When the current war between Iran and the Israeli-American alliance began, President Donald Trump asked Britain for modest assistance: permission to use the joint bases on the island of Diego Garcia. Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused, arguing that the war violated international law. Yet even when Iran attacked Cyprus, a European country, Starmer hesitated, dispatched an aircraft carrier with conspicuous slowness and stressed that its mission was purely defensive.
French President Emmanuel Macron also condemned the war, calling it illegal. He did remark that an attack on Cyprus is equivalent to an attack on all of Europe, but limited himself to defensive steps and a typical call for "de-escalation."
Other European statesmen and commentators likewise lamented the outbreak of war "during negotiations." The fact that the Iranians had dragged out countless rounds of talks while advancing their nuclear program made little difference. This was the approach of most Western European countries, with the exception of Germany, which surprised many by standing firmly and decisively alongside Israel and the United States.
Contrary to what is often claimed in Israel, the European approach is not merely weakness or cowardice. It rests on a deep philosophical outlook that stretches back to the 1928 treaty outlawing war (the Kellogg-Briand Pact) and to a series of agreements and conventions signed after World War II.
Idealism and conservatism
This approach combines idealism and conservatism. It is idealistic because the trauma of the world wars produced a deep aversion to war as such. It is conservative because at its core lies the aspiration to freeze the existing situation at almost any cost.
The statesmen who acted after World War II understood that in order to end wars of conquest, and the tangle of territorial claims that leads to such wars, existing borders had to be treated as sacred. Yet this conservatism, understandable as its origins may be, comes with a price. Thus the international community sanctifies the borders of failed states such as Somalia, which has been torn apart by endless civil war, while preventing more successful regions, such as Somaliland, from breaking away.
Even the doctrine of self-defense, at least in some of its commonly accepted interpretations, allows only the repelling of an attack and the restoration of the previous status quo. Thus many jurists and even quite a few statesmen believed that after the October 7 massacre Israel had the right to repel the invaders, but not much more than that.
The problem is that this approach ignores incentives, the enduring factor that drives human behavior and often leads to unexpected outcomes. Imagine, for example, a country where the only punishment for a thief is returning the money he stole. In such a situation, there is no incentive not to steal. In the best case you profit, and in the worst case you simply give back what you took. This distorted system of incentives also operates for states such as Iran and organizations like Hamas. They can attack and, in the worst-case scenario, the other side will push them back across the border and allow them to regroup and plan a more effective assault the next time.
If it is impossible to threaten an aggressor with the fall of its regime, or at least to exact a territorial price, the system encourages it to persist in its misconduct. Anyone who limits war strictly to self-defense must take into account that in practice they are encouraging aggressors such as Iran.
The current international order also creates distorted incentives elsewhere. For example, many critics of the war in Gaza argued that Israel must not attack hospitals, even if Hamas used them for military purposes. "If you want to hit your neighbor and he is holding a baby, you can't punch him through the baby," comedian Bill Burr said. Such an approach, of course, encourages organizations like Hamas to move more and more of their assets into humanitarian sites and to use civilians as human shields.
The same applies to the erosion of reciprocity in the laws of war and to the international obsession with rebuilding Gaza with donations each time Hamas brings destruction upon it. The result? Hamas is encouraged to embark on military adventures because someone else bears the cost of its actions.
Let us return to Starmer and Macron. Their obsession with "de-escalation" and "negotiations" as the only way to resolve problems actually encourages the Iranians to escalate their terrorist and proxy activities and weakens the effectiveness of negotiations. That is because Tehran knew, at least until the most recent attack, that no military threat stood behind the negotiations. Why, then, should it compromise?
Prof. Danny OrbachAs a result, violent actors who ignore the rules of the game multiply within the system, while the rules restrain only states such as Britain, France or the United States under the Biden administration, which are inclined to follow them in the first place. But at a certain point, incentives do their work and violent actors grow so emboldened that they increasingly undermine the system itself.
Ironically, the "rules-based international order," which sanctifies negotiations and "self-defense," carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The results are now unfolding before our eyes.
Prof. Danny Orbach is a military historian in the departments of history and Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.