Is international law still the law of nations?
When I studied international law in Heidelberg 60 years ago, international law was still considered the law of nations to live together in peace. However, those in power today, from Putin to Trump to Xi and Netanyahu, believe in the law of the strongest. The current war in the Middle East between Iran, Israel and the United States proves this assertion once again.
Iran’s firing of missiles at Israel is just as much a violation of international law as Israel’s missiles on Iran and the US bombs to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities are violations of international law. International law allows every nation to defend itself, but not to attack other nations. Wars of aggression are fundamentally prohibited under international law – and this has been the case for exactly 80 years.
Is the UN making itself redundant?
But the reality is different. In 2024 alone, the UN General Assembly passed 17 resolutions against Israel and six more against other UN member states. Result: none. Is it any surprise that the UN is hardly taken seriously anymore when Putin invades Ukraine with impunity or Iran, Israel and the US bomb each other with impunity?
It is particularly absurd that in the current orgy of war in the Middle East, all three main parties involved are declaring themselves ‘victors’. In Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei has just declared his country the ‘victor.’ Iran has “crushed” Israel, he said. Shortly before that, Israel’s Netanyahu had declared his country the ‘victor.’ And US President Trump had said it was a ‘great victory’ that US bombers had ‘completely destroyed’ Iran’s nuclear bomb plans. So everyone is a winner. The US intelligence service contradicts its own president. And where is the peace?
Ayatollah Khamenei has also declared that Iran will stick to its nuclear plans. The NATO states, like Israel, have declared that Iran must never be allowed to possess a nuclear bomb. So what applies now: international law, i.e. the strength of the law, or the law of the strongest?
At least there is now a ceasefire for a few days. But for how long? When will the law of the strongest prevail again?
When everyone proclaims ‘victory’, something cannot be right. There must be something fundamentally wrong and rotten about this ‘victory’. Common sense and logic tell us that.
It is therefore to be feared that, in the long term, the old doctrine that violence can only ever lead to more violence will once again prove true. The most important lesson of history is that if you want peace, you must prepare for peace. So far, however, the opposite has been true almost everywhere: those who want peace have always prepared for war. We are seeing the result of this again in the Middle East today.
Mikhail Gorbachev proved that the opposite is possible, paving the way for peaceful German reunification, as did Konrad Adenauer and Charles De Gaulle with their far-sighted and peace-securing Franco-German friendship. In accordance with international law, they laid the foundations for the European Union, in which no country has ever attacked another EU member militarily in decades. A political miracle! What was possible here is also possible in the Middle East or between Russia and Ukraine. The prerequisite, of course, is that as many people as possible really, truly want this peace. Only then can international law once again become the law of nations.
The UN is not superfluous, especially today, and neither is international law. Through its peace missions, the UN has prevented more wars than we can imagine – from Kashmir to Kosovo, from Congo to Cyprus – and it has saved millions of lives through its humanitarian actions.
Source
Franz Alt 2025 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
