When Power Kills the Law
by David Palethorpe
International law still exists on paper.
But when the world’s most powerful nations can disregard it without consequence, does it retain any meaningful authority?
The United Nations Security Council has been paralysed by its own design.
Its five permanent members possess the power to veto substantive action—and three of them, Russia, China and the United States, repeatedly use that privilege to protect themselves or their allies from accountability.
The United Nations still speaks, but too often it cannot act.
It has become the proverbial tiger without teeth.
Recent United States military action against Iran makes this failure painfully clear.
Whatever language is used to justify it in the American media, the unilateral attacks represent an unmistakable use of force in pursuit of a president’s ambitions.
They also demonstrate to the world that, when a powerful country chooses military action, the international system has few effective means of restraining it.
The United Kingdom’s refusal to condemn such action immediately and unequivocally should not be mistaken for neutrality.
Silence from an ally is itself a political choice.
By remaining quiet, the British Government risks aligning itself with international lawlessness while continuing to claim that it stands for a rules-based international order.
Those rules cannot be credible if they are enforced against weaker countries but treated as optional by the powerful.
We see the same pattern across the world.
Israel continues its devastating campaign in Gaza with impunity.
Russia and China use their influence to shield themselves and their allies from consequences.
Powerful states ignore United Nations resolutions when they prove inconvenient yet readily impose sanctions and demands upon nations with less economic or military power.
Justice applied selectively is not justice.
Law enforced only against the weak is not law in any meaningful sense; it is an abuse of power dressed in legal language.
This raises an unavoidable question:
What purpose does the United Nations now serve?
It still performs valuable humanitarian, diplomatic and peacekeeping work.
Abandoning it casually would create dangers of its own.
But we must also recognise that its central mechanism for maintaining international peace is no longer fit for purpose.
A system that gives five countries permanent authority to prevent action against themselves can never deliver equal accountability.
I recognise the irony of making this argument as an Englishman.
Britain has its own imperial history and has often helped create the very double standards it now claims to oppose.
But this is the twenty-first century.
We were supposed to have learned—from Iraq, from Gaza and from decades of selective justice—that military power without accountability leaves devastation behind and breeds further conflict.
Millions of people in the United States and the United Kingdom are horrified by what their governments do in their name.
Millions of others cheer those actions on.
That division should alarm us, particularly when nationalism, dressed up as patriotism makes the use of force easier to celebrate than to question.
Perhaps the time has come for law-abiding nations to begin building a new international body:
One without permanent vetoes,
One in which every member is subject to the same standards, and,
One capable of imposing consequences regardless of a country’s wealth, alliances or military strength.
Creating such an institution would be extraordinarily difficult.
Yet difficulty is not an excuse for accepting a system that repeatedly fails those it was established to protect.
I may not live to see what comes next.
My children and grandchildren will.
And I fear for the world we are leaving them—a world in which law restrains the weak, power protects the strong, and silence allows both to continue.
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