Rahila Qazi
Think about 1945 for a moment. Not as some dusty date in a history book, but as a time when people were actually living through the aftermath. Cities weren’t just damaged, they were flattened. Families were gone. Entire societies were trying to figure out how to exist again.
After two world wars in barely thirty years, the people sitting down to rebuild weren’t chasing elegant legal theories. They just didn’t want to watch the world burn like that again.
What they created wasn’t neat or fully thought through. It had gaps, contradictions, and political compromises baked into it. But one idea stood out clearly: countries shouldn’t attack each other unless they were defending themselves or had clear approval from the United Nations Security Council. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a line people were at least trying to hold.
Eighty years later, I’m no longer sure that line means very much.
Powerful states don’t really follow these rules in the way smaller countries are expected to. They interpret them, stretch them, and sometimes just ignore them when it suits their interests. Self-defense has been expanded so far that it can justify almost anything if you argue hard enough. And when the Security Council gets stuck — which it often does — countries don’t wait around. They act first and explain later, usually in language that makes it sound more principled than it really is.
You can see this pattern across different countries. The United States framed Kosovo as a moral necessity. Russia has offered its own justifications for interventions that most of the world rejects. China, meanwhile avoids outright war but steadily pushes its position in disputed regions right up to the edge of conflict. Different strategies, same underlying reality: the rules are flexible if you’re powerful enough.
To be fair, there’s a reason people defend some of these actions. The world doesn’t pause while lawyers debate legality. When civilians are being killed, waiting for formal approval can feel like doing nothing. Kosovo is still the example people turn to — many argue that acting without UN approval prevented something worse. In those moments, strict adherence to rules can seem detached from reality. But that argument only works if you trust the people making those calls. And that trust is hard to justify. For every case people defend, there’s another that went badly wrong. Iraq is the obvious one — intelligence that didn’t hold up, promises that didn’t materialize, and consequences that lasted far longer than anyone admitted at the time.
What feels different now isn’t that rules get bent — that’s been happening for decades. It’s how openly it’s done, and how little effort there is to even pretend otherwise in some cases. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine wasn’t just an invasion. It was direct and hard to justify under any serious reading of international law. In Gaza, the scale and duration of Israel’s campaign have pushed even cautious legal experts into openly questioning whether self-defense still tells of what’s happening. And drone strikes in foreign countries have become so routine that they barely trigger public debate anymore.
I have heard more than one international law researcher say the same thing in different ways: it’s not one violation that worries them, it’s the accumulation. When powerful countries act without consequences again and again, smaller states don’t see a system adapting rather they see a system they can’t depend on. So, they prepare for the worst. They build up their militaries, look for stronger allies, and assume no one is coming to enforce the rules. That kind of thinking doesn’t stabilize anything but it makes future conflicts more likely to happen more.
The Security Council itself doesn’t help. Five permanent members, chosen because they won a war eighty years ago, deciding what counts as legitimate force today — it’s hard to defend that without sounding like you’re ignoring reality. Ideas like expanding membership or limiting veto use in extreme cases have been around for years, but they never seem to go anywhere.
Even then, changing institutions won’t fix the deeper issue. The bigger problem is selective outrage. Countries call out violations when it suits them and stay quiet when it doesn’t. Western governments condemn Russia but make room for allies. Other states do the same in reverse. None of this is hidden, and over time it chips away at the credibility of the entire system.
1945 was, in a way, a gamble — that even countries driven by power and self-interest could agree to hold back, at least a little, after seeing how bad things could get. That idea has taken some serious hits. But it’s still worth holding onto.Because without it, you’re left with something much simpler and much harsher: power decides what’s acceptable. And history has already shown where that leads.
