A war without rules
Even wars, which imply disorder, have rules. And that’s because without shared expectations, conflict becomes unmanageable. A war where everything is allowed destroys not only its targets but eventually its authors.
That basic assumption has been fatally ignored in the ongoing American and Israeli war against Iran. The violations that are being committed today by all sides in t...
This narrative presents a stark vision of normative collapse in international relations, where the erosion of long-standing rules of war and diplomacy accelerates into a self-reinforcing cycle of escalation. The strongest version of this argument is its emphasis on the systemic unraveling of post-1945 constraints: the violation of perfidy, the targeting of heads of state, the bombing of embassies, and the replacement of professional diplomacy with personal emissaries. These breaches are framed n...