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We have entered a new rogue order. The rules-based order that underpins international relations, helped the birth of modern Israel and held back annihilation during the Cold War, has finally been blown away.
It crumbled with the 2003 US-led illegal invasion of Iraq, which paved the way for Russia’s illegal colonial war in Ukraine and now Israel’s attacks on Iran, enhanced by American bunker busters and stealth bombers.
Israel’s aim, to end Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, has not been underwritten with any hard evidence that Iran posed an immediate threat.
And leaked US intelligence reports suggest that rather than “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facility in Fordow, Trump’s strikes over the weekend may have only hampered Iran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months. The US president decried the leaks as “fake news’, but satellite imagery had already raised doubts about the efficacy of the mission.
Ironically, those states that have always been thought of as “rogue” – notably Iran, North Korea, sometimes Cuba, one day even Yemen or Eritrea – will now conclude that they need to get hold of a nuke, and fast.
The tearing up of international order began in the early 2000s with the doctrine of pre-emption, in which Israel pioneered so-called “targeted killing” of alleged terrorists posing an imminent danger. It was co-opted by the West after 9/11 and included extra-judicial killings by the US, the UK, and other allies around the world – often of their own citizens and always without trial. Alleged terrorists were blown up, frequently using drones, and many innocent civilians were killed along with them.
Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli admiral, was responsible for gathering intelligence and often drawing up the lists of people to kill.
In 2012, he revealed how damaging the idea can be in The Gatekeepers, a startling documentary featuring five other former heads of Israel’s internal security service.
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“There’s a concept, ‘the banality of evil’,” he said. “When you start doing it en masse, 200, 300 people die because of the idea of ‘targeted assassinations’. Suddenly, the processes become a kind of conveyor belt. You ask yourself less and less where to stop.”
But the US and Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran over the last 12 days have not prompted Tehran to give up on its intent to rid the Middle East of the Jewish state.
Iran knew the US was likely to strike against its stockpile of uranium that had been enriched using centrifuges to 60 per cent purity.
According to The New York Times, citing Israeli officials, 400kg of this uranium material – which can, in theory, be spun to weapons-grade 90 per cent purity, were moved away from danger before the US airstrikes on the nuclear site of Fordow. The UN’s nuclear watchdog the IAEA thinks this is likely too.
“The Iranians are not dumb. They have had years to plan for this and there’s no reason on earth why they would not have moved their uranium. It would have only taken a couple of trucks,” a senior Israeli military officer told The Independent.
Low-tech stealth is often highly effective. Pakistan is said by Western intelligence agencies to hide its nuclear warheads in plain sight by keeping them on the move in lorries floridly disguised as ordinary freight “jingle trucks”.
Israel is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons that it won’t confirm it has. Its allies, like the UK and the US, will never confirm whether they really exist. This has meant that it has remained outside all international non-proliferation talks and treaties.
Iran will now believe it has every incentive to develop a nuclear weapon of its own to protect itself against the kind of conventional attacks that the US and Israel launched to pre-empt its creation of a nuclear weapon – and to topple its government.
The US has targeted the traditional world order in other ways. In February this year, it cut through the fabric of international law by putting sanctions on the International Criminal Court after Israeli leaders were indicted for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The court “abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister of defense Yoav Gallant,” the Trump White House said.
The continued support of the US to Israel during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, in which Israel has killed at least 50,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, in the face of condemnation by the UN will have further undermined the idea of a rules-based international order.
And the lesson of Ukraine will not be lost on Iran, North Korea, or any other state contemplating nuclear armament.
At the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Ukraine inherited a substantial nuclear arsenal, including approximately 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 44 strategic bombers. It had the third biggest nuclear arsenal on Earth.
But it signed up to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1994 and by 1996 Ukraine had returned all nuclear warheads to Russia.
Eighteen years on, Russia invaded Ukraine and went on to launch a massive assault in 2023 aimed at toppling its pro-European government democratically elected the year before.
Now that the West has torn up the doctrines of international law with illegal invasions, there is one sobering conclusion to be drawn: If Iran had nukes and if Ukraine had “The Bomb”, no one would have invaded or attacked them.
Trump may say that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the f*** they’re doing” – but both have learnt that in the new rogue order only the dangerous will survive.
