The End of Morality

This article is one of 10 essays in the Summer 2026 print issue, The End of the World as We Know It. There was a time—not so very long ago—when world leaders felt obliged to lie to us. They didn’t always lie convincingly, but they went through the motions. When they violated international law, their lawyers produced lengthy memos explaining why, if you squinted just right, apparent violations weren’t actual violations. When they invaded other sovereign states, they invoked the U.N. Charter’s right to self-defense. When civilians were killed, they expressed regret and pledged to investigate. When they tortured detainees, they justified it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” States frequently ignored international law, but they took pains not to dismiss it outright. There was a time—not so very long ago—when world leaders felt obliged to lie to us. They didn’t always lie convincingly, but they went through the motions. When they violated international law, their lawyers produced lengthy memos explaining why, if you squinted just right, apparent violations weren’t actual violations. When they invaded other sovereign states, they invoked the U.N. Charter’s right to self-defense. When civilians were killed, they expressed regret and pledged to investigate. When they tortured detainees, they justified it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” States frequently ignored international law, but they took pains not to dismiss it outright. These days, major powers often dispense with the performance of adhering to international law altogether. In January, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, distilled the Trumpian view of the world: It’s a world “that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” A few days later, President Donald Trump drove home the point: The only check on his power, he told the New York Times, was his own morality: “It’s the only thing that can stop me. … I don’t need international law.” Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin declared last year that “no one is ready to play by rules set by someone far away”—certainly not Russia, when it comes to fulfilling the Motherland’s “destiny” or completing the task of “gathering the Russian lands.” Even China, usually more nuanced, has been abandoning the pretense that international law serves as a restraint. Reunification with Taiwan “cannot be stopped by any force or anyone,” President Xi Jinping declared in 2019. Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year derided an adverse decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration as “nothing but a piece of waste paper.” The old vocabulary of international law, with its invocations of universal values, now sounds antique. For all intents and purposes, international law is dead. Like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, international legal institutions continue their frenzied activity, but no one expects them to matter. But if international law is dead, who killed it? Was it Putin in Ukraine, with his talk of Russian destiny? Or Xi in the South China Sea, with his artificial islands? Or was the killer Trump, with his tariffs, his threats, and his war on Iran? A China Coast Guard ship fires a water cannon at a Philippine Navy chartered vessel, leaving four Filipinos with minor injuries, in the South China Sea on March 5, 2025.Ezra Acayan/Getty Images In truth, the story of international law’s demise looks less like a game of Clue than the plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: Everyone did it, and the victim mostly deserved it. It’s tempting to pin the murder on Putin and Trump, but international law has been mortally wounded for decades—and many who claimed to be its greatest supporters struck some of the most devastating blows. By the time Putin and Trump plunged in the final daggers, international law had become so riddled with internal contradictions that it had, in some sense, invited its fate. Modern international law traces its roots to thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, who envisioned natural law-derived rules governing war and sovereignty that would transcend kingdoms and faiths. As it matured, international law did at times function to restrain state violence, but just as often, it legitimized state violence, rationalized imperialist conquest, and excluded colonized peoples from the “civilized” community it purported to govern. After the Holocaust and the stunning carnage of two world wars, the international lawmaking enterprise acquired unprecedented urgency, idealism, and ambition. The U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions all represented, in effect, a wager that sovereign states would trade a degree of freedom for greater security and embrace a vision of a more just and equitable world. And it worked—almost. For a while. The second half of the 20th century saw a sharp decline in interstate armed conflicts. A

The End of Morality

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