As a fragile ceasefire holds between Israel and Lebanon and the region absorbs the consequences of the most significant military confrontation with Iran in modern history, a familiar chorus has resumed.
Critics insist that Israeli military action represents the defining blow to the rules-based international order. They are right about the verdict. They have the wrong defendant.
The obituary for international norms was written long before Israeli jets entered Lebanese airspace or struck targets in Tehran. Choosing strategic interest over institutional integrity, the world’s leading powers authored these norms – quietly and over decades – while the rest of the world mostly looked away.
Consider the record. When Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in a Saudi consulate in 2018, Western capitals responded with rhetorical outrage followed by undisturbed arms sales and diplomatic normalization.
When Bashar al-Assad deployed sarin gas against Syrian civilians, Security Council condemnations were structurally guaranteed to go nowhere.
When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the international community issued sanctions that left the annexation intact and then watched Europe deepen its energy dependence on Moscow before standing by as Putin launched a full invasion in 2022.
When the Chinese Communist Party constructed an industrial-scale detention network targeting Uyghur Muslims, which the US State Department labeled a genocide, the world’s response was calibrated by trade exposure and not moral urgency.
In each case, the pattern was identical: rhetorical condemnation, institutional theater, and the careful preservation of relationships with norm-violating states because dismantling them was deemed too costly.
The rules-based order was not merely damaged by these episodes; it was defined by them. What emerged was a system in which international law functioned as a cudgel against the weak and a suggestion for the powerful.
Consider what recently happened, in real time: Iran fired cluster munitions, banned by more than 100 states, directly at Israeli residential neighborhoods. Even Amnesty International condemned the strikes as clear violations of international humanitarian law.
The loudest voices are against Israel
Iran’s security forces had massacred thousands of their own civilians in the months prior. No Security Council resolution holding Iran accountable passed because China and Russia ensured it would not. Yet the loudest institutional voices have continued to center Israel as the primary threat to global norms.
The founding chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court invoked the rules-based order specifically in response to Israeli and American action. One might reasonably ask where that prosecutor was when Iran was firing banned munitions at apartment buildings.
The selective application is not incidental. It reveals that what is being enforced is not law but politics, dressed in legal language.
This points to the deeper structural problem that critics of Israel are unwilling to confront. The rules-based order was constructed by a handful of post-war Western states and encoded their preferences, their hierarchies, and their blind spots.
Emerging powers were either excluded from its founding architecture or have come to regard its norms as instruments of Western dominance rather than universal obligations.
Turkey, a NATO member and longtime EU aspirant, has spent years dismantling democratic institutions, jailing elected officials and opposition leaders, and conducting unilateral military operations in Syria and Iraq, all while facing little more than procedural censure from the same Western bodies that invoke international norms against Israel.
India, a state the West has actively courted as a strategic partner, declined to affirm that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine constituted a threat to the rules-based international order, treating the conflict as Europe’s problem rather than a systemic challenge requiring a systemic response.
Brazil and the Gulf states have similarly declined to treat international norms as binding when those norms conflict with their interests.
This is not defection from the system. Rather, it is the system revealing what it always was: a framework in which compliance is optional for the powerful and mandatory only for the exposed.
The transition to a multipolar world is not simply a redistribution of power. It is a contest over whose rules count, waged by states that were never meaningfully consulted in the original norm construction and feel no obligation to be bound by its outcomes.
A singular exception was inserted into this system: Israel has been subjected to a standard no other democracy faces, judged by institutions whose membership rosters read as a catalogue of the world’s most prolific human rights violators.
The UN Human Rights Council has censured Israel more times than every other state on earth combined, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
This is not incidental; it is architecture, and it brings us to the most glaring incoherence in the current debate.
Israel is a state systematically failed by the rules-based order: subjected to institutional bias across every major multilateral body, denied the protections routinely extended to other democracies under existential threat, and held responsible for conflicts whose architects, from Tehran to Beirut, have faced no comparable international accountability.
Iran spent decades building a regional proxy network explicitly designed to overwhelm Israeli defenses while insulating itself from meaningful censure behind a wall of procedural deniability. The international community’s response was a nuclear deal that enriched the regime without dismantling its military ambitions.
Israel is now being asked to subordinate its security decisions to the very institutions that failed it, in service of an order whose defenders have spent decades demonstrating they will not enforce it against anyone else.
Principled concerns about proportionality, civilian protection, and humanitarian access in wartime are serious and worth debating. However, the argument that Israeli military strategy is responsible for the collapse of the international legal order requires ignoring 30 years of precedent in which the world’s most flagrant norm violators paid no meaningful price.
It requires selectively enlisting legal frameworks against the one state that faces genuine existential threats, while extending structural impunity to the states actually responsible for the system’s decay. And, above all, it requires asking a state that was betrayed by the rules-based order to bear sole responsibility for repairing a system it never broke.
If there is to be a serious reckoning with the death of the rules-based order, it must begin with an honest accounting of who broke it.
That accounting does not begin in Gaza or Beirut. It began in Beijing, Moscow, Ankara, and every capital that chose profitable silence over institutional integrity, year after year, until the silence became the system.