The State of Nature, the Hormuz Consequence, and What Comes After the Rules-Based Order
The Record and Its Context
On 3 April 2026, this writer published The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law. The article was written before the F-15E Strike Eagle designated Dude 44 was shot down over Isfahan province on Good Friday. Before Trump posted on Truth Social on the morning of April 7: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." Before the ceasefire brokered by Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir: announced ninety minutes before Trump's own deadline, on terms Iran had largely set. Before the regime in East Jerusalem, denied its war aims against Iran, turned its lunacy toward Lebanon.
The argument of that article can be stated briefly: the phrase rules-based international order, as deployed by American officials, is not a reference to international law. It is a replacement for it (lex ex voluntate principis, law from the will of the prince), selectively applied and selectively suspended. The article examined statements by Secretary of Defence Hegseth, Secretary of State Rubio, and President Trump, and found in them not isolated provocations but a coherent doctrine of imperial administration, continuous with the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary, and the colonial grammar of civilisation and order that has always dressed the exercise of unconstrained power in the language of responsibility.
The events of the days following its publication confirmed that thesis more completely than its author had anticipated. This article records what happened, places it in the philosophical and legal framework it demands, and draws the implications for the international order, for maritime law, and for what comes after. It is also a response to Norman Finkelstein.
The Finkelstein Intervention
On 10 April 2026, Norman Finkelstein spoke in a joint release by Middle East Eye and Unapologetic by MEE. Finkelstein has spent five decades applying rigorous legal and historical standards to the conduct of Israel and the United States in the Arab world, at considerable personal and professional cost. His assessment of the current conflict belongs among the most important analytical statements produced in its course.
The core of Finkelstein's argument requires no legal sophistication to follow, but considerable intellectual honesty to state. When the United States and the regime in East Jerusalem launched their joint war of aggression against Iran on 28 February 2026, without Security Council authorisation, without an armed attack by Iran triggering Article 51 of the UN Charter, without any legal pretext of any kind. They did not merely violate international law. In Finkelstein's analysis, they ended it. The Emergency Security Council sessions that followed were, as he notes, precisely what the Russian representative described: Alice Through the Looking Glass. The victim was treated as the aggressor. The state subjected to the most brazen breach of the UN Charter in modern history was called upon to justify its existence. The institution sat in session and made the inversion official.
Norman Finkelstein, Middle East Eye, Implacable, 10 April 2026
At that point, Finkelstein argues, the world had returned to what the political philosophers of the seventeenth century called the state of nature. The term belongs to John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government (1689) described the pre-political condition in which no common judge exists, no neutral arbiter, no law binding on all parties by common consent. In the state of nature, each actor is sovereign unto itself in the matter of its own preservation. Locke reserved a particular category for those who exercise force without right and without acknowledgment of the other's humanity: the wild beasts. Such actors, by their conduct, have placed themselves outside the moral community. They forfeit the protections of the civil order they have abandoned.
The United States and the regime in East Jerusalem had become the wild beasts. Not as an epithet, but as a legal and philosophical designation. They launched a war of aggression. They assassinated the head of state and supreme religious authority of a sovereign nation, an act for which no international legal framework provides authorisation. They threatened publicly and repeatedly to destroy civilian infrastructure: power stations, desalination plants, bridges. They carried out a significant portion of those threats. And Trump said, in public, for the permanent record: "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it." He had previously promised to bomb Iran into "the Stone Ages" and to obliterate its generating plants, oil wells, and desalination capacity. Under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, the public announcement of intent to destroy what you intend to destroy is not merely evidence of a war crime, but it is itself a criminal act. These statements are on the record. The wild beasts made them, unashamed.
The Rotting Corpse
The events of April 2026 had a specific antecedent that must be named. In November 2025, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803. The resolution's operational effect, whatever its stated terms, was to transfer political authority over Gaza to the United States government, to Donald J. Trump. The institution whose founding purpose was the protection of sovereign peoples from exactly the kind of aggression that was about to be committed had handed the deed to a captive civilian population to the aggressor's patron. The UN had ceased to function as a moral or legal institution. Finkelstein reaches the same conclusion by the same route: it had become, in that moment, a rotting corpse.
The Emergency Security Council sessions following February 28, 2026, confirmed this in real time. Member state representatives rose to condemn Iran for responding to a war launched against it. The United States and its allies presented the aggression as a defensive campaign and treated the victim's self-defence as provocation. The Russian representative's Alice Through the Looking Glass observation was not rhetorical. It was structural description: a system that had fully inverted the relationship between law and power, and was now performing the inversion as official procedure. The Security Council had not merely failed. It had been turned against its own founding purposes.
This matters for one reason above all others: it answers the question of whether what followed was lawless. It was not. It was the exercise of the only law that remained.
The Right and the Responsibility
Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves the inherent right of individual and collective self-defence in response to an armed attack. Iran's right requires no elaboration. It was attacked on 28 February 2026 by two states acting in concert, without authorisation, without legal pretext, with stated objectives that included regime change, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, and the installation of a more compliant government. The right of self-defence does not depend on the Security Council's endorsement. The Charter says it explicitly: the right is inherent.
What Finkelstein's framework adds is the extension of this right, and its transformation into a moral responsibility, to Iran's allies. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), formalised at the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document, was designed as a doctrine of liberal intervention: powerful states acting to protect civilian populations when institutions fail. Finkelstein inverts it, not rhetorically, but logically. When institutions have not merely failed but been captured; when the powerful are themselves the aggressors; when the Security Council is being used to legitimise the assault it was created to prevent, then the responsibility to protect devolves to those who retain the capacity and the will to exercise it. It returns to its moral foundation: the obligation of the capable to come to the succour of the attacked.
Hezbollah, the Party of God, fulfilled that responsibility. Finkelstein is precise: it had every right, and one might argue every responsibility, to come to the defence of Iran against the wild beasts that were assaulting it. That Western governments and media will not say so is not a legal argument. It is a political position presented as one. The distinction is the entire argument of this article and its predecessor.
The Impossible Dilemma, Nasrallah
There is a figure at the centre of this analysis whose absence shapes everything that followed: Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, assassinated by the regime in East Jerusalem in September 2024. Finkelstein's account of Nasrallah's position in the preceding period deserves careful record.
Nasrallah was, in Finkelstein's assessment, probably the most serious political actor on the world stage in that moment. He faced what Finkelstein correctly identifies as an impossible dilemma. He wanted to defend the people of Gaza, this was not merely strategic calculation but genuine moral commitment. But he understood that if he pressed the resistance a step too far, Lebanon would be levelled. He attempted to find a middle path: sufficient pressure to constrain the genocide, insufficient to trigger Lebanon's total destruction. The path did not exist. He could not find it.
Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, martyred in the heart of Beirut’s residential areas on 27 Sept 2024 - mfa.irAfter his assassination, Hezbollah ceased its operations in defence of Gaza. It had concluded that the middle path was closed. When Iran was invaded, the choice became binary. In Finkelstein's formulation: live or die. Hezbollah chose to die, chose to accept total devastation, rather than abandon Iran to the wild beasts. That choice cost Lebanon enormously. Finkelstein does not minimise the legitimate anger of Lebanese civilians who did not wish to sacrifice their country and had every right not to. Both things are simultaneously true. Their grief is legitimate. And Hezbollah's decision to come to Iran's succour was, under the law as it stood and under the moral obligations Finkelstein identifies, the right one.
Israel, the regime in East Jerusalem, is now destroying Lebanon. Finkelstein calls it what it is: catatonic lunacy. A state that did not get its way against Iran, led by what MIT ballistics expert Professor Ted Postal described in interview as a homicidal maniac, is lashing out at the nearest available target. But Finkelstein goes further than a diagnosis of Netanyahu. It is not a lunatic state. It is a lunatic society. Through more than two years of documented genocide in Gaza, only five per cent of Israeli Jewish society considered the government to be using excessive force. Forty per cent thought it was not using enough. The German population under the Nazi regime had, however fraudulently, the alibi of claimed ignorance, the final solution conducted, in significant part, behind walls. Israeli society has no such alibi. It posts its conduct on social media. There are no walls. The comparison Finkelstein draws is precise and documented. He notes that fifty per cent of those murdered in the Holocaust were shot in open fields by soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing. The other fifty per cent died in the camps. The soldiers had no alibi. Neither does Israeli society.
A Sequence That Must Be Recorded
This article's predecessor was published on 3 April 2026. The events of the four days that followed were not yet known when it was written. They require documentation here, for what they reveal about the conduct of the war, the nature of the rescue operation, and the character of the threats that followed.
On Good Friday, April 3, an American F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Isfahan province by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile. Its pilot was recovered within hours. Its weapons systems officer, a colonel, spent more than twenty-four hours evading capture in the Zagros Mountains, hiding in a crevice at seven thousand feet while the CIA ran a disinformation campaign inside Iran claiming he had already been found. One hundred and fifty-five aircraft were eventually committed to the extraction. Two MC-130 transport aircraft suffered mechanical failure and were destroyed on Iranian soil. Two Black Hawk helicopters were struck by Iranian fire. An A-10 Warthog providing covering fire was brought down near the Strait of Hormuz, its pilot ejecting to safety.
On Easter Sunday, just after midnight, Trump announced on Truth Social that the colonel was safe. The language he employed was unmistakably that of resurrection: a warrior who had descended into treacherous mountains, been hunted by enemies closing in hour by hour, and been brought home. The White House press conference on April 6, Trump flanked by Hegseth and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was a performance of martial triumph.
Iran's foreign ministry raised a question the Western press largely declined to pursue. The ministry's spokesperson stated publicly that "the possibility that this was a deception operation to steal enriched uranium should not be ignored at all," noting that the rescue's claimed location was a considerable distance from the sites of attempted US landings in the operation. This was not an allegation made in a vacuum. On 1 April, American outlets had reported a developing US plan to use special forces to seize approximately 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium from the Isfahan nuclear complex. Iran had offered, prior to the February 28 invasion, to surrender this uranium as part of a negotiated settlement. The United States attacked rather than negotiate. Whether the rescue mission was also a uranium operation remains unconfirmed. That the Iranian government raised the question, given the documented plan, is not unreasonable. It is a question the historical record should hold open.
"A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight"
On the morning of Tuesday, April 7, Trump posted on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." He set 8pm Eastern as the final deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz or face what he described elsewhere as destruction of every bridge and power station in the country. He had previously threatened to bomb Iran into "the Stone Ages" and posted an expletive-laden demand that Iran's leaders open the strait or face hell. Congressman Mike Lawler, appearing on CNN, clarified that Trump was referring to civilian infrastructure, energy systems and bridges, as if that clarification mitigated the threat rather than confirmed it.
The threat to annihilate a civilisation, Iran is the heir to one of the most ancient and continuously inhabited cultures in human history, predecessor of the Persian empire, home to millennia of science, art, philosophy, and architecture, is not merely morally repugnant. Under Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute, threats of collective punishment and publicly stated intent to destroy civilian objects constitute war crimes. A state of mind expressed publicly, in writing, with a specified deadline, is legally cognate with the act it announces. These statements were made. They remain on the record. Democratic lawmakers described them as the words of an unstable and dangerous actor. Republicans were largely silent. The wild beasts made them, unashamedly.
Ninety minutes before the 8pm deadline, Pakistan's mediation produced a ceasefire announcement. Trump suspended bombing for two weeks, subject to Iran reopening the strait. Iran agreed to allow safe passage for two weeks, pending Islamabad negotiations toward a comprehensive settlement. Trump framed this as a deal. The Iranian Supreme National Security Council framed it as the opening of a negotiation toward terms Iran had set. Finkelstein's assessment is direct: Trump was too humiliated to attack again. He had not achieved unconditional surrender. He had not achieved regime change. He had not disarmed Iran. He had not prevented Chinese and Russian coordination against American positions at the Security Council. He had lost thirteen service members, seen multiple aircraft downed, watched his claims of total air dominance falsified in public, and been brought to a ceasefire by a Muslim state he had not previously treated as a significant diplomatic actor.
Two Blockades, One Standard
In the weeks before this article was written, the International Maritime Organization issued a formal condemnation of Iran's announced toll on the Strait of Hormuz, describing it as a "dangerous precedent" that threatened the global system of freedom of navigation through international straits. The condemnation is legally accurate as far as it goes. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, states bordering international straits cannot impose tolls on vessels exercising the right of transit passage. The IMO Secretary-General stated that international straits are meant for everyone's use and that no toll restrictions should be enforced. This is correct law, correctly stated.
It requires a context it was not given.
The same International Maritime Organization has issued no comparable statement across fifteen years of the blockade on Gaza, a blockade the International Court of Justice, in its 2025 advisory opinion, found to violate the prohibition on starvation as a method of warfare, the Fourth Geneva Convention's protections for civilian populations in occupied territory, and the Palestinian people's inherent right to self-determination. The ICJ's findings produced no IMO emergency session. No resolution co-sponsored by 115 member states. No statement from the Secretary-General about dangerous precedents. The institutional silence was not an oversight. The IMO's mandate covers navigation safety and transit passage, not military blockades of coastal territories. The law sorts neatly into jurisdictions. The moral and political weight does not sort with it.
| Situation | Legal Framework | International Findings | IMO Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gaza blockade (2007–present) | Geneva Conventions, IHL, ICJ jurisdiction | ICJ: violates prohibition on starvation; UNGA 149–12: demands immediate end; ICC: arrest warrants issued | None, outside mandate |
| Hormuz toll (2026) | UNCLOS, transit passage | IMO emergency session; 115-state co-sponsored condemnation; "dangerous precedent" declared | Immediate and formal |
The UN General Assembly voted 149 to 12 in June 2025 to demand Israel immediately end the blockade on Gaza, open all crossings, and ensure aid reached the civilian population. The ICJ issued binding orders. The ICC issued arrest warrants for the regime in East Jerusalem's political and military leadership on charges including the war crime of starvation. Nothing followed. No enforcement. No sanctions. No consequences of any kind for the party found by the world's highest courts to be in systematic, documented violation of the laws of armed conflict.
Iran received this lesson. Every state watching received it. The lesson was this: international law is enforced when it inconveniences those without protection from enforcement. It is not enforced when it inconveniences those with it. The Hormuz toll is not the dangerous precedent. It is the downstream consequence of one, a precedent set when the Gaza blockade was permitted to stand, confirmed when the ICJ's 2025 findings were met with the institutional silence of those who claim to uphold the law, and completed when the UN Security Council was used to legitimise a war of aggression against the state that drew the appropriate conclusions.
This is the maritime chapter of the argument made in The Prince's Rules. The law is the same law. The selectivity is the politics. Once the selectivity becomes publicly visible, ruled upon by the ICJ, voted on by 149 states, and still unenforced, the authority of the law does not merely weaken. It inverts. It becomes evidence, for every state watching, that the rules bind the weak and serve the powerful. That is not international law. That is the colonial legal tradition in multilateral clothing.
The Architecture of What Remains
There is a temptation, surveying the wreckage of the rules-based order, to conclude that what follows is chaos. The logic of events, and Finkelstein's analysis, suggests otherwise. What follows the collapse of a fraudulent order is not necessarily disorder. It may be the beginning of an order built on different, and more honest, foundations.
The Chinese framework, developed through decades of multilateral diplomacy and articulated most clearly in the architecture of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS framework, describes this as the transition from zero-sum to mutual benefit: a world in which sovereign states negotiate from their actual interests rather than from the imposed preferences of a self-appointed administrator. The BRICS expansion, the growing alignment of states that have been on the receiving end of the rules-based order's selective application, Pakistan's emergence as a credible mediator between the United States and Iran, these are not signs of chaos. They are the early architecture of a replacement.
Iran's terms in the Islamabad negotiations, full Iranian sovereignty over the Persian Gulf, the withdrawal of American forces from the region, a comprehensive ceasefire on Lebanon and all nations under assault by the regime in East Jerusalem, are the victor's prerogative. A state that survived an assault the aggressors expected to be swift and decisive, that maintained its governing structure, that demonstrated sufficient military capacity to down multiple American aircraft and strike regional energy infrastructure, that forced a ceasefire on its own timeline through Pakistani mediation, such a state negotiates from demonstrated resilience. Whether Trump will accept these terms, or continue to reframe retreat as deal-making for his domestic audience, is the question of the coming weeks. The answer will determine whether the Islamabad talks produce a durable settlement or merely a pause before the next escalation.
The First Major Lesson of the Century
Finkelstein closes his analysis with an observation that deserves to stand as the conclusion of this article as well. The war, he notes, has opened aspects of the system that were previously obscured: the sycophancy of institutions toward power; the information vacuum in the Western public sphere and the actors who have filled it; the willingness of allied states to facilitate aggression in exchange for security guarantees that no longer protect them. These things were always true. They are now visible.
Visibility is not resolution. But it is its precondition. The assault on Iran was, in Finkelstein's framing and in this writer's, the most brazen violation of the UN Charter in the institution's history, more naked than the invasion of Vietnam, more shameless than Iraq in 2003, because in those cases some minimal effort was made to construct a legal pretext. Against Iran there was none. None was attempted. The wild beasts acted, and the institution whose purpose was to constrain them sat in session and blamed the prey.
This cannot be unknowed. The states of the Global South, who carry institutional memory of how colonial powers spoke while they governed, who have read the texts of the civilising mission and the white man's burden and the stable governance brought by force, have watched this sequence in full. The argument that the rules-based order is a universal good administered by neutral institutions is finished. Not weakened. Finished.
What replaces it, if the moment is used with the seriousness it demands, could be something more durable: a genuinely multipolar framework, negotiated between sovereign equals, grounded in the frank acknowledgment that a shared order must serve shared interests or it will not hold. This is not idealism. It is the logic of the situation. The Persian civilisation that Trump threatened to end on social media on the morning of April 7, 2026, has endured for three thousand years. The rules-based order is seventy-nine years old. The week of Good Friday to the Pakistani ceasefire announcement has told us which one was the more fragile of the two.
"Portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts. Such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful, the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain military dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets."
— President Masoud Pezeshkian, Open Letter to the American People, 1 April 2026
A hegemon that has spent its post-war legitimacy faster than it can replace it, that threatened to end a civilisation in a social media post and accepted a brokered ceasefire ninety minutes before its own deadline, is not demonstrating strength. It is demonstrating that it has run out of arguments and substituted theatre. The world has noted this. It is reorganising accordingly. The first major lesson of the twenty-first century is being written in the rubble of Isfahan's bridges and the negotiating rooms of Islamabad. Its conclusion has not yet been set down. But its direction is no longer in doubt.
References
Primary Legal Instruments
Charter of the United Nations, 1945. Article 2(1), sovereign equality; Article 2(4), prohibition on use of force; Article 2(7), non-interference; Article 51, inherent right of self-defence.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Article 8(2)(b), war crimes including attacks on civilian objects and threats of collective punishment.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Protocol I), 1977. Articles 54 and 56, protection of objects indispensable to civilian survival.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 1982. Part III, transit passage through international straits.
https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf
UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025). Transfer of political authority over Gaza to American jurisdiction.
https://www.un.org/securitycouncil
UN Security Council Resolution 2817 (2026). Affirmed that impeding transit passage through international waterways constitutes a serious threat to international peace and security.
UN General Assembly Resolution, June 2025 (149–12). Demanded Israel immediately end the blockade on Gaza and ensure humanitarian access.
2005 World Summit Outcome Document, paragraphs 138–139, Responsibility to Protect.
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_60_1.pdf
International Court of Justice
Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), ICJ, Provisional Measures Order, 26 January 2024.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2025. Found Israel in violation of its obligation not to use starvation as a method of warfare and its obligation to ensure humanitarian assistance to the occupied population.
ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1996. Found most uses of nuclear weapons unlawful; left open a narrow exception in cases where the survival of a state is at stake.
Primary Sources Cited
Finkelstein, N. (10 April 2026). Interview on Middle East Eye, Implacable series.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4eg3yiYeQxc
Pezeshkian, M. (1 April 2026). Open letter to the American people, posted on X (@drpezeshkian). Full text: Bloomberg
Trump, D.J. (7 April 2026). Truth Social posts: "A whole civilization will die tonight"; "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day"; ceasefire announcement. Documented in NBC News, NPR, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour.
Iran Foreign Ministry, spokesperson Esmail Baghaei (6 April 2026). Statement on the F-15E rescue operation and uranium deception allegation. Documented in Wikipedia, 2026 United States F-15E rescue operation in Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_pilot_rescue_operation_in_Iran
Sharif, S. (7 April 2026). X post announcing ceasefire and invitation to Islamabad talks, 10 April 2026.
Preceding Article
Clothier, Y. (3 April 2026). "The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law." bushgrad.blogspot.com.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-princes-rules-north-america-western.html
Secondary Sources
Locke, J. (1689). Two Treatises of Government. Second Treatise, Chapter III: "Of the State of War." On the category of the wild beast and the forfeiture of civil protections by those who exercise force without right.
Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Metropolitan Books.
Falk, R. (2014). Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars. Routledge.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth.
