Into the void: how Trump killed international law

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : For the EU and Nato this is indeed the moment when every act has the potential to be decisive for the future sovereignty of Europe and the UN charter.Similarly the sovereignty of Venezuela, sitting on 303bn barrels of crude oil – about a fifth of the world’s reserves – becomes, like that of Greenland, Canada and Mexico, the subject of Trump’s marauding eye.
55% : It is my strong belief that this more multipolar world needs to be based on a single set of norms and principles, on the UN charter and the universal declaration of human
53% : What once promised order increasingly reads as performance.”The paradox is revealed in its starkest form when rulings of the UN security council or the international courts are invoked by western leaders who, in the next breath, prostrate themselves in front of Trump, caving in to his demands, calling him “daddy”, as Nato’s Mark Rutte did, and sending more lavish gifts to the Sun King and his family.Very few in 2025 stood up against what the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman called “immorality and unseriousness … the two defining traits of our leaders today”.Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN humanitarian agency Ocha, was arguably an exception.
51% : In May he asked UN diplomats “to reflect – for a moment – on what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st-century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.
50% : In total it is estimated to have cut $1bn (£750m) in funding for organisations linked to the UN and fired 1,000 US government staff whose portfolios reinforced major UN functions.At the UN general assembly, the key site of this year’s disputes between the US and the rest of the world, the US almost relishes its isolation.
48% : The Pentagon has subsequently claimed implausibly that it was permissible in US law to blow up shipwrecked sailors stranded in the water because they were combatants representing a threat to US security.Meanwhile, the rules of free trade are shredded as Trump deploys the sheer size of the US market to extort not just money from allies, but changes in their domestic policy.
45% : The US has never been a signatory to the Rome statute or the UN convention on the law of the sea.
44% : Photograph: Noushad Thekkayil/EPAFinally, Israel’s occupation and bombardment of Gaza, with European powers often complicit bystanders, is brutal in itself but also strips bare the supposed universality of international norms.
37% : The judges at the international court of justice, the UN body that deals with intergovernmental disputes, have had to take evasive action to prevent their assets being seized.The US has left or sought to undermine several other UN bodies, such as the Human Rights Council and Unesco.
31% : In the words of Majed al-Ansari, the foreign policy adviser to Qatar’s prime minister and a man who has had more dealings with Israel than most in 2025: “We are living in an age of disgusting impunity that is taking us back hundreds of years.
28% : China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, made the same criticism in May 2021 during a UN security council debate on multilateralism.

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