“President Trump was the first and so far, I think, almost the only one among the Western leaders who repeatedly, with conviction, several times stated that it was a huge mistake to pull Ukraine into NATO. And this is one of the root causes which we quoted so many times.” -Sergei Lavrov (11 April 2025)
The admiration is revealing. When an aggressor state’s foreign minister praises an American president’s “understanding” of Russian crimes against peace,[1] legal order is in conspicuous peril. Among other things, Sergei Lavrov’s support of United States leadership is evidence prima facie that Donald J. Trump is on the wrong side of global justice.
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 because he viewed Ukraine’s wish to join NATO as an existential threat. This ongoing aggression[2] represents a Nuremberg-category crime under international law,[3] and is not legally subject to “remedies” of negotiation, cease-fire or armistice.[4] As a mater of law, one does not seek rapprochement with a criminal, whether individual or collective.
Nullum crimen sine poena, declares Nuremberg Principle No. 1: “No crime without a punishment.”[5] Accordingly, there is a “theater of the absurd” quality to Putin’s complaint that the Ukrainian victim state is striking the aggressor state’s energy infrastructures.[6] Moreover, there is an uncomfortable historical resemblance of this ironic complaint to Third Reich arguments that its World War II occupying forces (both Wehrmacht and SS) were somehow under attack by “bandits” and “terrorists.” This even includes Germany’s genocidal destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.[7]
Law and Power Politics
In the final analysis, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine lacks justifications in both law and power-politics (realpolitik).[8] Regarding the first standard, Ukraine – as a fully-sovereign state – would have every right to join a collective self-defense arrangement such as NATO, and Russia would have no right to identify ongoing Putin aggressions as legal. On the second standard, the idea that Ukrainian NATO membership could pose an existential threat to Russia is disingenuous at best. Even if the United States was currently led by a law-abiding president who didn’t view submission to Moscow as his overriding rule, the cumulative Ukrainian threat to Russia would be minor ipso facto.[9]
There are variously pertinent details, some of them overlapping and/or force-multiplying. Civilization can survive assorted threats from a simplifying American president,[10] but only by first embracing more viable systems of international law and global justice. Ultimately, these strengthened legal arrangements would need to be founded on widespread understandings of human connectedness or “oneness.” Inter alia, the macrocosm (global justice system) must follow the microcosm (human species singularity).
There are many nuances and details, but only one core justification: Any such international law transformation represents a sine qua non for human species survival. This necessary embrace of oneness ought never to be summarily dismissed as “unrealistic.”[11] On our self-imperiled earth, macrocosm and microcosm can only survive together.[12]
What should be our animating goal? For capable scholars and policy-makers, this objective should be an incremental but still-foreseeable end to balance-of-power world politics.[13] While plainly ascendant during Trump II,[14] any continuously corrosive postures of belligerent nationalism would ultimately endanger everyone. By ignoring the determinative primacy of human oneness, such incoherent postures would leave little reason for any long-term civilizational hopes.[15]
It’s time for a more genuine and history-based realism. It’s also “high time” to acknowledge that the overwhelming geopolitical issues of human survival are never remediable by politicians, their advisors or any docile “mass” of ordinary citizens. Whether in democracies or in dictatorships, mass suffocates intellect.[16] Though mass actually deserves to be treated as a quantité negligible, as an insignificant factor,it has now managed to transform itself into the potential destroyer of entire civilizations.
Longer-Term Requirements of Global Justice
To operate meaningfully despite mass, the tangible particulars of international law reform must first be recognized as overlapping and synergistic.[17] But what, more precisely, should capable legal thinkers and scientists intend to “re-design”? Without a far-reaching vision and jurisprudential “blueprint,” no plan could conceivably halt or slow down our Trump-accelerated race to oblivion.
Already, certain jurists and philosophers understand that we require operationally plausible visions of “cosmopolis,” an organically integrated community of humankind. Though seemingly utopian, nothing could be less pragmatic than clinging stubbornly to the failed principles of a “balance-of-power” world legal order. Ultimately, to fashion a viable system of international law, there would first need to take place an expanded willingness to realign narrowly national judgments of self-interest with the wider interests of humankind.[18]
In such unique or sui generis inquiries, history will deserve pride of place. Our current vigilante system of world law has its origins at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,[19] the treaty that put an end to the Thirty Years War.[20] Left unchanged, or modified by merely token kinds of change, this flawed system will experience recurring catastrophic breakdowns. To argue otherwise, especially during our bewildering nuclear age,[21] would be to reject everything we have already learned about civilization, law, science and species survival.[22] To argue otherwise would be to commit a plausibly irremediable error.
Fundamentally, the task boils down to this: Unless we humans finally take vision-based steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization – a law-based civilization based on the central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all. To reject this conclusion would require a supportable faith in “Westphalian” international law. During Trump II, no such faith should ever be expected.
There is more. The obligatory nature of this challenging conclusion is underscored by our species’ conspicuous “advances” in mega-weapons creation. Augmenting these advances, “powerful” states could sometime commit themselves to asserted strategies of nuclear war fighting and cyber-warfare. Already, the spread of internet warfare surrogates is supported by both democratic and authoritarian regimes. What ought we then to expect regarding critical international law improvements?[23]
At an End, and a Beginning
It’s time for candor. We humans are now at an end, but simultaneously at a beginning.[24] Until now, trapped in the primal circularities of presumed national interest, we have consistently managed to miss what is most important. Nonetheless, a promisingly two-part truth remains: (1) there is always a latent but determinative oneness to world politics; and (2) the costs of rejecting such oneness could become both existential and irreversible.
Though infinitely complex, these are all matters of intellect or “mind.” Such critical dimensions of human security and survival can be encountered in vital but generally-ignored literatures, most notably among such philosophic giants as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Karl Jaspers, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl G. Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Emmanuel Levinas, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[25] The persistent rejection of global oneness in everyday life, even in the world’s allegedly great universities, represents an elemental threat to each and every state’s collective survival.
Variously antecedent questions should now be elicited. Why have we made ourselves, microcosm and macrocosm (humans are never passive victims in such matters) existentially vulnerable? The correct answer would include reference to a continuous worldwide drive to discover personal identity in “membership.”
Human beings often fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death. Amid the palpably growing chaos that is once again stampeding across whole continents, we still wittingly celebrate unswerving loyalties to “tribe.” Ironically, to be sure, a net effect of such universal “patriotism” is universally-enlarged human suffering.
Always, everywhere, individuals desperate “to belong” will enthusiastically subordinate themselves to the apparent expectations of nation, class or faith. And more often than we might first care to admit, such subordination will carry with it an ecstatic acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we should be reminded here that the veneer of legal civilization is always razor thin.
Impressive scientific and medical discoveries aside, whole swaths of humankind remain dedicated to war-related practices of “sacrifice.” In this connection, especially amid jihadists, terrorism has become a de facto expression of religious sacrifice. Facing such retrograde adversaries, literally billions of human beings remain excluded from the most basic protections of contemporary international law. Today, during the dissembling Trump II era, this high number includes American citizens and non-citizens wrongly deprived of the right to asylum.
Survival and Rationality
There are further nuances. Do we humans remain determinedly irrational as a species? If so, why? The best answer lies in our shortsighted views of power-politics or political “realism.” In the merciless light of verifiable history, these views are strange and incomprehensible. Not until the twentieth century did international law even bother to criminalize aggressive war, and then with conspicuously little effect.[26]
Hope exists, so we must assume, but now it must sing more softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, sotto voce. Though counter-intuitive, the time for celebrating gleaming new artificial intelligence technologies (AI) is at least partially over. To survive together on this bitterly self-defiling planet, each of us must sincerely seek to rediscover an individual life detached from tormenting pressures “to belong.” Only after experiencing such a primal rediscovery could we (microcosm and macrocosm) hope to reconstruct international law on a durable basis.
In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, first published during World War I, Oswald Spengler inquired: “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?” This remains a profound and necessary query. The correct answer must accept that the suffocating conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by fortifying global economies, building larger missiles, abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid regime with another or childishly declaring one’s own state “first.”
Eventually, we must learn that our tribal planet lacks a tolerable future not because we humans have been too slow to learn what has been taught, but because what has been taught has too often been inane or injurious. Species survival can’t be enhanced if great numbers of people manage to acquire shiny new “personal devices” or cars that drive themselves. In candor, these are pitifully false and lazy goals, unworthy of any serious, dignified and law-based civilization.
There is more. Traditional legal “remedies” will prove insufficient if the planet as a whole remains on its lethal trajectory of belligerent nationalism and tribal conflict. Reminds French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955): “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ [the animating dynamic of Trump II] is false and against nature.”
Still, the bewildering and intersecting questions accumulate. How shall we best conceptualize alternative systems of international law and justice based on stable and cooperative visions? What are the recognizable “rules” for such mind-challenging conceptualizations? What kinds of scientific and jurisprudential thinking ought to be implemented? Are they even available in Trump II America? And what should be the place of natural law or higher law in such vital planning?[27]
To answer meaningfully, our thinking will need to be expressly dialectical. Among other things, that means accepting that there can never be any conclusively final or permanent vision of a unifying international jurisprudence. World system change is continuous and dynamic; heuristic models, on the other hand, must be temporary or transient. This is not in any way a sign of intellectual inadequacy, but merely an acknowledgment that advantageous legal “therapies” must follow verifiably correct legal “diagnoses.”
The Proper Place of Human Unity
“You are a citizen of the universe,” observed the ancient philosopher Epictetus, underscoring the obligation to think holistically, to understand and acknowledge the immutable “oneness” of human life on Planet Earth.[28] Reciprocally, it is the individual human being writ large who must ultimately define this “universe.” Each man and woman is a “little world,” a microcosm, and each such individual must be nurtured not only for his or her private sake, but also for their much wider planetary consequences.
“God loves from Whole to Part,” says Alexander Pope, “but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole.” In the end, even in secular-scientific terms, any improved system of world legal order will need to be “human-centered.”[29] By grasping this critical wisdom, legal scholars[30] and policy-makers could finally craft a viable survival path beyond balance-of-power world politics. This will not happen simply because it is necessary. History renders such a warning clear and unassailable.
What law-oriented path should we seek? Above all, it should be configured toward expanding global oneness and coexistence. Above all, it ought not represent just another grievously fractured road to civilizational oblivion.[31] Though this recommendation might seem ostentatiously naïve or unrealistic, nothing could prove less realistic for human survival than staying the course of Trump II’s gratuitous rancor and belligerent nationalism. This Trump II posture could never be more than a retrograde choice. As a unifying species, our only residual hope now lies in an improved system of international law and global justice that is based on science, imagination, empathy and courage.
A Personal Closing
As a professor, this writer (Louis René Beres) taught international law for more than fifty years at Princeton, Purdue, the University of Illinois and Simon Fraser University (Canada). Over that half-century, it became obvious that his students were able to separate their own private academic and career goals from the larger issues of planetary survival. Always, they remained ready to distance their own personal interests in wealth and security from the plausible fate of the planet as a whole. For one reason or another, these students rarely understood that before they could make any meaningful progress as individual “parts” of a coherent and interdependent “whole,” their imperiled planet would have to be made whole.
Without an improved system of world law and global justice there could be no viable paths to international security. In principle, at least, to identify such a critical system, initial steps should be taken in universities, what Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called “temples of intellect.”[32] Ironically, however, the academic study of international law has never been as peripheral or marginalized as it is today. This crude subordination of intellect and dignity to status and commerce is prospectively grievous, not just for the United States, but for an entire planet that so desperately requires “legal healing.”
Ipso facto, there can be no acceptable alternative to ending such lethal subordination. In this existential matter, microcosm and macrocosm would be closely interwoven. Only if the individual can change, we may learn from Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung,[33] could we ever launch world system transformations. Only by acting on the civilizational principle of global justice could humanity ever reasonably expect security from Donald J. Trump.
As long as this American president is cheered by Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister for “understanding” Russia’s crimes against Ukraine, the United States will have placed itself on the wrong side of history. In a worst case scenario, Trump’s blithe attitude toward Putin’s egregious crimes would create a widening war in Europe, one that could suddenly or incrementally involve weapons of mass destruction. In operationalizing its current bewitchments of language on Ukraine, Russia learned from the sinister linguistic inversions of Nazi Germany and America’s president chose to side with the Moscow dictator. Following all normal rules of syllogism and deductive logic, a once-unimaginable posture for the United States has now become plausible.
Sergei Lavrov’s April 11 2025 admiring praise of Donald Trump says it all.
[1] See Charter of the International Military Tribunal [Nuremberg] Aug. 8, 1945, Art. 6(a), 59 Stat. 1544, 1547, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, 288.
[2] Jurisprudentially, there are related issues concerning the specific crime of aggression. See especially: RESOLUTION ON THE DEFINITION OF AGGRESSION, Dec. 14, 1974, U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 U.N. GAOR, Supp. (No. 31) 142, U.N. Doc. A/9631, 1975, reprinted in 13 I.L.M. 710, 1974; and CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS, Art. 51. Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, Bevans 1153, 1976, Y.B.U.N. 1043.
[3] Regarding Nuremberg, see: AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[4] In law, a cease fire or armistice represents an intra-war convention, an agreement concluded between belligerents. Prima facie, such an agreement does not terminate a state of war. The 1907 Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, stipulates, at the Annex to the Convention, that “An armistice suspends military operations by mutual agreement between the belligerent parties.” (Emphasis added): See CONVENTION NO. IV RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR ON LAND, WITH ANNEX OF REGULATIONS. Done at The Hague, Oct. 18, 1907. Entered into force, Jan. 26, 1910. 36 Stat. 2277, T.S. No. 539, 1 Bevans 631, at Chapter V, Art. 36.) The courts of individual states have also affirmed the principle that an armistice does not end a war (See, for example, Kahn v. Anderson, Warden, United States, Supreme Court, 1921, 255, U.S. 1). Throughout history, armistices have “normally” envisaged a resumption of hostilities.
[5] The peremptory principle of Nullum Crimen sine poena, “No crime without a punishment,” has its origins in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1728 – 1686 B.C.E.); the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 2000 B.C.E.); the even earlier Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 B.C.E.) and the law of exact retaliation, or Lex Talionis, presented in three separate passages of the Torah.
[6] Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient Roman philosopher Tertullian, “I believe because it is absurd.” Ukraine’s right of self-defense is a peremptory or jus cogens norm under relevant international law. According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).
[7] See The Stroop Report (SS Major-General Juergen Stroop; Pantheon Books, New York, 1979). In Ukraine, Russia is now resorting to bewitchments of language similar to Nazi descriptions of Warsaw Ghetto annihilations during World War II. A Report to SS Maj-Gen. Stroop dated 8 May 1943 speaks proudly of killing “bandits and terrorists.” The report is accompanied by multiple photographs of elderly Jewish women and infant children emerging from underground hiding places. The hideous narrative concludes as follows: “If the battle against the Jews and bandits was difficult for the first six days, it must now be understood [emphasis added to recall current language in Sergei Lavrov’s praise of Donald Trump] that the Jews and Jewesses bore sole responsibility….” Recall that during the March 2025 White House meeting between Trump, Vance and the Ukrainian president, the US vice president chastised Zelensky for “never once saying thank you.” Seemingly absurd, Vance’s inexcusable comment was actually a calculated reinforcement of Russian propaganda, one similar in language to the Stroop Report) that turned murderous victimizers into hapless victims. Most importantly, the self-defiling Vance comment corroborated fears that American President Trump has openly aligned United States policy with Nuremberg-level Russian criminality.
[8] Explanations for continually seeking gains via perpetually failed power politics brings analysis back to the “microcosm,” to the individual human being who seeks in nationalistic bravado a path to personal immortality. In his posthumously published lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in his Philosophy of Right (1820), that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” The “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation from mere principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew its originating strength from the doctrine of sovereignty advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially conceived as a principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent a specific metamorphosis, whence it became the formal or justifying rationale for international anarchy – that is, for the global “state of nature.” First established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in The Republic (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as a power absolute and above the law. Understood in terms of modern international relations, this doctrine encouraged the notion that states lie above and beyond any form of legal regulation in their interactions with each other.
[9]Reciprocally, however, in certain unpredictable circumstances, Russian decision-makers could falsely conclude that Ukraine and its willing European allies were about to strike collectively, that such a strike would be “unacceptable.,” and that more-or-less massive preemptive strikes would be necessary. Any such conclusion could be the result of decisional-irrationality by Moscow. Expressions of such irrationality could take variously different and overlapping forms. These include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of pertinent individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).
[10] The Trump White House consistently seeks to persuade by way of deliberate simplifications and falsifications. On the expected consequences of such deceptive measures, see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation in On Certainty: “Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry….”
[11] “The visionary,” reminds Italian film director Federico Fellini, “is the only realist.”
[12] See, by this author: Louis René Beres, University of California (Santa Barbara): https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/august-2017/fixing-microcosm-global-governance-and-world-order
[13] Aside from an all-destructive nuclear war, a sudden end to anarchic world politics would be inconceivable. The concept of a balance of power—an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a more fearful variant—has never been more than a facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with any calculable equilibrium. As such alleged balance is always a matter of individual and more or less subjective perceptions, adversary states could never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances were tilted in their favor. In consequence, as each side must perpetually fear that it will be left behind, the continual search for balance can produce only widening global insecurities and unceasing global disequilibrium.
[14] One may be reminded here of Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse’s generic description of the barbarous ruler in The Glass Bead Game (1943): “The dull-witted brute, blindly trampling the flower gardens of intellect and culture.”
[15] The reader may be usefully reminded of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s observation in Endgame: “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?”
[16]See by this author at Yale Global: Louis René Beres, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage See also Louis René Beres, at US News & World Report: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-03-20/commentary-the-masses-were-never-intended-to-rule
[17] In synergistic intersections, the “whole” is greater than the sum of its “parts.”
[18] For an early book on such willingness, by this author, see: Louis René Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (University of Denver, 1975).
[19] See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the “Peace of Westphalia.”
[20] Though few Americans seem to understand, international law is a part of US domestic law. In precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[21] Under extant international law, no state is under any per se legal obligation to renounce access to nuclear weapons. Moreover, in certain distinctly residual circumstances, even an actual resort to such weapons could conceivably be lawful. On July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague handed down its Advisory Opinion on “The Legality of the Threat or Use of Force of Nuclear Weapons.” The final paragraph of this Opinion, concludes, inter alia: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
[22] We may think of the prescient warning by the High Lama in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The storm…this storm that you talk of. It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos…The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary.”
[23] International law is not entirely codified or treaty-based. It also includes certain norms of a customary nature. Article 38(1)(b) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice describes international custom as “evidence of a general practice accepted as law.” 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993 (June 6, 1945). The norms of customary international law bind all states irrespective of whether a state has ratified the pertinent codifying instrument or convention. International law compartmentalizes apparently identical rights and obligations arising both out of customary law and treaty law. “Even if two norms belonging to two sources of international law appear identical in content, and even if the states in question are bound by these rules both on the level of treaty-law and on that of customary international law, these norms retain a separate existence.” See Military and Paramilitary Activities (Nicaragua v. U.S.), 1986 I.C.J. Rep. 14, para. 178 (June 27).
[24] “Is it an end that draws near, or a beginning?” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951).
[25] See by this writer at Yale Global: Louis René Beres, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[26]A similar point could be made about “crimes against humanity.” Under authoritative international law, these crimes are defined as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during a war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated….” See Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Aug. 8, 1945, Art. 6(c), 59 Stat. 1544, 1547, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, 288
[27] Under international law, the idea of a natural law or higher law was drawn originally from the ancient Greeks and ancient Hebrews and is contained, inter alia, within the principle of jus cogens or “peremptory” norms. According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).
[28] A tangible expression of “oneness” between states lies in the common civilizational fight against crime, and has given rise to the core principle of universal jurisdiction. It is mentioned in the Corpus Juris Civilis; Grotius, THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE (1625), Bk. II, Ch. 20; and also in Emmerich Vattel, LE DROIT DES GENS, Bk. I, Ch. 19 (1758). The specific case for universal jurisdiction, which is strengthened whenever extradition is difficult or impossible to obtain, is also built into the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, which unambiguously impose upon the High Contracting Parties the obligation to punish certain grave breaches of their rules, regardless of where the infraction was committed or the ascertainable nationality of the alleged criminals. Today, in 2025, the principle of universal jurisdiction is central to the ICC warrant issued for Vladimir Putin’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Among these egregious rimes, the Russian president’s transfer of Ukrainian children to Russian territory represents genocide.
[29] A broad idea of such centeredness followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE; with it came a coinciding legal doctrine of “universality.” By the Middle Ages, this doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking at Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than a whole. Said Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, of course, the idea of human oneness discussed here can be explained in more expressly secular terms of analytic understanding.
[30] Rabbi Eleazar quoted Rabbi Hanina, who said: “Scholars build the structure of peace in the world. See: The Babylonian Talmud, Order Zera’im, Tractate Berakoth, IX.
[31] For informed accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[32] See Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (1921). See also, by Professor Louis René Beres at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/12/love-suffering-pity-and-death-the-tragic-sense-of-world-politics/
[33] See Carl G. Jung’s The Undiscovered Self (1957).
