“Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind…Usually, they have wreaked havoc.” – Sigmund Freud, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study
US President Donald Trump’s policies are not just matters of domestic law, but also international law in that the Trump administration’s harmful policies could be catastrophic not “only” for the United States, but for global civilization as a whole.
Civilization can survive coinciding threats from a dissembling American president, but only by first embracing more viable systems of international law. Ultimately, these strengthened legal arrangements will need to be founded on widespread understandings of human unity. In essence, the macrocosm (world legal system) must follow the microcosm (human species singularity). By definition, the primal linkages involved in such a redemptive sequencing would be indissoluble and indispensable.
An international law transformation is essential for the human species to survive. This necessary embrace ought never to be summarily dismissed as “unrealistic.” [1] On this imperiled earth, macrocosm and microcosm can only survive together.
What should be our animating goal? For capable scholars and policymakers, this objective should be an incremental—but still foreseeable—end to balance-of-power world politics. [2] While plainly ascendant during Trump II, [3] any corrosive postures of nationalism will endanger us all. Ignoring the determinant primacy of human unity could leave little hope for long-term civilization. [4]
It’s time for a more history-based realism. It’s also “high time” to acknowledge that the overwhelming geopolitical issues of human survival are will not be solved by politicians, their advisors, or any docile “mass” of ordinary citizens. Whether in democracies or in dictatorships, mass suffocates intellect. [5] Though mass deserves to be treated as insignificant, it has transformed itself into the underlying destroyer of civilizations.
To operate meaningfully despite mass, the concrete details of international law reform must first be recognized as overlapping and synergistic. [6] But what, more precisely, should capable legal thinkers and scientists intend to “re-design?” Without a far-reaching vision and jurisprudential “blueprint,” no plan could halt or slow down our Trump-accelerated race to oblivion.
Already, some jurists and philosophers understand that we require plausible visions of “cosmopolis”—an organically integrated community of humankind. Though seemingly idealistic, nothing could be less pragmatic than clinging to the failed principles of a “balance-of-power” world legal order. To fashion a viable system of international law, there would first need to be a collective willingness to realign national judgments of self-interest with the wider interests of humankind. [7]
In such unique or sui generis inquiries, history will deserve pride of place. Our current vigilante system of world law has its origins at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, [8] the treaty that put an end to the Thirty Years War. [9] Left unchanged, or merely modified by token kinds of change, this flawed system will experience recurring catastrophic breakdowns. To argue otherwise, especially in our bewildering nuclear age, [10] would be to reject everything we have already learned about civilization, law, science and species survival. [11] To argue otherwise would be to commit an incomparable and potentially permanent error.
Unless we humans finally take vision-based steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization—a law-based civilization based on the central truth of human unity— there will be no civilization at all. To reject this conclusion would require a supportable faith in “Westphalian” international law. During Trump II, no such faith should ever be expected.
There is more. This challenging conclusion is underscored by our species’ “advances” in mega-weapons creation. Certain “powerful” states could augment these advances and commit themselves to asserted strategies of nuclear war fighting and cyber-warfare. Already, both democratic and authoritarian regimes support the spread of internet warfare surrogates. What should we then to expect regarding critical international law improvements? [12]
It’s time for candor. We humans are now at an end, but also at a beginning. [13] Until now, trapped in the primal circularity of presumed national interest, we have consistently managed to miss what is most important. Nonetheless, a promisingly central truth remains: there is always a latent but determinant unity to world politics, and the costs of rejecting such unity could quickly become existential and irreversible.
Though hideously complex, these are all matters of intellect or “mind.” Such concepts of human security and survival were covered in vital but generally-ignored literatures, most notably among such philosophic giants as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Karl Jaspers, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl G. Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Emmanuel Levinas, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. [14] Accordingly, the persistent rejection of global unity in everyday life, even in the world’s allegedly great universities, represents an elemental threat to every nation-state’s collective survival.
An antecedent question should now be asked: why have we made ourselves—humans are never passive victims in such matters—existentially vulnerable? The correct answer would include a continuous and worldwide drive to find personal identity in membership.
We human beings often fear solitude or “loneliness” more than anything else on earth; sometimes even more than death. Amid the palpably growing chaos that is once again stampeding across whole continents, we still wittingly celebrate unswerving loyalties to “tribe.” Ironically, a net effect of universal “patriotism” is universally enlarged human suffering.
Always, everywhere, individuals desperate to belong will enthusiastically subordinate themselves to the presumptive expectations of nation, class, or faith. And more often than we care to admit, such subordination carries with it an acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we may be reminded that the veneer of our legal civilization is razor thin.
Impressive scientific and medical discoveries aside, swaths of humankind remain dedicated to certain war-related practices of “sacrifice.” In this connection, terrorism can sometimes become an expression of religious sacrifice. Facing such retrograde adversaries, billions of human beings remain excluded from the basic protections of international law. Today, during Trump II, this high number includes both American citizens and non-citizens wrongly deprived of rights to asylum.
There are further nuances. Are we humans doomed to remain irrational as a species? The best answer lies in our shortsighted views of power politics or political “realism.” In the merciless light of verifiable history, these views are strange and incomprehensible. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that international law criminalized aggressive war, and even then with conspicuously little effect.
Hope exists, so we must assume, but now it must sing more softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, sotto voce. Though counter-intuitive, the time for celebrating science, modernization and gleaming new artificial intelligence technologies (AI) is at least partially over. To survive together on this bitterly self-defiling planet, each of us must sincerely seek to rediscover an individual life that is detached from tormenting obligations “to belong.” Only after experiencing such primal rediscovery can we (microcosm and macrocosm) hope to construct durable international laws.
In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler inquired, “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?” This remains a profound and necessary query. The correct answer must accept that suffocating conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by improving global economies, building larger missiles, fashioning or abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid regime with another, or declaring any one state “first.”
Most importantly, we must learn that our species lacks a tolerable future not because we humans have been too slow to learn what has been taught, but because what has been taught has too often been beside the point—or blatantly injurious. Species survival can’t be enhanced even if great numbers of people manage to acquire shiny new “personal devices” or cars that can drive themselves. In candor, these are pitifully false and lazy goals, unworthy of any serious, dignified and law-based civilization.
Furthermore, traditional legal remedies will not suffice because the planet as a whole will remain on its defiling trajectory of belligerent nationalism and conflict. French Jesuit and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955) wrote: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ [the animating dynamic of Trump II] is false and against nature.”
Still, the bewildering questions continue to accumulate. How shall we best conceptualize alternative international laws based on stable and cooperative visions? What are the recognizable “rules” for such conceptualizations? What kinds of scientific and jurisprudential thinking ought to be implemented? Are they even possible in Trump II America? What should be the place of natural law or higher law in such planning? [15]
To answer meaningfully, thinking will have to be dialectical. Among other things, that means accepting that there can never be any conclusively final or permanent vision of a unifying international law. World system change is continuous and dynamic; heuristic models, on the other hand, must be temporary or transient. We must acknowledge that a correct legal “diagnoses” will lead to truly meaningful legal “therapies.”
Real world legal change is anything but inevitable. The scholars’ and policy makers’ task is not to seek unachievable transformations, but to deliberately and intelligently initiate a dynamic process. It will need to be understood at the outset that there can be no gainful or optimal systems of international law. This is because judgments will always depend on the designers’ antecedent values and the ways in which these values integrate with each other.
Values
An international law alternative would only be viable if humanity agreed to a set of shared values. In principle, one scholar’s legal utopia could be another’s dystopia. Even if everyone involved could agree on the representative values of an improved world legal order (e.g., peace, social justice, pandemic disease management, economic well-being, climate change solutions, etc.), there would still be widespread disagreement concerning the favored rank-ordering of these constituent values.
In the end, any such hierarchic ordering must remain a subjective judgment. There can be no objective reasons to prefer any one specific value or configuration of values to another. This is not a negative judgment for science-based inquiries of international law. As a particular method of reaching conclusions, scientific investigation is concerned not with individual human preferences, but with hypotheses, models, theories and variously alternative modes of inference, such as induction and deduction. [16]
Hypotheses
Hypotheses are essential to any science-based inquiry, including the design of alternative world legal orders. These informed “hunches” are necessary to guide the search for analytic order among variously overlapping and discrepant facts. Without suitable hypotheses, there would be no reliable way to determine which factors are relevant in our analysis of alternative world legal orders. Thus, suitable hypotheses are necessary for science-based investigations of international law.
To make alternative world legal orders hypotheses work, legal scholars and policymakers would first need to agree on how to rank shared world values. Then, legal scholars and policymakers would need to link the agreed-upon values to factors expected to sustain or maximize them. These links are known as scientific hypotheses. In these tentative explanations, values would serve as the “dependent variables.”
Models
Models of alternative world legal order must follow hypotheses. Expressed differently, these models are determined by antecedent hypotheses. Such analyst-constructed visions are offered for the sole purpose of examining interesting hypotheses. Without them, there could be no satisfactory way of knowing if hypotheses had any explanatory and predictive promise. These models represent another example of why the adequacy of any particular international law design process depends on prior methodological and philosophy of science understandings.
In any world legal order design process, the models should derive from hypotheses. These models provide the analytic context within which any proper investigation must proceed. Exactly which models of world legal order are actually placed under consideration would depend on the already-selected hypothesis or hypotheses. This, in turn, could be more or less complex, and would depend on the investigators own informed sense of what is most important.
Recommendations
Once international law models have been stipulated and scientifically investigated, legal scholars and policy makers could decide whether to recommend them. This final critical decision should always be informed by the twin criteria of desirability and feasibility. Before any alternative system of international law could be judged sufficiently viable, it would have to appear suitable in terms of the selected values (“suitability” being a subjective judgment) and reasonably capable of actual implementation (“reasonably” being a similarly subjective determination).
There is still more to clarify. Feasibility issues are inextricably tied to desirability issues. They represent interdependent or intersecting criteria of acceptability. Depending on the agreement regarding what might constitute a desirable international law alternative, the feasibility of a considered legal system alternative could vary from one assessment to another. This is not to suggest that widespread agreement would signify feasibility. Any remaining differences concerning strategies of implementation could still render a particular jurisprudential recommendation infeasible or unattainable.
“You are a citizen of the universe,” observed the ancient philosopher Epictetus, underscoring the importance of thinking holistically, to understand and acknowledge the immutable unity of human life on Planet Earth. [17] Reciprocally, it is the individual human being writ large who must ultimately define this “universe.” Each man and woman is a “little world;” a microcosm, and each such individual must be nurtured not only for his or her private sake, but also for their much wider planetary consequences.
“God loves from Whole to Part,” said Alexander Pope, “but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole.” Even in secular scientific terms, any improved system of world legal order will need to be “human-centered.” By grasping this critical wisdom, legal scholars [18] and policymakers could finally craft a viable survival path beyond balance-of-power world politics. This will not happen simply because it is necessary. History renders such a warning clear and unassailable.
What alternative international law path should we seek? Above all, it should be configured toward expanding global unity and coexistence. Above all, it should not represent another grievously fractured road to civilization oblivion. [19] Though this recommendation might seem ostentatiously naïve or unrealistic, nothing could prove less realistic for human survival than staying the course of Trump II belligerent nationalism. As a unifying species, our only residual hope lies in an improved system of international law that is based on science, imagination, empathy, and courage.
As a professor, I taught international law for more than fifty years at Princeton, Purdue, the University of Illinois, and Simon Fraser University (Canada). Over that half-century, it became obvious that my students were easily able to separate their own private academic and career goals from the much larger issues of planetary survival. Always, they remained ready to distance their own personal interests in wealth and security from the plausible fate of the planet as a whole. Yet these same students rarely understood that before they could make any meaningful progress as individual “parts” of a coherent and interdependent “whole,” their imperiled planet would first have to be made “whole.”
As a professor, I know when it is time for a “summing up.” Without an improved system of international law, there will be no viable paths to individual or collective security. In principle, to identify such a critical system, initial steps should be taken in universities, what Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called “temples of intellect.” [20] Ironically, the academic study of international law has never been as peripheral as it is today. [21] Instead of functioning as a “temple of intellect,” universities now serve as witting adjuncts to corporate expectations and commercial interests. This increasingly crude subordination of intellect and dignity to status and commerce is prospectively lethal, not just for the United States, but also for an entire planet that desperately needs prompt “legal healing.”
There can be no acceptable alternative to ending such subordination. In this matter, microcosm and macrocosm would be interwoven. We may learn from Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung [22] that we could only expect life-saving transformations if the individual could change.
Reciprocally, only by acknowledging and acting on the civilization principle of human unity could individuals ever expect law-based security from “havoc.” [23] Amid the disjointed and destabilizing policies of Trump II, all outcomes of “America First” would be intolerable. Accordingly, the international-law imperatives of “Humanity First” should be endorsed by all who count species survival as their overarching goal.
LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Purdue. Born in Zürich at the end of World War II, he is the author of many major books and articles dealing with world politics, law, literature and philosophy. Professor Beres’ writings have been published in leading law journals and at Horasis (Zürich); JURIST; Yale Global Online; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); US News & World Report; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Atlantic; The New York Times; The Jerusalem Post; The National Interest; Oxford University Press; The American Political Science Review; The Brown Journal of World Affairs; Defense Opinion; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College; Modern War Institute (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); BESA Perspectives (Israel); INSS Strategic Assessment (Israel); Air and Space Operations Review (USAF); Israel Defense (Israel); The Hill; World Politics (Princeton) Virginia Journal of International Law; and International Security (Harvard). His twelfth book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016 (2nd. ed., 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
NOTES:
[1] “The visionary,” reminds Italian film director Federico Fellini, “is the only realist.”
[2] Aside from an all-destructive nuclear war, a sudden end to this anarchic world politics would be inconceivable. The concept of a balance of power—an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a more fearful variant—has never been more than a facile metaphor. Prima facie, it has never had anything to do with any calculable equilibrium. As such alleged balance is always a matter of individual and more or less subjective perceptions, adversary states could never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances were tilted in their favor. In consequence, as each side must perpetually fear that it will be left behind, the continual search for balance can produce only widening global insecurities and perpetual global disequilibrium.
[3] One may be reminded here of Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse’s generic description of the barbarous ruler in The Glass Bead Game (1943): “The dull-witted brute, blindly trampling the flower gardens of intellect and culture.”
[4] The reader may be usefully reminded of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s observation in Endgame: “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?”
[5] See by this author at Yale Global: Louis René Beres, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage See also Louis René Beres, at US News & World Report: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-03-20/commentary-the-masses-were-never-intended-to-rule
[6] In synergistic intersections, the “whole” is greater than the sum of its “parts.”
[7] For an early book on such willingness, by this author, see: Louis René Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (University of Denver, 1975).
[8] See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the “Peace of Westphalia.”
[9] Though few Americans seem to understand, international law is a part of US domestic law. In precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[10] Significantly, under extant international law, no state is under any per se legal obligation to renounce access to nuclear weapons. Moreover, in certain distinctly residual circumstances, even an actual resort to such weapons could conceivably be lawful. On July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague handed down its Advisory Opinion on “The Legality of the Threat or Use of Force of Nuclear Weapons.” The final paragraph of this Opinion, concludes, inter alia: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
[11] We may think of the prescient warning by the High Lama in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The storm…this storm that you talk of. It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos…The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary.”
[12] International law is not entirely codified or treaty-based. It also includes certain norms of a customary nature. Article 38(1)(b) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice describes international custom as “evidence of a general practice accepted as law.” 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993 (June 6, 1945). The norms of customary international law bind all states irrespective of whether a state has ratified the pertinent codifying instrument or convention. International law compartmentalizes apparently identical rights and obligations arising both out of customary law and treaty law. “Even if two norms belonging to two sources of international law appear identical in content, and even if the states in question are bound by these rules both on the level of treaty-law and on that of customary international law, these norms retain a separate existence.” See Military and Paramilitary Activities (Nicaragua v. U.S.), 1986 I.C.J. Rep. 14, para. 178 (June 27).
[13] “Is it an end that draws near, or a beginning?” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951).
[14] See by this writer at Yale Global: Louis René Beres, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[15] Under international law, the idea of a natural law or higher law was drawn originally from the ancient Greeks and ancient Hebrews and is contained, inter alia, within the principle of jus cogens or “peremptory” norms. According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).
[16] Strictly speaking, induction and deduction are not alternative modes of inference, but two sides of the same inferential process.
[17] A tangible expression of “oneness” between states lies in the common fight against crime, and has given rise to the core principle of universal jurisdiction. It is mentioned in the Corpus Juris Civilis; Grotius, THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE (1625), Bk. II, Ch. 20; and also in Emmerich Vattel, LE DROIT DES GENS, Bk. I, Ch. 19 (1758). The specific case for universal jurisdiction, which is strengthened whenever extradition is difficult or impossible to obtain, is also built into the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, which unambiguously impose upon the High Contracting Parties the obligation to punish certain grave breaches of their rules, regardless of where the infraction was committed or the ascertainable nationality of the alleged criminals. Today, in 2025, the principle of universal jurisdiction is central to the ICC warrant issued for Vladimir Putin’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine. The Russian president’s transfer of Ukrainian children to Russian territory represents an authentically genocidal crime.
[18] Rabbi Eleazar quoted Rabbi Hanina, who said: “Scholars build the structure of peace in the world.” See: The Babylonian Talmud, Order Zera’im, Tractate Berakoth, IX.
[19] For informed accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[20] See Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (1921). See also, by Professor Louis René Beres at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/12/love-suffering-pity-and-death-the-tragic-sense-of-world-politics/
[21] This observation underscores, inter alia, that the world has largely forgotten the peremptory judgments at Nuremberg. See, accordingly, AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[22] See Carl G. Jung’s The Undiscovered Self (1957). In essence, Jung’s argument is the same as in Alexander Pope’s epigraph to this article, taken from an Essay on Man (1733).
[23] See Sigmund Freud’s comment in article epigraph (above).
