Impunity and a Dark World

This past week, we witnessed Trump and Netanyahu launch an illegal, immoral, and reckless war of aggression against Iran. Iran did not strike first. They pose no threat to the United States. In fact, they were negotiating in good faith with the U.S. The Omani foreign minister, who was acting as the primary mediator between the sides, reported that Iran had offered extraordinary concessions. However, before a deal could be reached, the US and Israel treacherously betrayed the possibilities for peace. They unleashed a devastating strike-first bombing campaign. The coordinated U.S.-Israel attack assassinated the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini and dozens of top leaders of the country. They targeted a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing over 165 children and injuring countless others. They’ve struck hospitals and civilian infrastructure, which are war crimes. Wanton death and destruction became normalized during the genocide in Gaza. So much so that the chatter class is reduced to merely asking, “what’s the rationale?” How grotesque! Atrocities are lawless and irrational, beyond the pale. These were egregious violations of international law. There is no rationale for slaughtering schoolgirls, for destroying key landmarks of ancient Persian culture, dismantling civilian infrastructure. This is the modus operandi of Gaza all over again.

We should not be surprised. The family of nations has failed to hold those who carried out the genocide in Gaza accountable for their grave crimes against humanity. This has created a pervasive sense of impunity. The message is: commit horrific atrocities and war crimes that violate every standard of civilized conduct as laid out in the UN Charter, and you will very likely get away with it. I realize the International Court of Justice has ruled that South Africa’s complaint against Israel’s conduct in Gaza is “plausibly genocide,” and ordered Israel to stop immediately. Israel and its primary patron, the United States, simply ignored this ruling. They also ignored the International Criminal Court’s warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant. They now must plan their international travel carefully so as not to be detained and handed over to the Hague for prosecution. But so far there have been no real consequences for their horrific crimes. Impunity breeds repetition. We live in an already-dark world where powerful nations bomb other countries into the Stone Age, and slaughter thousands upon thousands of innocents. They put out blatant lies and propaganda based on false, ever-shifting, and self-contradictory pretexts. Most importantly, they face no consequences for their actions. If we don’t want to live in this kind of world, then we must hold the wrongdoers accountable. On the other hand, if we’re saying this dark world is somehow tolerable, then we should just look away and allow it to continue. Because undoubtedly it will. As every parent knows, if you want to extinguish a negative behavior, you must address it directly and impose consistent consequences. Otherwise, it will continue, and likely worsen. Despite the obvious differences between parenting and geopolitics, it’s uncanny how this moral truth holds up. Immunity breeds repetition.

Let’s step back and widen the lens. Philosophers, theologians, and ethicists have argued about whether goodness or evil is most basic in our nature. But there is no denying that we are capable of both. Since we possess both tendencies, clear-eyed wisdom says we need to organize our collective life to encourage “our better angels,” and restrain the worst in us. This was uppermost in the minds of diplomats who gathered to form the United Nations (UN) in 1945. The stirring words of the Preamble of the Charter of the UN speak directly to this need:

We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.

The words of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) inscribed near the UN headquarters extol the highest possibilities of this freedom – “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Later in the Charter we find these words:

To maintain international peace and security…to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples…all members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

There’s no question. The Charter of the United Nations contains beautiful convictions. We desperately need these peaceable norms and guardrails to restrain violence and destruction. Without them, as political philosopher Thomas Hobbes warned, we will descend into a “state of nature” and “the war of all against all.” He described life in this dark world very memorably: it will be “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” If he were with us today, walking among the wasteland of Gaza, and observing what is going on in the world today, he would surely say, “This is what I was talking about.”

To push back against the darkness, the United Nations Charter must be reformed. Its structure is deeply flawed. Giving the “Great Powers” the status of “permanent members” of the Security Council, while all the other nations of the world – many in the Global South - relegated to lesser power status, and giving each member of the Security Council veto power, is deeply undemocratic and tragically misguided. More often than not, the General Assembly gets it right, and the Security Council gets it wrong. The General Assembly often stands with the poor and the oppressed, while the Security Council caters to empire and “might makes right.” The General Assembly has passed numerous resolutions condemning Israel’s occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, while the United States uses its Security Council veto to shield Israel from accountability. The General Assembly upholds the original UN vision of the abolition of war, including nuclear weapons, while the “great powers,” mired in lawless militarism, keep blocking the General Assembly’s yearning for peace. They keep opening the gates of the dark world.