International Law Can't Stop Tyrannical Regimes
by Gerald M. Steinberg • April 29, 2026 at 5:00 am
[Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth] Roth and his chorus, including morally blind academics claiming legal expertise, promote an imaginary "rules-based international order" that paralyzes democracies while protecting despotic dictators.
Under their absurd version of international law, preventive and preemptive strikes – like those carried out by the US and Israel – would be prohibited except against what they refer to as immediate, obvious, and universally acknowledged threats. In this form of unilateral disarmament reminiscent of European pacifists of the 1920s and 1930s, nothing can be done to restrain the world's malicious dictators and warmongering aggressors before they begin mass slaughter.
Whether in London, Ottawa, Berlin, or even Wellington, no plausible interpretation of international law requires democracies to wait passively for such catastrophic threats to become real.
Grandiose declarations by Western politicians claiming preventive force against murderous regimes is somehow illegal have become de rigueur. The leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Norway and most European countries have weighed in with parallel and often identical statements on the essential importance of obeying international law while waging war against Iran and its terror proxies, such as Hezbollah.
Such statements are a revealing snapshot of the shallow and dangerous Western discourse on war, law, and justice. Much of this is thanks to NGO personalities like Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, who have transformed rational conversation on human rights and the use of force in self-defense into ideological weapons. Roth and his chorus, including morally blind academics claiming legal expertise, promote an imaginary "rules-based international order" that paralyzes democracies while protecting despotic dictators and terrorist tyrants.
