YOU will have heard, repeatedly and insistently, that the international rules-based order is under threat. And it is. But the threat comes primarily from the very people making this claim. The Starmer government is damaging the credibility of international law by misusing it as a policy tool rather than as a set of guardrails. Bad faith allegations of war crimes and double standards are eroding the incentive to comply.
The Prime Minister faces many challenges. These include war in Europe, war in the Middle East and, at home, increasingly assertive Islamism, openly sectarian MPs and the early but unmistakable signs of popular nationalism. There are 70million people who are dependent on his leadership.
If the only policy tool he reaches for is international law, which simply tells him what he cannot do, he will remain unable to develop a proactive, strategic and morally purposeful response to these challenges. That is why those 70million people watched, first baffled and then aghast, as he declared that he will, at some point, when administratively appropriate, do the bare minimum, and in accordance with international law. He emphasised the last bit proudly.
There is an important role for international law as a restraint on the action of states. But it is intended to operate upon positive action, not replace it. To misuse it this way is to discredit it. To hide behind international law to avoid the responsibilities of office is even worse.
The country needs leadership, not legal advice. Failing to provide it, while citing international law, invites mockery of its principles and not respect for them.
The flip side of this problem is the weaponising of international law by bad actors. The US, its allies and, importantly, their enemies, learned during the Vietnam War that public opinion is the soft underbelly of a democracy.
Since that time, the enemies of the West have targeted this weak spot relentlessly, with Hamas and its supporters refining the strategy to an exquisite degree. Public opinion is now part of the battlespace, and daily media briefings by military commanders, allegedly showing guided missiles arrowing into air-conditioning vents to destroy, precisely and without collateral damage, legally justified targets, are intended to defend against this attack.
Increasingly, however, alleged breaches of international law are based on misleading casualty numbers, civilian harm caused by human shielding, the complete erasure of context, and double standards. These allegations are amplified – knowingly or otherwise – by high-status actors such as the UN, through agencies like UNRWA, and the Western media.
International law is rarely adjudicated. Without any process for particularising the charge and producing then examining evidence and witnesses in a transparent, procedurally rigorous manner, with clear findings of fact and law, claims risk descending into wild, choose-your-own adventure stories to animate fellow travellers and weaken opponents.
There are obvious recent examples. We have heard that the IDF committed a war crime by conducting operations against Al-Shifa hospital. Yet even the Biden administration, in all its hesitancy and caution regarding the war in Gaza, confirmed that Hamas had constructed military facilities under, and conducted military operations from, Al-Shifa hospital. This is a clear war crime under the Geneva Convention.
Israel has the right, under international law, to defend itself and respond to military operations conducted against it from a hospital, provided its response is proportionate and seeks, to the extent practicable, to minimise harm to non-combatants. The weight of evidence suggests it did so and, in fact, that it took extraordinary measures to protect civilians such as carrying incubators and other critical care equipment into battle to support Al-Shifa’s most vulnerable patients. This was a tactical decision to defend against the inevitable allegations of war crimes as much as a moral one.
I’m not suggesting there is no evidence of the IDF or the US breaching the laws of armed conflict in the Middle East or elsewhere. Under the extreme stress of combat, the laws of war are breached on all sides. The issue is a state’s commitment to them, through training, the establishment of lawful rules of engagement, and reasonable, proportionate enforcement against its own personnel.
For there are very real strategic and operational costs to complying with the laws of armed conflict. Legal reviews of targeting decisions and operational objectives slow operations. Increasing the precision of air strikes and ground-based operations requires extremely expensive guided weapons systems and increases the risk to ground forces. Warning civilian populations, by issuing evacuation notices, enables an enemy to prepare or simply withdraw and lay concealed explosive devices in every building in the area. More of your own soldiers are killed and maimed.
The problem is exacerbated by an apparent hierarchy of expectations. When the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, people declared that this would set a ‘dangerous precedent’. What could they have meant when this was obviously not the first time a state had infringed the sovereignty of another or acted against its head? Well, we knew what it meant. It meant that some states such as the US are expected to comply with international law and some are not. The states expected to comply are also expected to underwrite and enforce the system. The dangerous precedent was not the alleged breach of international law itself, but what appeared to be an unapologetic rejection of this logic.
Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, what new lesson is the US military learning? My guess is that, regardless of how carefully you comply with international law, and irrespective of whether your enemy’s actions constitute the most obvious and egregious breaches of international law, you will still be accused by vast numbers of your own people and media of breaching international law and committing war crimes – often based on the most transparent lies of your enemies. In other words, what’s the point?
There will always be breaches of international law. But the real threat to the international rules-based order is from those discrediting it, whether by misusing international law as a policy tool or by weaponising it. They are steadily eroding the credibility of international law and the incentive to comply all while telling themselves, and anyone who will listen, that they are its moral champions.
