{"id":316711,"date":"2026-06-01T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=316711"},"modified":"2026-05-27T13:06:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:06:33","slug":"do-us-war-crimes-doom-the-world-to-endless-war-and-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/06\/do-us-war-crimes-doom-the-world-to-endless-war-and-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"Do US War Crimes Doom the World to Endless War and Chaos?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On May 24, Iran\u00a0rejected<\/a>\u00a0President Trump\u2019s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations and Iran\u2019s $100 billion in frozen assets.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for\u00a0sneak attacks<\/a>, and the\u00a0charade<\/a>\u00a0of one-sided \u201cceasefires with Israeli characteristics,\u201d in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.<\/p>\n

Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it\u2019s written on, it\u2019s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the\u00a0UN Charter<\/a>, no matter what they all agree to.<\/p>\n

The only effective ways Iran has found to protect its land and its people are to build strong military defenses, including the capacity for devastating retaliation, and to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of the impact on the world\u2019s oil and gas supply and the global economy. By attacking Iran, the United States and Israel forced it to defend itself and triggered a war that is reshaping the Middle East and possibly the world.<\/p>\n

Losing this war is forcing the United States to finally start reevaluating the neoconservative tactics it has blindly substituted for a rational US foreign and military policy since the 1990s: sanction; threaten; bomb; kill; destroy; occupy; escalate; leave countries mired in violence and chaos \u2013 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon \u2013 never admit defeat; never question American exceptionalism or superiority.<\/p>\n

The systematic US disdain for the rule of international law that undergirds this policy appears to make peace impossible in today\u2019s world. But the final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.<\/p>\n

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has effectively exempted itself from the entire system of treaties, international laws and agreements that are supposed to govern international affairs, starting with the\u00a0UN Charter<\/a>, which prohibits the threat or use of force between countries, and the\u00a0Geneva Conventions<\/a>, which protect civilians, prisoners-of-war and wounded soldiers and sailors from the impacts of war.<\/p>\n

These treaties were drawn up and universally adopted in the wake of the Second World War, to \u201csave succeeding generations from the scourge of war,\u201d as the UN Charter says in its\u00a0preamble<\/a>. President Roosevelt returned from his Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in 1945 to tell a joint\u00a0session<\/a>\u00a0of Congress that they were designing the United Nations as a \u201cpermanent structure of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries\u2014and have always failed,\u201d FDR told Congress.\u00a0\u201cWe propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0UN Charter<\/a>\u00a0codified and strengthened the age-old common law prohibition against international aggression, and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact, which German leaders tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for\u00a0violating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, amid overblown Western triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, a new generation of US leaders, like\u00a0Madeleine Albright<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Dick Cheney<\/a>, came to see the\u00a0UN Charter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Geneva Conventions<\/a>\u00a0as obstacles to their ambitions to further expand US global power by more widespread and unrestricted use of military force.<\/p>\n

Believing that the new imbalance in military power freed them from compliance with post-1945 treaties and conventions based on the hard-earned wisdom of past leaders in two world wars, the US and its allies unleashed their armed forces to\u00a0attack<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0invade<\/a>\u00a0other countries,\u00a0torture<\/a>,\u00a0rape<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0kill<\/a>\u00a0prisoners, and\u00a0massacre<\/a>\u00a0civilians.<\/p>\n

US officials assumed that the new military\u00a0imbalance<\/a>\u00a0so greatly favored the United States that neither the UN, international courts, other powerful countries, nor even the entire people of the world could enforce the rules of international law and the laws of armed conflict on the United States if it chose to ignore them.<\/p>\n

It is ironic, and deeply frustrating and confusing to US officials, to find out that what they hailed as a position of overwhelming power and\u00a0impunity<\/a>\u00a0has led them to squander America\u2019s day in the sun and waste the chance that its great good fortune provided to improve the quality of life for Americans and their neighbors.<\/p>\n

The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proved to be a double-edged sword. There is no such thing as unlimited military power, short of the mass suicide of\u00a0nuclear war<\/a>. The idea that America\u2019s virtually unlimited investment in weapons and war would give it the final word in every dispute was a mirage, as even Trump is now finding out.<\/p>\n

As Americans reexamine the state of the world and the conflicts by which warmongering US leaders have tried to define it, it is obvious that war and military power do not lead to peace or prosperity, for Americans or anyone else. The more countries the Pentagon and the CIA take aim at, the more people they kill, and the more resources our leaders throw at them, the more other people all over the world rightly come to see the United States as a threat to their own lives and futures.<\/p>\n

Governments around the world face difficult choices between meeting the needs and aspirations of their own people or complying with the hegemonic and\u00a0undemocratic<\/a>\u00a0demands of the United States.<\/p>\n

After holding itself up as the champion of democracy and freedom for 250 years, the United States is only accelerating its own decline by wasting trillions of dollars, and what little is left of the world\u2019s good will, on this failed, ill-fated bid for global imperial power.<\/p>\n

When the United States rose to great power in the first half of the 20th century, its leaders were wise enough to recognize that exercising naked imperial power would not succeed in a world still fighting to free itself from the ravages of European colonialism. So FDR and his colleagues based the UN system on sovereign equality between nations, and created a framework for international relations that the whole world could agree to.<\/p>\n

Like all legal and political systems, the success or failure of the UN system rests on whether the most powerful countries will agree to live by the same rules as the others. The veto is a poison pill that corrupts the system, as Albert Camus predicted when it was unveiled in 1945.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this report is accurate, \u2026 it would effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy,\u201d Camus wrote in\u00a0Combat<\/i>, the underground French Resistance newspaper he edited.\u00a0\u201cThe world would be ruled by a directorate of five powers\u2026 The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the UN has developed the \u201cUniting For Peace\u201d\u00a0process<\/a>, which allows the General Assembly to hold Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) on international problems when a veto prevents the Security Council from acting to resolve them.\u00a0<\/a>The General Assembly used that process to\u00a0resolve<\/a>\u00a0the Suez Crisis in 1956, and it has been using it, albeit intermittently and inadequately, to address the crisis in\u00a0Palestine<\/a>\u00a0since 1997.<\/p>\n

In response to a\u00a0request<\/a>\u00a0from the General Assembly in its Emergency Special Session on Palestine, the International Court of Justice\u00a0ruled<\/a>\u00a0that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end without delay. And so, the General Assembly\u00a0passed<\/a>\u00a0a resolution demanding that Israel must bring \u201cto an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories\u2026 and do so no later than\u201d September 2025.<\/p>\n

Israel did not comply, so the General Assembly must take further steps, such as an arms embargo and an economic boycott. But it does have the means to do so and just needs to muster the political will.<\/p>\n

While the United States and Israel commit systematic and barbaric war crimes, presuming themselves immune from accountability, the world is slowly \u2013 too slowly \u2013 coming to grips with the international cooperation needed to enforce the \u201cpermanent structure of peace\u201d that all countries have agreed to live by, and on which the lives of millions of vulnerable people and the future of humanity depend.<\/p>\n

While US leaders are finally realizing that they do not have the power to intimidate and conquer the whole world, the American people are gradually understanding that we have an even greater power, the power to refuse to fight their criminal wars, and to insist on making peace and cooperating with all our neighbors on this small planet that we all share.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________-<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of<\/em> Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq<\/a>. He is also the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of<\/em> War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a>, now in a new revised, updated 2nd edition<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 24, Iran\u00a0rejected\u00a0Trump\u2019s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying Iran\u2019s $100 billion in frozen assets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":164428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[3729,87,742,88,2097,767,427,70,481,1025],"class_list":["post-316711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-ceasefire","tag-gaza","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-lebanon","tag-middle-east","tag-palestine","tag-usa","tag-warfare","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316712,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316711\/revisions\/316712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}