A war without rules

Even wars, which imply disorder, have rules. And that’s because without shared expectations, conflict becomes unmanageable. A war where everything is allowed destroys not only its targets but eventually its authors.

That basic assumption has been fatally ignored in the ongoing American and Israeli war against Iran. The violations that are being committed today by all sides in the Middle East go beyond violation of any particular agreement on international humanitarian law or any provision in the United Nations Charter. What we are seeing rather is the collapse of an entire structure of expectations that, since 1945, has kept modern conflicts within limits.

Consider what has already happened. On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched targeted strikes aimed at decimating Iran’s political and military leadership—even as Iranian diplomats were meeting American emissaries at the negotiating table in Geneva. The strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and members of his immediate family, and dozens of senior officials simultaneously.

International humanitarian law has a term for this: perfidy—the deliberate exploitation of a peace process as cover for assassination. It is among the oldest prohibitions in the customary laws of war, and it was violated by Israel and the US in broad daylight.

Iran’s retaliation has been equally oblivious of limits. Its missiles and drones have struck American military bases across the Gulf region. Thirteen of these are now uninhabitable, their personnel forced to relocate to hotels and office buildings in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, with six service members killed in a single strike in Kuwait.

Iran argues that these bases, all located in neighboring countries, served as launch platforms for the Feb. 28 attacks, a claim that carries some legal weight. But Tehran has gone further: it has, in addition, proceeded to bomb embassies, which is not permitted under international law even in wartime. It has effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, denying passage to oil and gas tankers and commercial ships from nations entirely uninvolved in the conflict.

Oil prices are threatening to rise to $200 a barrel. Asia and Europe are facing a devastating energy crisis. The war’s impact has radiated outward in ways neither party can control. Underlying all of this is a conflict that should never have begun in the way it did. The UN Charter permits the use of force only in response to an actual or imminent armed attack. No such attack had occurred, and America’s mercurial President Donald Trump alone assumed the power to determine what was an imminent threat. Iran’s supreme leader was slain not on the battlefield but in a meeting, while his diplomats were negotiating in good faith.

And what is happening to US diplomacy and the professional corps of trained officials that used to constitute the State Department? Rather than dispatching experienced diplomats adept in the protocols that make negotiation possible, Washington had sent President Trump’s personal emissaries: Steve Witkoff, a friend, and Jared Kushner, a son-in-law.

This did not escape Iran’s notice. It has subsequently refused to seriously consider any US overture to negotiate. Its foreign minister has said plainly that America’s recent 15-point offer for ending the war is not negotiation but a transmission of messages through intermediaries.

When the system of peacemaking itself loses its professional tools, the last channel through which this conflict might be resolved becomes unreliable. As we have seen, each of these violations feeds the next. This is the nature of spiraling norm collapse: what may appear as separate breaches eventually come together as a single, self-reinforcing breakdown.

Which brings us to where this normative collapse leads. What happens when war sheds its rules one by one until none remain? When treachery replaces negotiation, when heads of state are treated as legitimate targets, when embassies are bombed and international waterways are closed, and untrained personal emissaries take the place of professional diplomats, what follows is not war in any recognizable sense but a primitive clash of forces. In such a void, there is no mechanism for de-escalation.

The nuclear threshold—the last unspoken norm standing—is eroding in plain sight. Israel and the US possess the weapons. And Iran is drawing the only lesson this war makes available: that its 460 kilograms of uranium, enriched to near-weapons grade, is not a bargaining chip but the minimum condition of national survival.

Something of incalculable value is being lost in this war: a world in which the use of nuclear weapons is not a rational choice to be made by any state that feels threatened. To name this loss is the most urgent duty of anyone who still believes that words can matter.

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public.lives@gmail.com

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