Are we experiencing merely another period of serious noncompliance with international law, or do you perhaps believe that the system itself is entering a fundamentally new phase?

Yeah.

Well, first of all, let me start by saying thank you for having me.

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to talk with you.

So I think the two are connected.

I don't think they're either or.

So I think on the one hand, we are experiencing a period of major noncompliance with international law, and in particular, the prohibition on use of force, which Scott and I wrote about in our book, The Internationalists, is the core underlying norm of the modern international legal order.

And as we make the transition to a multipolar international system, what changes, legal, institutional, political, will be necessary if international law is to remain effective?

At the top of their agenda is Russia not winning.

You know, I'm not so sure you're right about that.

I mean, so I think that obviously it depends a bit on who you talk to.

And everybody's very frustrated and rightly so and angry and dismayed and scared by the ongoing situation.

And I think some of that anger and fear is entirely understandable and reasonable.

You know, I mean, it is true that Russia has waged an illegal war since 2022.

I mean, the war is in violation of the UN Charter, clear and outright violation of the UN Charter from the get-go.

Will it be EU members? And if so, what can they do about it? And what's your vision for righting the situation?

Can you just talk a little bit in broad terms about how The law around war and how to make it less violent, less harmful to civilians has evolved again to put in perspective why this is such a sharp departure, at least from the ideals that the U.S. had nominally been committed to as it deployed its military around the world.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's two bodies of law, and the U.S. has been a critical player in both.

So the book that I wrote, The Internationalist, I wrote with my colleague Scott Shapiro, is about this project of outlawing war, which seems like an outrageous and insane thing, except for we've been living in a world in which war is outlawed.

That is the honest truth.

That's what the U.N. Charter and customary international law do.

They prohibit states from resorting to force.

unless they meet certain basic conditions.

Is that even feasible? We've only ever known that kind of stability when the largest player in the system was fully invested in it.

Why don't you see a plausible legal rationale for these attacks?

Yeah, so each of these, I mean, each of these has to be justified both as a matter of international law and domestic law.

So under international law, the only justification available would be if it's an act of self-defense.

Under domestic law, the president needs to get the consent of Congress, or it also, again, has to be a situation where there's an imminent attack on the United States, where there's no moment for deliberation and it's necessary to act to respond to save the country.

That's the kind of situation in which a president can act without going to Congress.

None of these meet that test, right? None of these meet that test.

Just let's take Venezuela, for instance.

So how does the Constitution attempt to limit that power? And what does Article 3 have to say about it?

Has anyone been held accountable at the Pentagon? Has the Pentagon or the White House or the Defense Secretary said anything about holding anyone responsible for that mistake, if indeed that's what it was? How, how should accountability work in a case like this?

Yeah, I mean, not that we've heard.

And I think it's important to point out that simply calling something a mistake does not sort of end the discussion.

Um, there are, uh, often mistakes in war, uh, but sometimes mistakes in war are, um, are avoidable.

And, um, if there is a failure to take necessary precautions to ensure that civilians are not killed, if, for instance, there's not review of contemporary maps to take up the fact that, um, this building had been in use as a school for over a decade, um, if there hadn't been any effort to review pattern of life, um, if there hadn't been any effort to verify the target, um, that may be reckless, and recklessness can constitute willfulness, and, uh, there can be legal li- liability for that.

That can itself be a war crime.

So simply calling something a mistake doesn't necessarily en- end the discussion, and the department is under obligations to investigate and should tell the American people what's happened because this is one of the worst civilian casualty incidents in US military, uh, recent r- US military history.

So to Monica's question, what does that mean for accountability?

I talked to an economist that said it would be about 200 days before our economy actually recovered.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

I mean, this is really a war of choice that's being waged for no good reason.

So we had a deal with the Iranians.

It's called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or sometimes referred to as Iran Nuclear Deal.

It was a deal where the Iranians agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

And President Trump just tore that up.

Are we actually moving the goalpost back instead of forward?

The world's, you know, best funded and largest military.

No, I think that's exactly the question we should be asking.

What was the process by which they selected and, and then verified these targets? I mean, from all the public reporting we're seeing, this, uh, transition of this building to a school happened years ago.

And particularly I'm concerned about how these targets were verified given that something like a school is generally pretty easy to tell from satellite imagery, because you have people coming and going at certain times of day.

And so you don't have to watch that building for very long to know that you see little people going in and out of that school with people who look like parents.

That's the kind of thing you can very easily see with satellite imagery.

And so the fact that they, they claim not to have known that this was in fact a school, and I, and I believe that they did not intentionally target a school.

If the investigation were to find wrongdoing here, what are the potential consequences? I mean, I'm thinking especially because the United States is famously not a signatory and a member of the International Criminal Court.