When the hegemon declares itself above the rules it claims to uphold, the world notices.
Three Men, One Doctrine
On March 5, 2026, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth stood before a conference at US Southern Command in Florida and invoked the Monroe Doctrine as the living foundation of current American strategic policy. He described a "Greater North America" stretching from Greenland to the Panama Canal, declared the nations of this region to be outside the category of the Global South, and framed them as components of the United States' immediate security perimeter. He spoke of preserving Western civilisation, dismissed the principle that diversity is a source of strength as a military absurdity, and invoked Theodore Roosevelt's vision of "eternal peace" in the hemisphere. To understand what that invocation carries, it is worth pausing on Monroe. James Monroe's 1823 doctrine was, at its core, a defensive declaration. The newly independent United States, surrounded by European imperial powers with active interests in the Americas, declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonisation. European powers were to stay out; the American republics would manage their own affairs. It was the assertion of a boundary, imperfect, self-interested, but structurally defensive in logic.
Roosevelt's 1904 Corollary presented itself as a natural extension of this logic. In practice it inverted it entirely. Where Monroe had said to Europe: you may not come in, Roosevelt said to the hemisphere: we may come in whenever we judge it necessary. Any Latin American state deemed insufficiently orderly, by Washington's definition, on Washington's timetable, could expect American military intervention to restore what Roosevelt called civilisation and order. The boundary that Monroe drew to keep imperial power out became, under Roosevelt, a licence to exercise it within. This is not a corollary in any honest sense. It is a colonial franchise, dressed in the language of stewardship.
Hegseth's speech, with its Greater North America strategic map, its dismissal of Global South solidarity, and its invocation of Roosevelt's eternal peace, stands in direct continuity with this tradition. And the tradition carries within it the same foundational folly that has undone every iteration of it: the belief that peace can be produced by confrontation, that order can be imposed through disorder, that civilisation can be defended by abandoning the values that give the word meaning.
This is the deepest contradiction running through all three speeches examined in this article. Hegseth invokes Western civilisation. Rubio invokes a rules-based order. Trump invokes America First. Each invocation claims a body of shared values, law, stability, the protection of the innocent, the dignity of sovereign peoples, as the justification for actions that systematically violate those very values. Civilian infrastructure is targeted in the name of security. Heads of state are assassinated in the name of order. Resources are seized in the name of partnership. Allies in Europe and Asia watch their own interests subordinated, their own legal frameworks dismissed, their own counsel ignored, and are told this is leadership. The result is not the consolidation of legitimacy but its accelerating expenditure. Every ally estranged, every legal norm violated in public, every gap between stated principle and demonstrated conduct widens the distance between the claim and the reality. A power that governs by spectacle, that mistakes the performance of strength for its substance, does not accumulate authority. It consumes it. Roosevelt understood, at least, that the appearance of civilised order required some minimal consistency between word and deed. The current administration has dispensed even with that constraint. What remains is the assertion of will, undressed.
On March 31, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on Good Morning America and described the objectives of Operation Epic Fury against Iran: the destruction of Iran's navy, air force, missile manufacturing capacity, oil infrastructure, and, stated as a conditional threat, its power stations and desalination plants. He noted, with approval, that Iran is currently in a weakened state, which he argued made this an opportune moment to press the campaign to completion. He expressed hope for a new, more reasonable Iranian government.
On April 1, President Donald Trump addressed the nation. He described the assassination of Iranian leaders as an operational achievement, announced that Venezuela's oil and gas resources were now being accessed in "partnership" with the United States following a military operation, threatened to strike Iran's power stations if a deal was not reached, and declared that Iran had been "completely destroyed militarily and economically." He framed all of this as the defence of America and the free world.
These are not isolated statements. They are a doctrine, stated in public, without apology.
The Monroe Doctrine as Living Law
The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823, asserted that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further European colonisation and that the United States would regard interference in the affairs of its neighbours as a threat to its own peace and security. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it functioned as a licence for American intervention across Latin America and the Caribbean, to protect American economic interests, to remove governments deemed unfriendly, and to install or sustain those deemed cooperative.
Hegseth's speech did not emerge from nowhere. It is the most explicit articulation of a project that predates Operation Epic Fury and the strikes of February 28, a concerted effort, visible across Trump's second administration from its earliest days, to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine not as a historical reference point but as active governing doctrine. The annexation rhetoric around Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal; the arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro; the redesignation of Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organisations subject to military action, these are not separate policy initiatives. They are the sequential installation of an imperial perimeter, each step normalising the next. Hegseth's SOUTHCOM speech was not the beginning. It was the public announcement that the framework was now complete enough to name openly.
And yet, for all its political momentum, the doctrine on which this project rests has no standing in international law. It is a unilateral declaration by one state that the sovereignty of its neighbours is conditional on that state's approval. It has no standing in the UN Charter, which is built on the sovereign equality of all states regardless of geography or relative power. Hegseth's revival of it, and his extension of its logic to include the explicit removal of sovereign nations from the Global South solidarity framework, is not a historical curiosity. It is a policy statement: these nations belong to our perimeter, not to their own community of peers.
This is the colonial sphere of influence, restated for the twenty-first century. The language has been updated. The structure is identical.
Hegseth's reference to Roosevelt's "eternal peace" is particularly telling. Roosevelt's 1904 Corollary stated that the United States, as a "civilised nation," had not only the right but the duty to intervene in states that failed to maintain order or honour their international obligations, as defined, of course, by Washington. The language of civilisation, order, and duty is the precise vocabulary through which colonial powers have always explained why the rules they impose on others do not apply to themselves. To hear it spoken approvingly at a military command headquarters in 2026 is not surprising. It is instructive.
Weakness as Justification
When Rubio observed that Iran is currently in a weakened state, and that this makes the present moment favourable for achieving American objectives, he was not making a legal argument. He was not appealing to any principle of self-defence. He was doing something simpler and older: noting that the prey is injured and that the hunt should proceed accordingly.
International law recognises no such principle. The United Nations Charter, in Article 2(4), prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of any state. Article 51 permits self-defence only in response to an armed attack, not in response to potential future capability, not in response to political rhetoric, and certainly not in response to a weakened defensive posture that presents an operational opportunity. A nation's military vulnerability is not a legal trigger for attack. It never has been, in any body of law that aspires to the name.
But it has always been a sufficient condition in colonial practice. The punitive expedition, the pacification campaign, the pre-emptive strike against a weakened adversary, these are the instruments of empire, not of law. Rubio's framing is not merely reminiscent of this tradition. It reproduces its logic exactly, in plain language, on breakfast television.
The Language of the Executioner
Before the first bomb fell on February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli forces launched joint strikes on Iran, a different kind of operation was already underway inside Iranian territory. On December 28, 2025, protests had erupted across Iran, rooted in genuine economic grievance following a sharp collapse in the value of the Iranian rial and widespread shortages linked to decades of sanctions. Within days, external actors had made their involvement explicit.
On December 29, the Mossad's official Farsi-language account on X posted publicly, in Farsi: "We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field." On January 2, 2026, former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added: "Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them." These are not rumours or allegations. They are public statements by senior officials of foreign intelligence services, admitting operational presence inside a sovereign state during a period of internal unrest. Under Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, this constitutes prohibited interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. The admissions were made without apparent concern for legal consequence, which is itself a statement about the impunity these actors have come to expect.
The protests were met with lethal force. The Iranian government officially reported 3,117 deaths. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency documented over 7,000 confirmed deaths by early February, with nearly 12,000 additional cases under review. Time, The Guardian and Iran International, a London-based Persian-language channel whose funding has been linked by The Guardian and The Economist to Saudi state-adjacent sources, and whose editorial orientation is openly critical of the Iranian government, citing local health officials, reported between 30,000 and 36,500 dead from the crackdown of January 8–9 alone. These figures diverge dramatically. Under any standard application of international human rights mechanisms, such divergence demands independent investigation, by UN special rapporteurs, by neutral forensic bodies, by independent human rights institutions.
No such investigation has been demanded with any serious institutional weight by the Western powers who most loudly describe themselves as defenders of human rights. This is consistent with a pattern. When the UN Human Rights Council, the ICJ, or independent rapporteurs have issued findings critical of Israeli or American conduct, in Gaza, in Lebanon, across Western Asia, those findings have been systematically dismissed as biased, politicised, or irrelevant. The effect is that the evidential standards applied to Iran become impossible to satisfy: official figures are dismissed as propaganda; independent figures are dismissed as unverified; and the mechanisms for independent verification are delegitimised before they can function. The population of Western news consumers, fed a diet of rapid-fire headlines and algorithmic amnesia, is poorly equipped to track this pattern across time. Rubio and Trump speak entirely in the register of immediacy. The threat is now, the window is now, the action is now. Historical and legal context is not merely absent from their statements. It is structurally excluded.
On "decapitation strikes" and the naming of killing
The targeted killings of Iranian officials and scientists in the period preceding February 28 were described, in the vocabulary of modern military communication, as decapitation strikes. The term is worth examining. It sounds surgical, architectural, as though one were removing a faulty component from a machine. What it describes is the deliberate killing of named human beings, outside any judicial process, on the unilateral authority of a foreign power. This is assassination. Under international law, the customary prohibition on extrajudicial killing, the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, and the framework developed by successive UN Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial executions, it is illegal.
The renaming does not change the act. It makes it harder to see. This, too, is a colonial inheritance. Colonial administrations developed rich vocabularies for the killing of resistant local leaders: pacification, neutralisation, elimination of hostile elements. The function of such language is always the same, to remove the act from ordinary moral scrutiny by removing it from ordinary moral vocabulary.
Trump's labelling of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Syed Ali Khamenei as the butcher of Iran belongs to the same tradition. Demonisation of the resistant leader is the rhetorical precondition for his removal: the monster must be named before he can be destroyed without consequence, or so the logic runs. The colonised leader who becomes a savage, a tyrant, a threat to civilisation, always just before the gunboats arrive. The assassination of Khamenei, whatever one's view of his governance, represents the killing of the head of state and supreme religious authority of a sovereign nation by a foreign power. No international legal framework sanctions this. No Security Council resolution authorised it.
The "Rules-Based International Order": A Colonial Syntax
There is a phrase that recurs constantly in American and Western diplomatic language: the rules-based international order. It sounds, to the casual listener, like a reference to international law, to the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the NPT, the International Court of Justice. It is not.
The rules-based international order is a deliberately constructed alternative to international law. Its rules are not codified in any treaty. They are not subject to neutral adjudication. They are not applied universally. They are, in practice, whatever the dominant Western powers declare them to be at any given moment, applied to whomever those powers choose, and suspended whenever those powers find compliance inconvenient. This is not law. In the precise terms of jurisprudence, it is lex ex voluntate principis, law from the will of the prince. It is the opposite of the principle that underpins the post-1945 international order: lex inter pares, law between equals.
The distinction matters enormously in practice. Israel's government has dismissed ICJ rulings as without authority over its conduct. The United States has vetoed Security Council resolutions on dozens of occasions to shield itself and its allies from legal accountability. The Trump administration withdrew from the ICC's jurisdiction and imposed sanctions on its officials. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton described the ICC as "superfluous" and "illegitimate." These are not the positions of states that accept the rule of law. They are the positions of states that accept their own rule, dressed in the language of law.
For the nations of the Global South, the peoples who lived under colonial administration and know how colonial powers spoke while they ruled, the rules-based order sounds less like a legal principle and more like an updated version of the civilising mission: obligations for the colonised, exemptions for the coloniser, enforced by those who wrote the rules for their own benefit.
Targeting Civilian Infrastructure
Among the targets Rubio enumerated, and which Trump confirmed when he threatened to strike Iran's power stations if negotiations failed, were power stations, oil infrastructure, and desalination plants. This is not a peripheral detail. It is a statement of criminal intent, stated conditionally but publicly, on national television.
Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1977), Articles 54 and 56, prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of civilian populations and on installations whose destruction would release dangerous forces. These prohibitions are not contingent on the military utility of the objects in question. They exist because the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, food, water, power, medical supply chains, has been condemned, repeatedly and unambiguously, as incompatible with human dignity and the laws of armed conflict.
Iranian President Pezeshkian put it plainly in his April 1 letter: "Attacking Iran's vital infrastructure, including energy and industrial facilities, directly targets the Iranian people. Beyond constituting a war crime, such actions carry consequences that extend far beyond Iran's borders." He cited the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities as one example. These are not military targets. Their destruction kills civilians not immediately but over months, as treatment stops and supply chains fail. This is a slower, less visible form of the same crime.
The NPT, the JCPOA, and the Art of Moving the Goalposts
The framing of Iran as an existential nuclear threat requires a carefully edited version of recent history. Let us look at the unedited version.
Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, signed in 1968. Article IV of that treaty preserves the explicit and inalienable right of all non-nuclear-weapon states to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment for civilian use. This is not a concession. It is a right the treaty was designed to protect.
In 2015, Iran went substantially further than its NPT obligations required. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action subjected Iran to one of the most intrusive inspection regimes ever accepted by any sovereign state, measures that went well beyond the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran accepted extraordinary constraints on its sovereign rights not because it was legally compelled to do so, but as a gesture of accommodation toward the anxieties of regional and global powers. The IAEA confirmed Iranian compliance with those terms repeatedly, in official report after official report. Pezeshkian's letter states the sequence plainly: "Iran pursued negotiations, reached an agreement, and fulfilled all its commitments. The decision to withdraw from that agreement, escalate toward confrontation, and launch two acts of aggression in the midst of negotiations were destructive choices made by the US government."
The United States withdrew from the JCPOA unilaterally in 2018. It reimposed crippling sanctions. In January 2020, it assassinated Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil, an act constituting the use of force against a sovereign state's official on the territory of a third country, with no Security Council authorisation and no credible claim of imminent armed attack under Article 51. Iran, the party that had complied, bore the consequences. The United States, the party that walked away, faced none.
Since then, the American position has progressively criminalised rights that the NPT explicitly protects. The trajectory is worth tracing:
| Stage | American demand | Legal status |
|---|---|---|
| One | Iran must not develop nuclear weapons | Legitimate NPT concern |
| Two | Iran must not develop ballistic missiles | Not covered by NPT, Iran's sovereign right |
| Three | Iran must not enrich uranium | Explicitly permitted under NPT Article IV |
| Four | Iran must not possess defensive industrial capacity | Violation of the sovereign right of self-defence |
The logical terminus of this progression is the demand that Iran surrender the right of self-defence itself. It is worth noting, in this context, that Israel, the one regional power that actually possesses nuclear weapons, estimated at several hundred warheads, has never signed the NPT, has never submitted to IAEA verification, and has faced no comparable demands from Washington at any point in its history. This asymmetry is not a legal argument. It is the clearest possible demonstration that the nuclear issue, as deployed against Iran, is not really about nuclear weapons. It is about something else: compliance, submission, and the management of a state that refuses to align with the hegemon's regional project.
Venezuela: A Parallel Note
Trump's description of Venezuela as a country whose oil and gas the United States has now "partnered" in extracting, following a military operation he described as successful, deserves brief attention, because it illuminates the Iran case from a different angle. Under UN Resolution 1803 (1962) on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, a state's natural resources belong to its people and cannot be alienated by force. The seizure or exploitation of a conquered state's resources constitutes spoliation, prohibited under the Hague Regulations of 1907 and confirmed in customary international law. Trump's framing of Venezuelan resource extraction as a partnership benefit of military action is not diplomatic language. It is the open description of pillage, stated as an achievement.
The Iran case follows the same template, one step removed: destroy the state's military and economic capacity, install a friendlier government, and access the region's resources, including the Strait of Hormuz, on American terms. Hegseth's "Greater North America" is the Western Hemisphere version of the same map.
The Colonial Grammar of Regime Change
Rubio's expressed hope for a new, more reasonable Iranian government is not a peripheral remark. It is the destination toward which the entire enterprise is pointed. The UN Charter, Article 2(1), establishes the sovereign equality of all states. Article 2(7) prohibits interference in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. The norm against forcible regime change is among the most foundational in the post-1945 international order, built precisely on the memory of colonial and imperial powers installing and removing governments at will.
Trump went further than hope. His April 1 address framed the killing of Iranian leaders as the mechanism by which regime change had been achieved, an operational metric. To define the assassination of a sovereign state's leadership as a success indicator in a televised national address is to announce, without euphemism, that regime change by killing is American policy. And to describe the hoped-for replacement as more reasonable is to define reason as agreement with Washington, exactly the definition colonial administrators applied when they spoke of bringing stable, responsible governance to the territories they controlled.
Historical Context and the Privilege of Forgetting
When leaders of the Global South situate their position within historical context, as Pezeshkian did in his April 1 letter, referencing the US-backed coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, that context is treated in much of the Western media as irrelevant, as an attempt to evade present responsibility, or as propaganda. The 1953 coup is not contested history. It is documented in declassified CIA records. It is the foundational event of Iran's modern relationship with the United States, and it helps explain, with considerable precision, why Iranians across the political spectrum view American intentions with deep structural scepticism.
To exclude this from the analysis is not neutrality. It is a choice, the choice to treat the present as though it has no past, and to advantage the actor whose case rests on immediate action over the actor whose case rests on accumulated historical record. This is the privilege of the powerful: to act without remembering, and to demand that others do the same. International law, by contrast, is built on memory, on precedent, on treaty obligations that bind across decades, on the principle that what was agreed remains agreed until lawfully renegotiated. Rubio's interview has no memory. It has only targets. Trump's address has no memory either. It has only victories.
A Voice from Tehran
On April 1, 2026, the same day as Trump's national address, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian published an open letter on X, addressed directly to the American people. It was covered by Time, Bloomberg, The Hill, Reuters, and Military.com. It deserves to be read alongside Rubio's and Trump's statements as a parallel document, not because it settles every question, but because it makes arguments that the Western media's coverage of this conflict has largely declined to engage with on their merits.
Pezeshkian wrote that Iran, despite its historical and geographical strength, has "never, in its modern history, chosen the path of aggression, expansion, colonialism, or domination," and that it has only ever "resolutely and bravely repelled those who have attacked it." He drew a distinction between governments and peoples, stating that "the Iranian people harbor no enmity toward other nations, including the people of America." He asked Americans directly: "Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is 'America First' truly among the priorities of the US government today?"
He cited over 2,000 Iranian civilians killed in American strikes conducted from regional bases, including more than 200 children. He cited the destruction of cancer-treatment facilities. He described the infrastructure strikes as war crimes, using that term specifically and accurately. And he made the legal point that "what Iran has done, and continues to do, is a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defence, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression."
Much of the Western media response to the letter focused on whether it was sincere, whether it was propaganda, whether it was an attempt to "manipulate" American public opinion. The substance, the legal arguments, the historical record, the documented civilian casualties, was largely bypassed. This is not journalism. It is the performance of a worldview in which the frameworks of the powerful are self-evidently legitimate, and the frameworks of those under attack are self-evidently suspect. The letter was dismissed, in places, within hours of its publication. The dismissals engaged almost nothing it actually argued.
Iran's Actual Record: Restraint, Law, Strategic Patience
The narrative that frames Iran as the primary destabilising force in Western Asia requires the erasure of a significant factual record. During the years of Israel's military campaign in Gaza, a campaign that drew findings of plausible genocide from the International Court of Justice in proceedings brought by South Africa, Iran exercised notable strategic restraint. It faced intense domestic political pressure to intervene directly. It did not do so. Its support for allied non-state actors, whatever one's view of those relationships, did not constitute a direct military attack on Israel or the United States in the period leading to February 28, 2026.
When Iran has struck, in the exchanges of 2025 and in its conduct since the February 28 strikes, it has done so in declared retaliation for direct attacks on its territory and personnel. Article 51 of the UN Charter is clear: the right of self-defence in response to an armed attack is inherent and unambiguous. That Iranian strikes are characterised as evidence of Iranian aggression while American and Israeli strikes are characterised as defensive operations reflects not a legal analysis but a political one, and a political reading with deep colonial roots. The violence of the strong is order. The violence of the weak is terror.
Iranian political voices have long called for the fall of the Israeli government and the end of American hegemonic reach in the region. This is political speech. The United States routinely and formally calls for regime change in states it opposes. The existence of such speech does not constitute evidence of imminent armed attack, the legal threshold required to trigger Article 51. The conflation of political rhetoric with operational intent is one of the oldest tools in the colonial justification toolkit, and one of the most effective, because it is almost impossible to disprove: any statement of hostility becomes, in this reading, evidence of a threat that must be pre-empted.
Iran's strategic posture appears, at its core, to rest on a sober historical assessment: that a power which consistently violates the law it claims to uphold will find itself weakened by that very lawlessness, diplomatically isolated, economically constrained, and gradually abandoned by the multilateral institutions through which it once projected authority. This is not a prayer. It is a reading of the record. And the record of 2025 and 2026, the alienation of European allies, the fracturing of the NATO consensus, the growing assertiveness of the BRICS framework, the open questioning of dollar supremacy, suggests the reading is not wrong.
The World Is Watching
There is an irony at the centre of these American wartime statements that no confident delivery can dissolve. The state described as the existential nuclear threat is an NPT signatory with a documented record of compliance and accommodation, whose president has just written a carefully reasoned legal letter to the American people explaining its position. The state whose officials are doing the describing tore up the agreement that codified that compliance, assassinated a foreign head of state without legal authority, admits through its own officials to running intelligence operations inside a sovereign nation during civil unrest, openly discusses the destruction of civilian water supplies as a negotiating lever, and has done all of this while invoking a rules-based order whose rules, on examination, turn out to be its own.
The nations of the Global South are not unaware of this. The peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America who lived under colonial administration carry institutional memory of how colonial powers spoke while they ruled, of civilising missions, of the white man's burden, of stable governance brought by force, of resources shared in partnership after military subjugation. Hegseth's speech, Rubio's interview, and Trump's address sound, to those ears, deeply familiar. Not new. Familiar.
The Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere an American sphere. The rules-based order declares the world one. The logic is continuous. Only the scale has changed.
Iran's bet, stated with patience and precision in Pezeshkian's letter, embedded in its decades of legal compliance, visible in its willingness to absorb enormous pressure without abandoning its sovereign rights, is that this logic is not sustainable. That the spectacle of the world's most powerful military destroying desalination plants and calling it security, assassinating heads of state and calling it decapitation, seizing oil fields and calling it partnership, is not the performance of strength. It is the performance of a power that has run out of arguments and substituted force.
A hegemon that spends its post-WWII legitimacy, earned through acting with moral fortitude and diligence, faster than it can replace it, is not demonstrating strength. It is engaging in folly, initiating an erosion of its source of influence.
References
Primary Legal Instruments
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), 1968. Article IV, right to peaceful nuclear energy; Article VI, disarmament obligations of nuclear-weapon states.
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Vienna, July 14, 2015. Full text as published by the EU External Action Service.
https://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/statements-eeas/docs/iran_agreement/iran_joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action_en.pdf
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, right of self-defence.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 (Protocol I), 1977. Article 54, civilian survival objects; Article 56, dangerous installations.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Article 8(2)(b)(xvi), pillage; Article 8(2)(b)(ii), intentional attacks on civilian objects.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf
UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 (XVII), 1962, Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/general-assembly-resolution-1803-xvii
UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, 1990; UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-executions
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, January 26, 2024.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
IAEA Verification
International Atomic Energy Agency, Reports by the Director General on Verification and Monitoring in Iran, 2016–2018.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/iran
Primary Sources Cited
Pezeshkian, M. (April 1, 2026). Open letter to the American people, posted on X (@drpezeshkian). Full text: Bloomberg
Mossad Farsi X account (@MossadSpokesman), December 29, 2025. Documented in JNS.org (January 18, 2026):
https://www.jns.org/fact-vs-fiction-the-mossads-role-in-the-2026-iran-uprising/
Pompeo, M. (January 2, 2026). Post on X referencing Mossad agents among Iranian protesters. Cited in Al Jazeera (January 14, 2026):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/iran-accuse-foreign-intelligence-behind-protest-movement
2025–2026 Iranian Protests, Wikipedia (continuously updated):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025–2026_Iranian_protests
Secondary Sources
Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Metropolitan Books.
Chomsky, N. (2006). Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Metropolitan Books.
Chomsky, N. & Vltchek, A. (2013). On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. Pluto Press.
Falk, R. (2014). Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars. Routledge.
Falk, R. (2023). On Nuclear Weapons, Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament. Clarity Press.
Falk, R. — UN Special Rapporteur reports (2008–2014):
https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-palestine
Parsi, T. (2017). Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Yale University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. University of Chicago Press.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth.
