The DEAD END of US Militarism. The World is Waking up | Prof. Richard Falk

## Introduction The central claim to emerge from this wide-ranging conversation is stark: the reliance on overwhelming military power as the primary instrument of foreign policy is fraying, and with it the credibility of an international legal order that was built on unequal foundations. The exchange traces how the legal architecture created in 1945—designed to manage the aftermath of a cataclysmic war and to preserve the privileges of its victors—now collides with shifting power realities, rising nationalism, and the growing refusal of many states to accept selective enforcement. What follows is an analysis of that diagnosis: why law and reciprocity are inseparable, how unipolar militarism has misfired, how states are recalibrating alliances and claiming neutrality, and why media framing around Gaza and Israel has exposed the limits of war law and the reputational consequences of double standards. ## Law power and reciprocity One of the clearest threads running through the conversation is the argument that international law functions where reciprocity is real and credible; it struggles where power is grossly unequal. The post‑1945 order institutionalized a legal hierarchy through mechanisms like the Security Council veto, a deliberate concession to the “winners” of World War II. That design feature formalized an exception: great‑power behavior in the strategic domain was often treated as outside normal enforcement, relying instead on assumed self‑restraint. Where states perceive that counterparts can and will impose costs on them, legal rules become usable, predictable instruments. Where that perception breaks down, law devolves into rhetoric or selective instrumentality. This is not to romanticize law’s reach. Domestic analogies used in the exchange are instructive: legal systems at home routinely falter when wealth and influence skew outcomes. Powerful litigants enjoy procedural advantages; wealthy nations can do something similar internationally. What matters is mutual interest. Diplomatic immunities, maritime regimes, air traffic rules—these work because every participant gains when the norms are respected. The deeper problem is in security politics, where unilateral prerogatives and the shielding effect of great‑power status undermine reciprocity and generate cynicism about legal commitments. A further nuance pointed out in the discussion is perceptual: the effectiveness of law depends on actors believing that norms will be backed by countervailing power if breached. It is not enough that international rules exist; they must be embedded in a balance of deterrents and incentives recognized by all relevant parties. When a state, or a coalition, acts as if it faces no credible constraints, legal norms lose bite and become tools of propaganda rather than constraints on behavior. ## US militarism and failed wars The conversation paints US militarism as increasingly counterproductive—strategically costly, domestically corrosive, and politically unsustainable. The United States invested heavily in a global military posture—hundreds of foreign bases, vast defense expenditures—that has not translated into the kinds of durable political gains its advocates promised. Instead, prolonged interventions across multiple theaters have exposed the limits of military power in resolving political conflicts, have strained public resources, and have created a cycle of dependency on arms sales and militarized bureaucracies. Several historical echoes underscore the pattern: from Vietnam to more recent theaters, conventional military superiority has failed to translate into political success against mobilized nationalism and asymmetric resistance. Those conflicts demonstrate that victory in kinetic terms does not automatically produce legitimate or lasting political settlements. Moreover, the domestic political economy that sustains militarism—contractors, vested bureaucratic interests, strategic narratives—insulates decision‑makers from many of the costs and consequences. That creates a moral hazard: elites and firms can profit irrespective of whether interventions succeed, while publics and allied states bear the burdens. The conversation also emphasizes a comparative lens: the contrast with a rising China that favors economic leverage, infrastructure diplomacy, and win‑win framing. This does not mean China is appeasing or altruistic, but its model relies less on the projection of hard military power and more on economic interdependence and infrastructural investments—measures that reshape global alignments without direct coercion. In this sense, the era in which raw military primacy could ensure political outcomes is fading; the returns on militarized grand strategy are diminishing even as the costs rise. ## Neutrality and shifting alliances As unipolarity wanes, states and regional groupings are reassessing how they position themselves. The conversation highlights neutrality and shifting alliances not as relics of an earlier age but as pragmatic responses to an increasingly multipolar and uncertain environment. Where legal order once functioned in practice through a two‑pole or three‑pole distribution of deterrence and tacit rules, contemporary actors are seeking flexible postures that minimize exposure to great‑power rivalry. Neutrality, in this context, is not merely legalistic abstention but a strategic calculus: states that cannot rely on a single guarantor or that face incompatible pressures from competing powers will opt for hedging, nonalignment, or carefully calibrated neutrality to safeguard their interests. The reassertion of reciprocity can be seen here too: by signaling that they will respond in kind to coercive moves, middle powers and regional actors try to recreate the mutual constraints that law depends upon. The conversation also underscores the importance of legitimate norms for smaller states. When global institutions appear politicized—applied selectively by powerful states—these states lose faith in collective mechanisms and gravitate to bilateral deals or regional arrangements. The result is a fragmentation of legal universality and an increased reliance on ad hoc balances and strategic bargaining. The long‑term danger is that such fragmentation hardens into a patchwork order where the great powers negotiate spheres of influence and smaller states are left to navigate shifting fault lines without consistent legal protections. ## Israel Palestine media and war law Perhaps the most politically charged segment of the discussion centers on Gaza, Israel, and the role of media framing in shaping perceptions of legality and legitimacy. The exchange argues that the recent handling of that conflict has exposed the fragility of the rules‑based rhetoric when applied inconsistently. Law becomes delegitimized in the eyes of many when accusations of genocide, disproportionate force, and collective punishment are met with political shielding rather than accountability. That selective enforcement corrodes faith in international criminal mechanisms and fuels popular perceptions—especially in the Global South—that legal instruments are tools of great‑power policy rather than impartial instruments of justice. Media framing plays a decisive role. How a conflict is narrated—whose suffering is foregrounded, which legal terminology is mobilized, whether civilian harm is contextualized or minimized—affects international political responses and popular mobilization. When mainstream outlets and official narratives reflect the priorities of powerful states, they can amplify impunity; conversely, alternative narratives can mobilize global solidarity and pressure for accountability. The conversation stresses that this battle of narratives has legal consequences: prosecutions, sanctions, and diplomatic isolation often hinge on what becomes perceived as the dominant truth in world opinion. A related legal point is the use—and misuse—of international law a

The DEAD END of US Militarism. The World is Waking up | Prof. Richard Falk Today, I speak with Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, about the state of international law in 2026, power and reciprocity, the UN order after 1945, unipolar decline, US militarism, neutrality, Gaza and Israel, media framing, and whether law can still restrain great powers in a more unstable world. Links: Richard Falk blog: https://richardfalk.org TRANSCEND Media Service: https://www.transcend.org/tms/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz. substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack. com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:16 International law in 2026 00:05:24 Law power and reciprocity 00:10:28 Unipolarity and instability 00:16:38 US militarism and failed wars 00:27:35 Rules based order and reform 00:39:25 Neutrality and shifting alliances 00:47:21 Can US realism still change 00:54:57 Israel Palestine media and war law #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. I am very much joyed that I am joined today by Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and a brilliant mind who's been writing on the issue of international law for many years. Richard, welcome. Thank you. Great to be with you, Pascal. It's fantastic having you. I was just looking over your blog that you're doing on your homepage, richardfalk.org, and you started that blog on the occasion of your 80th birthday, I read, and that is now 16 years ago. You've been writing for a long time. Richard, may I ask you, what is your assessment of the state of international law as we speak in 2024? #Richard Falk It's important to make a distinction between international law in the context of global security, where it has been performing in a very disappointing way, and international law as the framework within which international interactions routinely occur—anything from maritime and air safety to tourism, communications, even trade and investment normally. Everywhere the logic of reciprocity operates. Unfortunately, in global security, the inequalities of power overwhelm the mutuality that effective international law depends upon. And this, it should be remembered, was recognized in the design of the UN Charter, which gave the winners of World War II, who were among the most powerful countries in the world at the time, the right to veto any decision of the UN that was not within their strategic domain of interests. And that was intentional. It accorded primacy to the winners in the war, giving them this privileged position in relation to all the other members. And it also was reflected in the Nuremberg and Tokyo -- 1 of 14 -- war crimes trials, where only the crimes of the losers were investigated, and the gigantic crimes of the winners were not even scrutinized and could not be brought up in the defense of those that were accused. So this kind of geopolitically slanted management of global security trusted the self- restraint of the powerful rather than an international legal regime that had reasonable expectations of enforcement and accountability with respect to these permanent members of the Security Council. So that kind of exception was woven into the fabric of the normative order from the time of the establishment of the UN in 1945. And it's only been exposed as a kind of denial—what is in the media and generally talked of as a denial of the effectiveness of international law—in the recent excessive efforts and irresponsible kind of geopolitics that the U.S. has pursued and has shielded Israel in pursuing. And that's created this kind of crisis of belief in the role of international law, which is less a consequence, as I'm suggesting, of international law as it is of those that designed this international order in 1945. #Pascal We have to go into this order of 1945, but before we do so, just a question about your perception of the nature of international law. I mean, not only are some people very fatalistic about it, but we can put that aside. But how do you think it actually exists in the world? When I talk to my students, I usually tell them, look, you should think of international law and domestic law as about as different as we think about domestic law and the laws of nature. We use the same term, but we mean a different thing by it. It is related, it's metaphorically related, but it is not the same beast. How do you see that? #Richard Falk Well, as I tried to suggest in my prior response, international law is not a homogeneous normative, what shall I say, corpus of rules. And my view is to suggest that it's closer to domestic law than is generally perceived, because domestic law also doesn't work very well when you're dealing with very uneven class identities. In extreme cases, the impunity enjoyed by those that were patrons of the Epstein world, who basically have not been held accountable for very severe crimes against young girls—and that is almost taken as a given in domestic law—that those who have the means can hire the best lawyers, and they can often influence the prosecution and the judges in ways that are normally subtle. They're not outright corruption, but they do reflect differences in societal leverage enjoyed by rich people who have a lot of leverage and poor people who are quite vulnerable normally. And so there is a continuity between where law works and where it doesn't work. And I'm trying to argue that it doesn't work in contexts where inequalities of power are dominant. And that's particularly relevant in international society, where one is extremely vulnerable to irresponsible behavior by the most -- 2 of 14 -- powerful states that are not held accountable unless they lose a big war. Only in that kind of context, for instance, when Iraq lost the war to the US and UK, they prosecuted Saddam Hussein as a war criminal. They didn't prosecute the aggressor. And so, again, it's a winner's game in global security, but it works where there is this mutual interest in its effectiveness. And we take it for granted that that pertains. Diplomatic immunity, for instance—the ambassador of Luxembourg is approximately as secure as a U.S. ambassador in carrying out his diplomatic missions. That's because all governments, large or small, have an interest in this reciprocal access to diplomatic procedures, and they don't want to undermine that by making weak governments feel they can't trust the diplomatic immunity that is enjoyed by strong governments. #Pascal This is a very, very good observation. But that then also means that the more equal the power distribution in the international system, the higher the likelihood that this reciprocity of international law will kick in and actually then start working. So do you actually see the—sorry, just to extrapolate from that—would mean that in a unipolar world, and a lot of people would now argue that, you know, what we used to call the post–Cold War, these 30 years after ’89 until roughly 2022, something around there, 33 years, would count as what we now name, you know, the unipolar moment, when we had one global superpower and everybody else just was structurally in a weaker position. Would you say that we actually see, you know, maybe not a decay, but a change in the way international law was adhered to if we compare it to the period before, which was at least bipolarity, or even earlier moments when we had some form of multipolarity, especially during the long 19th century, when, of course, international law was at a completely different point at that time—the law of nations? #Richard Falk That's an important question and observation. I've interpreted the bipolar period of the Cold War as one where there first existed this reciprocity between the Soviet Union and the West, Europe and the U.S., but also one that was conditioned geopolitically by the agreements at Yalta and Potsdam to establish fault lines in Europe between East and West. And that was a geopolitical issue. It was seen, even at the height of the Cold War, as something that both sides wanted to observe. In other words, they didn't, even though they were tempted and had very militarist advisors and militarist social forces that on occasion wanted to violate them or test them, they were basically respected and probably prevented a Third World War. But that was, again, not an achievement so much of law but of political arrangements that were premised on the reciprocity embedded in trying to avoid a mutually disastrous war. It was tested in -- 3 of 14 -- the Cuban Missile Crisis, where both sides saw the other as violating a fault line—the U.S. by not respecting self-determination in Cuba, the Soviet Union by challenging the primacy of the U.S. within the Latin American framework. And it was only because you had rather prudent state leaders on both sides, Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, that you had a diplomacy that tried to restore the stability of bipolarity. Now, in the unipolar situation, as you suggest, there is less of a—there’s no Potsdam-Yalta way of cushioning the behavior of the powerful rival states. And with the ascendancy of China and the reemergence of Russia as a wannabe country, a geopolitical actor, you have this very dangerous situation in the world where, if they don't make a new kind of arrangement between those three countries, we're likely to see these crises emerge from time to time and be counting on, in a sense, good luck and responsible leadership to avoid them producing catastrophes. And that's a very unstable situation to be in. Indeed. #Pascal I mean, what you're explaining here is, of course, that the power of international law to restrain these worst impulses that societies may have rests upon the recognition of the other being also able to inflict equal power. So it's not just that you need multipolarity or you need a balance of forces, actually, or reciprocity. You need the recognition of that in each actor. If you have an actor that believes it is infinitely more powerful than the other one, even if it is not, well, then the whole thing— the self-restraint—won’t work. And in the absence then of frameworks to bring them, to force them to stop things, well, we are headed for catastrophe in that case, right? So perception is actually very, very important in that discussion. #Richard Falk Yeah. That's my fear, and the U.S. misplayed, in my judgment, unipolarity—first Biden, by trying to shift the focus of the Ukraine war from Ukraine to a defeat of the Russian challenge to its traditional sphere of influence on its border. And Trump accentuated that by the very irresponsible and unpredictable assertions of power, as if it was still a unipolar world. He pursues what I would call a delusionary geopolitics, which is premised on a reality that no longer exists and existed only briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was broken, I think, by the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, and then by the U.S. and Europe shielding the Israeli genocide in 2023 and subsequently. And one further point that illustrates the approach that I'm trying to argue is that it's not just a matter of assessing responsible statecraft in a given situation, but it's also a matter of a rational and coherent conception of national interests. And one of the failures of unipolarity was for the U.S. to invest this heavy amount in militarism and capabilities, establishing 750 foreign military bases that are very expensive to maintain and have the effect of undermining the standard of living of a large percentage of the people, ordinary people in the U.S. In other words, it impoverishes the very country that is pursuing this excessive geopolitics internationally by way of militarist geopolitics, in -- 4 of 14 -- contrast to China that also has