Teaching international law has always required disciplined idealism. For those of us in the academy who reject the conceit of a benign American imperial order, it is an exercise in professional candour. One must teach rules while explaining, without euphemism, that the most powerful states do not feel bound by them and no longer bother to conceal it.
Consider the present moment. The President of the United States can announce designs on foreign territory such as Greenland not through treaty, referendum, or any lawful process, but by blunt invocation of “US interests,” accompanied by the warning that force remains available if persuasion fails. He can order the seizure of a sitting foreign head of state, Nicolás Maduro, from Venezuelan territory and then publicly boast that Venezuela’s oil will be redirected for American benefit. This has long been the practice of the United States in substance, but no previous president has been so candid about the premise. Donald Trump has stated openly that he does not consider himself bound by international law, that the only constraint on American power is his own sense of morality, a position he articulated on January 8 in an interview with the New York Times. What earlier administrations cloaked in the language of norms, necessity, or exceptionalism, he dispenses with altogether.
Intellectual honesty in the academy requires that this be taught for what it is: an explicit threat and a completed act of aggression, the very offence defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime. On that standard, Donald Trump is no less answerable in The Hague than Vladimir Putin, and no less than Western leaders such as George W Bush and Tony Blair should have been for the invasion of Iraq. This is not subtle. It is not a matter of contested interpretation. It is classical aggression and coercion, unembellished and undisguised, stripped of even the pretence of diplomatic restraint.
Yet much of the American mainstream media and pundit class does not describe such conduct for what it plainly is: a clear and unambiguous violation of international law. Instead, the debate is displaced. The question posed is not legality but prudence. Will this alienate allies? Is it strategically wise? Law disappears, replaced by a technocratic discussion of optics. When legality becomes a footnote to strategy, the legal order is debased.
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The indulgence is selectively dispensed. The two most militarily assertive powers, the United States and Russia, employ force with a settled expectation that nothing consequential will follow. When American aggression is at issue, condemnation is typically muted or purely ceremonial. Accountability exists largely as abstraction. The lesson conveyed to students is unmistakable. Power confers immunity.
Nowhere is this starker than in the treatment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Genocide is not assessed on the basis of legal definition or evidentiary threshold, but on political permission. If the United States does not wish the word to be used, it becomes unsayable. Language itself is subject to veto. This is not law. It is deference, fear, and self-interest masquerading as restraint.
European governments, meanwhile, are preoccupied with their own security anxieties and therefore reluctant to challenge Washington’s vision of the world. Their caution is understandable. Their silence is not. In moral terms, they have yet to escape the gravitational pull of their colonial pasts. The suffering of Palestinians is viewed through a different lens from that applied to Ukrainians, not because of scale or intensity, but because of race, proximity, and historical comfort. The disparity is glaring.
To sustain this imbalance, Western governments have inverted reality itself. A Zionist settler colonial project is presented as a liberal democracy, while every rule governing occupation, self-determination, and proportionality is bent or ignored. Words are redefined. Violence is reclassified. Victims are rendered abstract.
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The same indifference is evident in the United States’ violations of the UN Headquarters Agreement through the denial of visas to officials it disfavors. These are not technical breaches. They strike at the basic functioning of the international system. Yet there is no meaningful pushback. The international community absorbs the insult and moves on.
Nor is this confined to the use of force. The United States has unilaterally torn through trade agreements, destabilising the global trading regime it once championed. But trade disputes, serious as they are, pale beside the ultimate crimes. Aggression, genocide, apartheid and crimes against humanity are not marginal infractions. They are the apex offences of the international legal order. Yet the lesson delivered by practice is stark. When committed by the powerful or their allies, nothing follows.
This is the intellectual terrain on which international law must now be taught. Students are not naïve. They see the contradiction. They understand that rules proclaimed as universal are enforced selectively, if at all. The challenge for the teacher is not to sell illusions, but to explain why law still matters when its breach carries so little consequence.
International law today stands exposed as moribund. It survives less as a constraint on power than as a record of its abuse. Teaching it honestly requires acknowledging that the system was never designed to discipline empires, only to civilise their language. That is a bleak conclusion. It is also preferable to a dishonest syllabus.
If international law is to command authority, it will not come through pious reaffirmations by those who violate it most frequently. It will come through the insistence that legality is not contingent on alliance, race, or convenience. Until then, teaching international law remains a demanding exercise in explaining not only what the law says, but why it is so often ignored by those who wrote it.
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