I’m writing this at the end of a full day in which it really felt like the U.S. or Israel might use a fucking nuke because Iran dared to defend itself. Many people, many more than I’ve seen take an explicitly anti-war position in my lifetime, correctly oppose this. They condemn the war crimes and name the attacks on civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. But after the U.S. and Israel bombed a school in Iran on the first day of their latest attack with no consequences, after three years of the world’s most documented genocide in occupied Palestine, after hundreds of years of societies built on foundations of enslavement, theft, and murder exporting their parasitism globally, these condemnations, though usually well intended, feel very beside the point.
It’s always been like this, you see. As Walter Rodney explains in chapter 3 of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances African people were simply the victims, for the law recognised them only as transportable merchandise.”
So how do we make sense of this? In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney shows us a method. Applying it to international law reveals what most legal scholars won’t tell you. Historical materialism is a tool of analysis. It helps us understand that things don’t just happen as disconnected events but that everything comes from somewhere. Cause and effect. It helps us understand why things happen and, crucially, how we could take collective organized action to make things happen. Rodney’s historical materialist analysis pushes us to ask: who made international law? And whose interests does it serve today? The ruling class in power under capitalism, and its need for a smooth, profitable system of international trade in order to generate wealth, made the structure of international law to serve its needs.
From its inception, international law has really just been the law of the violently expansionist West, collectively developed by Western nations in order to ensure that they did not step on each other’s toes too much while raping and enslaving the rest of the planet. International law has also historically and consistently been dropped on a whim when it becomes incompatible with the economic and political objectives of those same nations. It is essentially a system of rules for thee but not for me which has functioned as the backbone of international trade under imperialism, built to legalize, justify, and rationalize the mass destruction and exploitation the system needs to sustain itself.
In the modern day when we are faced with another barbarism of this system we cannot ignore, it is common to invoke international law and identify violations of it. To point to one act or another and say “that’s a war crime!” And it’s like, sure, fine, usually even correct. But also: so what? The nations who made these rules have been committing war crimes the whole time. Targeting civilians and infrastructure needed for life like land, air, and water has never been off the table and in fact has been one of their primary strategies for consolidation of power and economic growth. So while it is important to name when things are wrong, to be clear about what constitutes violations, it is also important to be clear about what we are trying to do, what we can win on that terrain and what we cannot. To understand these limitations, we can look at international law’s failure in Palestine and then look at what is actually working to win justice in Cuba and Iran.
The genocide in Palestine is not a violation of international law’s promise, but rather a fulfillment of international law’s logic under imperialism when applied to the colonized. Though many hands have been wrung and much ink has been spilled about the Zionist entity’s attempted annihilation of the people of Palestine and Lebanon, a lot of it has the same energy as those scenes in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Willy Wonka, watching assorted children use his products and die, says in a deadpan voice, “No. Don’t. Stop.” How else could we explain the spectacle of political leaders across the West (and in Gulf Arab states) making boneless calls for ceasefires and respect for international law at the U.N. while literally giving Israel the guns, bombs, and cover it needs to do this Nazi shit in the first place? We have to recognize the performance. These nations and their leaders do not actually oppose this because they are helping it happen. Zionist Israel is not an outlier or an aberration but a modern take on the very old tactic of settler-colonialism, the inherently genocidal way that many Western imperialist nations built their wealth and spread their power around the world. Most of them have done what Israel is doing before. The only difference now is the technology being used to carry out the terror and the level of documentation of it. We should not be surprised that so many of the world’s institutions created to uphold international law and humanitarian rights have so abjectly failed here, or that those same structures have been much more likely to be weaponized against the resistance while Israel kills with impunity. Instead we should pay attention to what this tells us about who actually controls these structures and what that means for how they currently function. The colonized cannot wait for the colonizer’s laws to save them. The law was never designed for that purpose.
So if international law will not save Palestine, what will? As Rodney wrote in Groundings with My Brothers: “Previously, black people prayed, we were on our best behaviour, we asked the whites ‘please’… Now it is time to show our teeth in a snarl rather than a smile.” Iran shows us a way.
Six weeks into the latest unprovoked U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran, it looks like Iran won. The victory was hard fought. The Islamic Republic survived decades of sanctions, attempted destabilization, even the threat of nuclear annihilation to force the U.S. to negotiate on its terms. Iran knew the U.S. could not be trusted, something easily observed both in its own relations with the U.S. but also throughout the 400 year history of an empire which has been breaking treaties and ceasefires the entire time. Iran also correctly recognized that defense when your aggressor is the imperialist West means nothing less than resisting full extermination. Trump is quite blunt about this but the logic has been the same (and the rhetoric often just as blunt) since 1492. You cannot negotiate with an enemy that does not see you as human. Your only option is to get organized, be clear on who you are and what you want, identify your leverage, and fight. That is precisely what Iran did. They built power through national unity, economic development, and brilliant military and strategic organization. They identified their leverage, the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. They fought. They won. They also are not the only ones.
Iran is winning justice through militant sacred defense. Cuba is winning with socialism and solidarity.
At the end of January 2026, Trump escalated the already genocidal blockade on Cuba. His executive order absurdly named Cuba an existential threat and threatened 50 percent tariffs on any nation selling oil to the island. At the same time, the U.S. also began a naval blockade which saw its Coast Guard and Navy begin intercepting ships bound for Cuba with oil. This escalation, combined with the kidnapping of Venezuela’s democratically elected president and first lady and the expropriation of that nation’s oil supplies (formerly a major source of support for Cuba), immediately created a devastating situation on the island, impacting everything from medical care to food storage to the water supply. However, the Cuban people and their revolutionary project have been under attack by the U.S. empire since its earliest days, and through it all they have managed to survive through collective mass organization, long term socialist economic planning centered on life, and a large and increasingly connected global solidarity movement built by Cuba’s principled internationalism, meaning its commitment to building people to people ties based on humanism, equality, and respect for life. So when Trump claimed Cuba was on its last legs and mused that he could do anything he wanted with it like the abuser he is, the Cuban revolution and the movement blooming from it said, “The hell you will. When you zig, we zag, motherfucker.” And thus Cuba is surviving the U.S. oil blockade through domestic oil production, an incredibly rapid expansion of solar power infrastructure, grassroots community organizing combined with state run central planning to organize distribution of limited resources, and material support from Russia, China, Mexico, Turkey, and people just like us all around the world. You cannot blockade solidarity or the sun.
The limitations of international law should be clear at this point, but I also want to be clear that I am not saying it is useless. One need only look at how imperialist powers are melting down and lashing out in response to South Africa bringing a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in order to see there is something useful there. Imagine a world, not so far away now, where the international balance of power is shifted and the U.S., Israel, and the collective West cannot throw their weight around anymore because the global South is organized and unified to resist them. I suspect the enemy is imagining it too and is quite invested in attacking any attempt to set a precedent for using international institutions to hold them accountable. We must first and foremost, however, contend with the world as it presently exists. Though the case has vexed them dearly, they have also been able to use their dominance of international institutions to tie it up in procedural hurdles and delays which forestall most kinds of meaningful accountability. At this point Benjamin Netanyahu has had warrants for two years and he is still a free man, jetsetting around the world to sell genocide as religious self defense. The ICJ and similar institutions represent an important field of struggle, but we cannot mistake legal strategy for liberation nor can we expect justice out of these structures, yet. We need to learn from Cuba and Iran and change that global balance of power first.
Rodney pushed us to consider who made this law and whose interests it serves. An analysis of history and current events gives us our answer. So finally, the question I want to leave you with is: does international law contain any resources for anti-imperialist struggle? And how do we fight strategically and effectively when it fails?