing her findings as biased or going beyond remit.

If the legal norms Albanese invokes — the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute — are indeed mere abstractions with no practical weight, then her reports are simply an overindulgent academic exercise. There is no need to silence an academic with no expansive executive powers. Yet even Plato feared the poets in the Republic. Poets who shaped how citizens felt about war, death, the gods and justice; who bypassed logic, reason and raison d’être and who aimed to move the heart, to elicit emotion. With no formal authority, no army, no office and no decision-making power, they were more formidable and thus more threatening to those they described and indicted in the public square.

The intensity of the effort to discredit or remove Albanese is, in itself, evidence that her invocations of international law carry consequences. It is the facts on the ground and not normative “fictions” that ground culpability and legal liability. What consequences, then, do states fear from an entity that is both a paradoxical fiction and a reality?

The paradox

At the heart of contemporary great-power behavior lies a contradiction. Governments simultaneously dismiss international law as naïve or inapplicable to hard realities, and mobilize significant political, legal and economic resources to suppress its enforcement mechanisms. These two positions cannot be coherently held at once.

To call the rules-based order an abstraction while sanctioning the ICC is to acknowledge, implicitly, that the Court’s work has real-world effects. To demand the removal of a UN rapporteur for her legal findings is to concede that legal findings shape reputations, mobilize opinion and potentially constrain state action. Power rarely mobilizes against what it considers immaterial and irrelevant.

The prohibition on genocide is codified in the 1948 Genocide Convention, ratified by 153 states. The protections afforded to civilians in armed conflict are enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and ratified by every recognized state on earth. These are not poetic metaphors but grave crimes that, in the language of international law, “shock the conscience of mankind.” They are treaty obligations. What may be contested, therefore, is not the international law’s existence, but the political will to apply and enforce it consistently — and, crucially, the authority to interpret it.

The deeper struggle is not over whether international law exists but over who gets to wield it. Who defines genocide? Who determines proportionality in armed conflict? Who judges compliance with the laws of war and who suffers its consequences? The post-1945 legal order attempted to institutionalize answers to those questions through the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, treaty bodies, special tribunals and independent rapporteurs. What the current moment reveals is that those institutions are contested not because they are weak, but because they are established and functional enough to produce findings that leading states and their allies find increasingly inconvenient.

This is a political crisis, not a legal one. It is a crisis of political conscience and of moral coherence. The treaties remain intact. The institutions have not yet ceased to exist. What is eroding, however, is the shared commitment among Western states, no less, to operate within their constraints — or at a minimum, to acknowledge their legitimacy. The rhetoric heard in Davos and Munich is the ideological scaffolding for that erosion: If the order was always just a naïve but convenient fiction, then abandoning it is not a betrayal, but a maturation necessitated by a pragmatic geopolitical realignment, its exponents argue. 

When the United States sanctions the ICC, it signals to every government under investigation — in The Hague, in Geneva, before the Human Rights Council — that legal accountability is a function of geopolitical alignment rather than conduct. That signal, if received, will shape behavior. Given technological possibilities (i.e., reemergence of energy, laser and chemical weapons use), the temptations to transgress international law and elide the normative consensus grow in proportion to the possibilities of securing strategic advantage in a perpetual contest over power, its maintenance and expansion. 

This calculus has found institutional expression within the current American defense establishment. At a Pentagon press briefing on March 2, 2026 — the Trump administration’s first public statement since US–Israeli strikes on Iran commenced — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the operation would proceed with “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.” The remarks were not incidental but highly premeditated. As early as September 30, 2025, addressing US generals and admirals at Quantico, Virginia, Hegseth had already framed rules of engagement as “politically correct and overbearing” constraints on the military imperative to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.” The Iran campaign, undeterred by “what so-called international institutions say,” operationalizes the secretary’s principle of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” accelerating the erosion of the institutional architecture that requires civilized nations to abide by legal obligations and translate them into responsible battlefield practice.

The debates at Davos, Munich and the Pentagon should not be about whether international norms and laws are real. That question is settled, if not by the treaties themselves, then by the energy expended trying to suppress them.

The productive debate ought to focus on how best to reform and strengthen these institutions, ensure their impartial application across geopolitical lines and build the coalitions of states willing to defend them when doing so is politically costly. How do we ensure and protect unbiased operations of future tribunals, in the conduct of future conflicts, and on the ground in places where civilians have no protection except the “aspirational language” of the laws of war? How do we ensure that international law is a proactive instrument of foreign policy and a counterweight to state self-aggrandizement?

International law is admittedly flawed and imperfect; it has been politicized and asymmetrically enforced because it is fundamentally human. But it is not a phantasmagoria. And the proof of that, paradoxically, lies in the resurgent ferocity of the effort to silence those who invoke it.

This article was originally published on Fair Observer

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