The U.S. president has made lawless and abhorrent statements before, and, on April 7, he raged once again on social media, this time stating that he would obliterate the "civilization" of Iran in an escalation of the unlawful U.S. Israeli war. His words were morally depraved, legally significant, and, ultimately, a ruse – we, both the domestic audience and those under bombardment, were made to anticipate a horror that, for the moment, did not come to pass. Alongside everything else that is illegal about this war, this statement – a threat of total, indiscriminate warfare and collective punishment meant to terrorize a people – was itself a war crime.
Even under the current tenuous ceasefire, the danger this war of aggression continues to pose and its implications on a rapidly changing world order cannot be overstated. The Trump Administration’s attack on Iran – and Israel’s opportunistic invasion of Lebanon – have caused widespread civilian harm, deepening regional instability, mass displacement, and destruction. The U.S. and Israel have once again blatantly flouted legal norms and constraints, further eroding the already weak “rules-based order” that has underpinned the international system since World War II. While the worldwide economic implications of the war on Iran have captured global attention, the human cost and long-term harm have been underdiscussed and cannot be understood in isolation. They are part of a broader trajectory, rooted in impunity for the post-9/11 global U.S. torture program and the decades of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed across Palestine, especially in Gaza. These realities are rapidly reshaping the conditions that will define our collective future.
The Past: Impunity as Precedent
For two and a half years, Israel has carried out a genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza, marked by the mass killing of civilians, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, the repeated displacement of virtually the entire population of more than 2 million people, and the imposition of conditions – including famine – intended to make Gaza uninhabitable. Using a steady stream of U.S. weapons, Israel has decimated hospitals, schools, places of worship and culture, water systems, entire neighborhoods – and even, as in the case of Rafah, entire cities. The expansion of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, and Israel’s attack on Lebanon, have not displaced the crisis in Palestine but rather deepened and broadened it, stretching humanitarian systems even further while creating increasingly catastrophic conditions shielded from the public gaze.
The destruction of civilian life has been accompanied by the systematic dismantling of the institutions meant to protect and sustain it. Efforts to undermine and dismantle UNRWA have further eroded one of the last remaining lifelines for Palestinians and signal a broader attack on the entire infrastructure of the international humanitarian system itself. This is happening alongside both the Trump administration’s sanctioning of prominent international officials, including UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, and three leading Palestinian organizations who supported the ICC investigation, and the full withdrawal by the United States from the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process, the first time a country has done so.
While we shouldn’t overstate the effectiveness of the mechanisms of international justice and accountability, we shouldn’t underestimate the significance of the effort to discredit and destroy them. Bent on aggression, the United States and Israel are attacking the universal standards intended to ensure dignity, equality, and self-determination, and the most foundational of legal constraints. This new baseline undergirds the assault on Iran and Lebanon, as it did the assault on Palestine before it: overwhelming force deployed with little regard for civilian life, the normalization of the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a military tactic, and war based not on necessity and legality but the naked assertion of power, open theft of land and resources, and the demonization and dehumanization of the “other.” The impact can be seen in the carnage across the region, and it is likely to keep spreading unless a meaningful alternative path can be articulated and developed.
The Present: Genocides and Unchecked Violence
The genocide in Gaza continues, and similar dynamics are now unfolding across the region. In the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, settler violence, land seizures, and state repression continue to accelerate, deepening a system of apartheid and forced displacement that has become increasingly overt. In Lebanon, military operations have also driven land seizures and the displacement of an estimated 1.3 million people under the same security “terrorism” pretexts used in Palestine, reflecting a shared playbook of territorial control and ethnic cleansing. Israeli forces in Lebanon are now explicitly calling for the expulsion of all Shi’a from southern Lebanon and warning other communities not to shelter Muslims.
The unlawful assault on Iran has also steadily escalated into ever more brazen attacks on civilian infrastructure, with an eye toward state collapse. The U.S. and Israel have struck Iran’s largest bridge, the century-old Pasteur medical institute, and two steel factories, as Trump threatens to bomb “Iran back to the Stone Age,” echoing genocidal language used in Gaza and beyond. Tactical similarities abound as well; Israel is dropping the same 2,000-pound bombs it has been using to destroy Gaza on densely populated areas of Iran, hitting hospitals and other critical civilian infrastructure. Even the current “ceasefire” echoes those in Palestine and Lebanon, a dynamic of “they cease, we fire” in which dominant powers continue to attack and destabilize those they deem the enemy.
This pattern of “destroy, displace, dismantle” is not confined to the Middle East. Much as the indefinite detention and torture of foreign citizens in Guantánamo is now mirrored in the torture and detainment of U.S. residents in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the same unchecked violence abroad is increasingly visible within the United States. Though hardly unprecedented and all too familiar to Black and Brown communities in the United States, the rising arrests, detentions, and unchecked state violence have militarized U.S. streets in campaigns of displacement and demographic change. As hundreds of thousands flee their homes in the face of U.S. bombardment overseas, thousands at home are being targeted by a Christian fascist white supremacist regime and forced to leave as Temporary Protected Status for Yemenis, Haitians, and others is revoked. Here, as in Lebanon, Palestine, Guantánamo, and CECOT, “counterterrorism” is used to justify limitless and overwhelming force, especially against Black and Brown communities, with no due process, transparency, or accountability.
Across it all, systems of surveillance, control, and punishment developed in the post 9/11 context and increasingly consolidated in the latest military assaults are adapted and redeployed to produce ever greater abuses of power with ever diminishing transparency.
The Future: Building a World Where Accountability is a Reality
By sanctioning international institutions, withdrawing from multilateral processes, dismantling humanitarian infrastructure, and openly rejecting the most fundamental legal constraints and protections, the United States and other powerful states are attempting to eliminate or bypass the very mechanisms through which accountability has historically been pursued. This system – which for too long has operated under a double-standard where the powerful were allowed to operate above the law – has also been a critical forum for truth-telling and resistance, especially for human rights defenders and vulnerable communities of the global south. It has allowed colonized and formerly colonized states, social movements, and legal advocates to invoke shared norms, expose contradictions, and force concessions – and indeed, in rare cases like the issuance of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, get one step closer to accountability for powerful states.
In its place is emerging a more openly violent order in which the ability to contest – let alone stop – that violence is itself diminished. It is the difference between a world where power is challenged through law, politics, and collective struggle, and one where power seeks to operate without limits. At the same time, the cumulative effects of war, displacement, and economic coercion are producing widespread precarity, particularly for those who are not white, cis-gendered, Christian men. From the Middle East to the midwest, people are being pushed into increasingly unstable conditions, cut off from resources, and denied meaningful agency to shape their own futures. This growing fragmentation allows systems of unchecked power to flourish, limiting the capacity for collective resistance while deepening inequality and vulnerability. In a recent address, Trump voiced this dynamic with unabashed clarity: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.”
It will be difficult to resuscitate the very systems whose shortcomings produced our current political reality. The old international order is unlikely to be revived unchanged, and it remains to be seen if we can build, in the words of Max Elbaum, “an alternative world order where all countries are on equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy, and a transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority.” In any case, dismantling the U.S. war machine is a critical and urgent precondition. Ending cruelty and violence, refusing to normalize collective punishment, and challenging the expansion of detention and deportation regimes are all part of that work. Legal advocacy remains an essential tool, as the Center for Constitutional Rights’ litigation and advocacy efforts continue to demonstrate, and it must be accompanied by sustained public pressure, mass mobilization, political engagement, and global solidarity
The assault on Iran, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and increasingly, across all of Palestine, the destruction and displacement in Lebanon, and the expansion of ever-more unaccountable power within the United States are not separate crises. They are interconnected manifestations of a broader and long-running breakdown in legal and political constraints on violence. The breakdown requires us not only to confront the malevolent actors behind it but also to finally confront the weaknesses and double-standards in the system that they have exploited.
Samer Araabi is the Associate Director of Political Education and Research at the Center for Constitutional Rights
