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Parts 1 through 3 built the diagnostic and prescriptive framework. The West's episodic war theory is a category error. Revolutionary movements identified that error and built a doctrine around exploiting it. We need to handle adversarial reality considerably better than what international law currently provides.
The question is, what should international law look like, or does it even make sense?
The first thing to say clearly is this: international law is a procedural system, not a moral one. It is a coordination mechanism among sovereign states, designed to manage conflict, reduce escalation, and create predictable expectations of behavior. What it does not do, despite the moral language that constantly surrounds it, is adjudicate right and wrong.
Terms like "war crimes," "international justice," and "the rules-based order" carry enormous moral weight in public discourse. They imply that legal compliance tracks moral legitimacy and legal violation tracks moral culpability. But the system's enforcement depends almost entirely on political power and consent. Its institutions are manipulated by the states that fund them. Its definitions are negotiated by parties with interests in the outcomes.
The UN couldn't agree on a definition of terrorism because too many member states wanted their favored terror groups excluded. Syria used chemical weapons repeatedly while sitting on the Security Council. The International Criminal Court pursued Israeli commanders while Hamas leadership walked free. This is the system operating exactly as its political structure predicts.
In other words, there is a huge gap between what is legal and what is moral. Things that are legal (like Iran's ballistic missile program) can be immoral, and things that are moral (like the Osirak strike) may be considered illegal.
Updating international law cannot work. The problem isn't technical, it's structural. Any reform flexible enough to address the capability-threshold problem and the continuous-war doctrine is also flexible enough to be claimed by Russia against Ukraine, by China against Taiwan, by Iran against Israel. The universality that gives international law its legitimacy is precisely what makes it unreformable for this class of problem. You cannot write a rule that applies to everyone and have it apply only to good-faith actors.
The deeper issue is that universal legal systems have a scaling problem. A system that must govern hundreds of states with radically different traditions, threat environments, and political structures cannot be both universal and morally serious simultaneously. The attempt to make it both produces exactly what we have - universal enough to be hijacked, morally serious enough to weaponize as language, neither in practice.
The solution is not a better universal system. It is a different architecture entirely.
The proposed solution has two parts.
There needs to be a system where there is a basic set of laws that everyone can agree upon, like not targeting civilians, prohibiting weapons of mass civilian destruction, and not murdering prisoners of war. They are universal because they represent the floor below which no war doctrine can descend without forfeiting moral standing entirely, and every serious tradition knew this before any convention was signed.
But above that, each state publishes their own laws of war. Most states do this already - they have military manuals that go into detail as to what they can and cannot do. States must make these regulations and policies public and transparent, and they should be judged against them.
Pluralism is more realistic than universalism. Even today, there is a reason every country has its own published rules of war: there are always specific circumstances that apply to individual countries. It is the honest recognition that different states, different traditions, and different threat environments produce legitimately different doctrines - and that this diversity is preferable to a false universalism that the most ruthless actors exploit most effectively.
What makes pluralism workable rather than anarchic is transparency and self-accountability. Each state develops and publicly declares its own laws of war. Those declarations are public and criticizable. Each state is held accountable — by its allies, by its citizens, by history — against its own declared standards, not against a universal standard negotiated by parties with conflicting interests.
Voluntary treaties and signed conventions carry genuine moral obligation within this framework, because consent creates responsibility in a way that imposition does not. A state that signs the Chemical Weapons Convention and violates it is culpable in a way that a state operating outside a framework it never accepted is not.
If states voluntarily decide to be subject to rulings of the ICC, that is fine. But states that do not should not be penalized by than decision.
International law functions as a reference point — a repository of accumulated wisdom about how wars should be fought — not as a moral authority whose pronouncements supersede national survival. The ICRC can (and does) publish its own interpretation of the laws of armed conflict; it should be used as a reference but not as canon. Every state can specify which parts they disagree with and why.
You may ask, if states declare their own laws of war, what prevents a state from simply declaring chemical weapons, torture, or deliberate civilian targeting legitimate? Doesn't that dissolve the floor entirely?
Two mechanisms within the framework itself answer this, with no external enforcement required.
First: a declaration that violates the irreducible floor is itself a casus belli. This follows directly from the relational framework established in Part 3. Declared hostile intent combined with capability constitutes a state of war in Locke's sense. A state that publicly declares its intention to use weapons designed purely for mass civilian suffering has announced something about its relationship to every other state simultaneously. That declaration, combined with possession, already meets the threshold criteria. No tribunal is required, the transparency requirement enforces itself: your public doctrine has consequences you cannot later disclaim.
Second: states may include exception clauses in their own declared doctrines when dealing with enemies who themselves violate accepted rules. If observing a specific protection systematically disadvantages you against an enemy who deliberately exploits that protection as a weapon, you may relax that specific protection to the degree necessary to restore operational parity, but no further.
Hamas fires from hospitals, stores weapons in schools, and uses civilian infrastructure as deliberate military cover, meaning Israel's genuine commitment to protecting those sites becomes a tactical asset for Hamas, not a protection for civilians. In that specific context, the protection can be adjusted — not eliminated, but recalibrated to account for the systematic exploitation, with evidence, proportionality, and public justification.
An enemy that consistently uses white flags as deception reduces the operational presumption of surrender — not eliminates it, but adjusts the evidentiary threshold required before extending it.
This is not carte blanche for a nation to ignore accepted rules if their enemies do. If one side uses chemical weapons against civilians that does not mean the other side can do the same. But if one side weaponizes civilians or humanitarian symbols or religious sites, the other side can justify attacking them.
The exception clause invocation is never self-executing. It must be publicly justified — against the adversary's own declared doctrine, demonstrated behavior, and the specific operational disadvantage being created. The evidentiary burden is high, visible, and applied to the specific protection being adjusted, not to the laws of war generally. The claim is either sustained by the record or exposed as false by it.
This framework gives precise, evidence-based, proportionate adjustment to specific protections that have been systematically converted into weapons — and it requires you to show your work publicly.
This is not perfect. It can still be abused. Catching deception is not easy. But we have that situation today as well. The advantage here is not to treat international law as a moral system when it can be used for immoral purposes. A nation that hides its crimes invites others to demand answers - or suffer consequences. Transparency helps a great deal here.
Iran's revolutionary doctrine is public. It declares permanent hostility toward Israel and the United States as a founding constitutional principle, endorses proxy warfare, deliberately targets civilians through those proxies, and has consistently pursued weapons of mass destruction as instruments of that struggle. Judged against its own declared standards, Iran has placed itself outside the irreducible floor. The declaration is its own condemnation.
Israel's military doctrine is public, detailed, and rigorously applied. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality relative to military objectives, warnings before strikes where operationally possible, and investigation of alleged violations. Israel has a functioning military legal system that has prosecuted soldiers for violations of its own standards. Judged against its own declared doctrine, Israel's conduct reflects genuine structural commitment to fighting within a serious ethical framework under conditions deliberately engineered to make that commitment costly.
These are not morally equivalent positions. The current system treats them as if they are. An honest framework makes the difference visible and lets the record speak.
There is no institutional solution to a world containing genuinely malign actors with veto power. The existing system's pretense that institutions solve this problem is precisely what revolutionary movements have spent decades exploiting.
Right now, the international law system has been politicized and hijacked. Strong states do whatever they want anyway, and terrorist states hide behind the law.
A theory of law must be based on reality. The only way this can happen is if the malign actors are forced to be transparent about their policies and others can act accordingly.
Law is not morality. But morality must govern what laws we build - and anticipate how they will be perverted by those who treat them as weapons rather than obligations
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