The end of rules-based international order?
They remembered everything but learned nothing,” lamented the legendary French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand when observing the abject failure of the ruling elite to learn from past mistakes. The past week was perilously surreal amid the outbreak of direct conflict between the Middle East’s two most powerful militaries. The specter of the disastrous “Iraq War” was fully revived when the world’s superpower stepped in with neither clear legal justification nor definitive strategic end goals.
After initially welcoming nuclear talks with Tehran, which were seemingly headed for a “framework agreement,” and distancing itself from unilateral strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by a key ally, the Trump administration began embracing the Israeli operations, and, soon after, co-owning it. Then came the ultimate ultimatum: an additional “two weeks for diplomacy” announcement—only for America to strike Iran’s main nuclear facilities barely two days later. In response, leading experts such as University of Chicago professor Robert Pape openly asked: “[W]hy would Iran think US and Israel would stick to any peace deal, after two US-Israeli surprise attacks?”
In his Foreign Affairs Magazine essay earlier this month, Pape, a specialist in air war campaigns throughout modern history, underscored how “even following extensive airstrikes against [Iran’s] nuclear facilities, significant uncertainty about the condition of surviving elements and their ability to be reconstituted would remain.” Preliminary analysis suggests that Iran’s nuclear program remains broadly intact: the deeply buried Fordow facility is still in place, highly enriched uranium was reportedly moved to secure locations, and, more crucially, thousands of Iranian nuclear scientists and technical experts are on standby to reverse any major devastation. “Without onsite inspections, Israel would not be able to conduct reliable assessments of the damage done to Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities and existing stocks of enriched uranium,” Pape warned. “Iran is not likely to allow international inspectors, much less US or Israeli teams, to assess the exact degree of damage to its enriched uranium stocks, determine whether usable equipment or material has been removed before or after strikes, or pinpoint the manufacturing locations for the components for Iran’s significant domestic centrifuge production.”
The strategic upshot is troubling, since “[c]oncerns about Iran nuclearizing in secret would fester, mirroring the fears that drove the United States in 2003 to launch a ground war to conquer Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.” This explains why both Israel and US President Donald Trump have now raised the prospect of “regime change” operations, even as US Vice President JD Vance maintained the US was “not at war with Iran,” and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth clarified that the recent strikes were “not, and has not, been about regime change.”
What ostensibly began as a supposedly limited military operation to reverse Iran’s nuclear threshold status could soon morph into a total war. Mind you, Iran has a population that is more than four times that of early-2000s Iraq—and boasts a vastly larger military and more expansive, topographically challenging landscape. The cost of a total war would be incalculable.
No wonder then, a vast majority of Americans are wary of US military intervention. A recent YouGov poll found that only 16 percent of Americans think the US military should get directly involved in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, while a clear majority (60 percent) opposed it. Last month, a poll by the Brookings Institution showed that a decisive majority of Americans support a diplomatic resolution to the Iran nuclear issue. Should the US get bogged down in an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East, revanchist superpowers, such as China and Russia, will enjoy expanded latitude to impose their own hegemonic ambitions in their supposed backyards at the expense of frontline US allies, such as the Philippines.
Over the past decade alone, we have seen how superpowers violate international law with impunity: China bullying smaller neighbors and rejecting the arbitration case on the South China Sea, which it seeks to turn into a national lake; Russia shamelessly invading Ukraine without any real pretext; and now, the West sleepwalking into a total war with yet another sovereign state in the Middle East.
We seem to be returning to what the authors of the definitive book “The Internationalists” described as the “Old World Order” a century ago, where “the belief [is] that war is a legitimate means of righting wrongs … an instrument of justice. [That] Might was Right.”
