Two distinguished Yale Law School professors have issued a stark warning about the current US administration’s systematic assault on international legal norms, characterizing it as a dangerous departure from eight decades of established global order. In a comprehensive Foreign Affairs commentary published January 13, Professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro presented a compelling analysis of how the administration’s actions transcend mere violations of specific laws and represent a fundamental rejection of the United Nations Charter-based system that has governed international relations since World War II.
The legal experts articulated that the post-WWII international framework rests on the foundational principle that unilateral force between states is prohibited unless exercised in self-defense or under collective UN Security Council authorization. They documented a pattern of behavior that demonstrates the administration’s wholesale abandonment of this principle, citing specific examples including attempted interventions in Venezuela and Iran, along with controversial statements regarding the Panama Canal, Canadian sovereignty, Greenland’s status, and control over Gaza.
What particularly alarms the Yale scholars is not simply the legal breaches themselves, but the administration’s overt dismissal of the very concept of legal constraints in international affairs. They emphasized that the absence of any legitimate legal justification for these actions, coupled with the rejection of diplomatic persuasion, represents a form of nihilism that threatens to unravel the entire international rules-based system. The professors concluded that this approach—replacing multilateral cooperation with unilateral coercion—risks returning the world to an era where might alone determines right, fundamentally undermining global stability and security.