Hormuz in August is dead calm. The muggy air could choke a gnat. The sea is a mirror—so calm it feels oiled. Shave with it. Slit your reflection’s throat—barely a ripple. There are no birds. There is no sound. There are no tankers. The spice does not flow. Silently, the rest of the world is dying.
Sorry. It’s not actually like this. The world is not actually dying. Oil prices are up, a little. Gas prices are up, a little. Reserves are down, a little. Nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes.
The military and political situation
The current state of the war, as best I can read it, is that the war is in stalemate, because neither side can afford to escalate. The issue currently in question is the political and economic stamina of either side.
The stalemate continues because the political leaders on each side need to come home with something, anything, they can call a “win.” The actual goal of both sides is a narrative victory—a retarded, but not unprecedented, diplomatic situation.
Neither side can afford to escalate, because the Hormuz war has shown us a new reality: conventional MAD. The Gulf states, Anglo-American protectorates since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, are pure infrastructure. The humans of the Gulf are almost irrelevant. These “nations” are oil wells, gas concentrators, desalination plants, airports, managed by a thin layer of expats, maintained by an army of helots. Their citizens are not an economic resource, but an economic liability. They exist only as a justification for these geological regions to call themselves “countries.” The lifeblood of these countries is not the hearts of their citizens, but the pumps of their refineries.
And offense in the missile/drone era, at least right now today, dominates defense. A few strikes on desalination plants, and the UAE has to evacuate Dubai. A few strikes on gas concentrators, and the world economy chokes. Why doesn’t Iran do this? Maybe because evilmaxxing, Marvel villain style, is not a real thing and never has been. “Mutual Assured Destruction” proved that in the Cold War.
It’s easy to forget that conventional MAD was already predicted in the interwar period with the invention of the bomber. “The bomber will always get through,” they said, and so indeed it proved. Many optimistic interwar thinkers, if not quite in a Norman Angell state of pre-WW1 innocence, believed that the political threat of city bombing would prevent a new war. It did not work out that way—the German bomber stopped getting through, the Allied bomber did not—and truly unstoppable cruise and missile “revenge weapons” were developed only by the Germans at the end of the war, after the loss of tens of thousands of Allied bomber pilots. Technical descendants of the V-weapons are the currency of the Iran war today,
The median voter turned out not to be rational and would vote for aggressive foreign policy and/or war, even if it involved his city being bombed. Nothing has proved as ineffective as bombing people, or even threatening them with bombs, to win their political affections. That 20th-century political systems, from far right to extreme left, (although guess who didn’t do “strategic bombing” in WW2, ever? Stalin!) have kept reinventing this bad idea of exploding sermons, is reason enough to distrust them all.
If anything changes, it will change because the USG today is determined to choke out Iran, and believes its blockade can last longer, especially with more and more tankers getting through at night with their beacons off. Maybe it’s right. Hopefully it’s right?
However, this strategy involves cornering a dangerous animal which does not particularly want to fight at the moment—but which can still fight, which is in a military state of conventional MAD, and whose regime is complex and divided and not exactly historically renowned for its sanity and stability. This seems risky?
The military situation is always a detail in the political situation. The political situation is that the military leadership of both sides—not “Iran” and “the US”, but the IRGC and the Trump administration—both need to bring home something they can sell as a win. Most American voters in 2024 were not terribly concerned with the freedom of the seas, in Hormuz or anywhere else. Like Iranian voters, however, they love a winner and they hate a loser. Live by democracy, die by democracy. Sad!
So, before it all goes pear-shaped on both sides, I have a win-win peace plan—the second half of this essay. My plan makes no sense without its context—which is international law—which is 200 years of no good, horrible, very bad international law.
The plan is a really dumb plan. It’s just to restore the old, good international law of 250 years ago, and apply it to the Middle East—sensibly, so things don’t catch fire and explode. But without a little history lecture first, none of it will make sense at all.
The 20th-century context
Iran is a real country, for better or for worse. Mainly for worse. Although the Islamic Revolution was never aligned with the USSR, it was always a Leninist revolution in both form and style, and its alignment with the last of the Leninist powers and the Russian successor state is inevitable—as is its alignment with the last remnants of Third World “freedom fighters” in Hamas and Hezbollah. Without being a neoconservative, I can agree that if the Trump administration could wave a magic wand, and abolish the last remnants of 20th-century Leninism around the world, (a) this would be very nice for anyone, and (b) it would not be reborn anywhere.
Yet we also have to admit that the only path toward being an independent, sovereign country in the 21st century ran through 20th-century Leninism. These deeply carnivorous states, founded in chaos and blood—like all historical nations, but a good bit worse than most—either imploded, or matured.
China, where the laptop I am typing this on was made, is the perfect post-Leninist state. All that remains of its old deranged ideology is pure pragmatism. Mao Tse-Tung had his Thought and so does Xi Jinping, but we cannot imagine today’s China funding revolutionary terrorist movements in Africa based on Xi Jinping Thought. Nor does Premier Xi appear on many dorm-room posters. Nor does he need to. Trump has no magic wand that can abolish the Chinese Communist Party, or even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Sovereignty ultimately rests on physical and economic force.
Accepting that mad-dog 20th-century Leninism can mature into 21st-century sovereignty is a bitter pill for believers, liberal or conservative, in the old American Century. Unification of the Leninist world with the “democratic” world was a core belief of Cold War Americans. Most liberals, all the way from 1917 to 1989, believed in convergence: the theory that the two orders shared the same basic ideals. The rough Russian bear would be cajoled, rewarded, tamed and socialized. The wild, individualistic American cowboy would be caponized. And the odd-couple of conservatives and Trotskyites, who in the 70s would merge into the neoconservative tradition, expected the USSR to be defeated or, possibly, collapse of its own contradictions, and then elect Ronald Reagansky. Or maybe Ayn Rand.
All of these things sort of happened, and sort of didn’t. Russia wound up with Putin. Who is not quite Xi Jinping, but not Stalin either.
Neither living American foreign-policy tradition has an answer to these outcomes. But there is also a post-Leninist foreign-policy tradition, whose lines are often spoken in English. When we hear people in 2026 talking about a “multipolar world order,” we are almost always hearing post-Leninism. The language and philosophy of Russian, Chinese and “Global South” foreign policy remains well within the old Soviet tradition. And the Soviet tradition was at its core a tradition of hypocrisy, cynically wielding “anti-imperialist” and nationalist ideas as a path to its own global empire.
What we’re looking at is three different schools of imperial-revolutionary foreign policy: the old school of Anglo-American liberal imperialism, the neoconservative post-Trotskyist school of world democratic revolution, and the neo-communist, post-Stalinist school of Third World socialist-nationalist revolution.
The 19th-century context
All these schools, though perhaps less the explicitly antinomian neoconservatives, claim the mantle of “international law.” There is not one living “international law.” There is Samantha Power international law, Robert Kagan international law, and Alexander Dugin international law.
And they all suck. No, really. All these traditions are absolutely vile and tired and harmful and need to be abolished.
All, even the Soviet revolutionary tradition, are descendants of 19th-century English liberalism. Anyone who reads any Soviet history of the 19th century will recognize all the usual liberal heroes. The Bolsheviks were, of course, extreme Westernizers on the Russian political spectrum.
We cannot understand the history of the 19th century without understanding that, in 1815, the world became a unipolar military, financial, and diplomatic order. England after Napoleon’s defeat had no geopolitical peer in the 19th century, just as America had no peer in the 20th—and the unity of the Anglo-American empire is shown by the smooth shift of gravity from London to Washington. Basically, we are all living in Cecil Rhodes’ last will and testament. While the German, Japanese and Italian regimes in World War II, and the German regime in World War I, did aspire to equality with Anglo-America, as did Moscow after World War II, we know who won.
Legal theorists distinguish between positive and natural law. Positive law is a system of rules imposed by superior authority. Natural law consists of the rules that normal human beings, with normal human psychology, normally regard as fair. “Thou shalt not steal.”
There has never been any human society in which it was, like, okay to steal. If a ship is wrecked on a desert island where there is no legitimate government to impose any system of positive law on the shipwrecked sailors, it is still not okay for them to steal from each other—and natural law also allows for both repossession and retribution.
Philosophy always grows to fit its time. Law, even more so. And the 19th century, so new and fruitful in so many ways, developed its own new philosophy of international law—a positive international law. A system of rules collectively agreed to and collectively enforced. Under the benign, free, civilizing, peaceful umbrella of the Foreign Office.
Outside the formal British Empire proper, an informal empire of satellite states developed: the modern era’s first “international community.” Any half-educated bandit chief who could recruit a small entourage of Byronic gentlemen with friends in the London press could, with the generous (but informal) assistance of the Royal Navy, overthrow its old regime, stake out some territory, and declare himself President of a brand-new three-newspaper republic. This would be a “country,” in the same sense that, say, Spain, was a country. Spain was not in much position to object.
We will have to accept that the British empire, with a small E, was the first Orwellian empire. Already in the Victorian age, soft power was its greatest power. If it became fashionable in London in 1837 to call a cat a dog and a dog a cat, in ten years all the cool kids in Vienna would be inverting their animals. The wellsprings of soft power are as mysterious as the mind of man—or even, as the fashions of woman. Yet it always correlates with hard power. Always and everywhere, strength is fashionable.
English is the world language today for many reasons. As Borges said, due to its origins, it is objectively the best Western language for either prose or poetry. It is spoken worldwide, though, mainly because of the Duke of Wellington.
Until Waterloo, European international law—the jus publicum Europeaum—was a system of natural law. In the classical era, there was no hegemonic power that could impose a positive international law. The concept would have made no sense.
But in the new unipolar order, it was the old natural international law that no longer made sense. It was no longer relevant. A new order existed, like it or not. The new order, as Machiavelli recommended, copied the symbolism and reputation of the old order, while inverting its substance—to follow the geopolitical reality of the century.
This Jedi mind trick, and the legal ambiguity it created—since the old Westphalian order was never explicitly repealed—led directly to the great wars of the early 20th century, which were fundamentally rebellions against this new unipolar Anglo order.
In the public mind of the unipolar hegemon—of our dear Universal Republic—any rebellion is an attempt to capture unipolarity. In the public mind of the rebel against this order, any rebellion is an attempt to restore the multipolar order. Because the old order was never in any formal way denounced, abandoned or repealed, both orders held competing legitimacy—the basic formula for war.
In 1940, the Nazi invasion of America loomed large in our minds. Hitler was said to be ready to leap, tigerlike, across the Atlantic from Dakar to Brazil. In historical reality, world domination was never really a thing for the Nazis. Continental domination certainly was. World domination—that was our thing. The Anglo thing. Obviously.
The rebel, in any rebellion, is always accused of aspiring to hegemony, not secession. Usually, he denies the false accusation. His denial confirms the frame—often at real military cost. Hitler stopped at Dunkirk because he didn’t want to invade England, and he wanted England to see that. Like many of Hitler’s ideas, it didn’t work out.
Similarly, no historian now believes Jefferson Davis was plotting to establish slavery in Boston. But this “Slave Power Conspiracy” is a normal strain of Northern political thought in the 1850s—Southern Derangement Syndrome, essentially. After Bull Run, the first battle of the war, the Confederates could easily have taken Washington—militarily. Politically, they could not, because this expansion of their war aims would have confirmed the deranged conspiracy theories of their enemies. Later in the war, this delicacy was not such a concern. As at Dunkirk, the opportunity never recurred.
If Gettysburg had gone otherwise, could the War of Secession have produced a stable geographic division in the former United States? If Stalingrad, Midway, the Marne, had gone otherwise, could the 20th-century “world wars” have resulted in a stable multipolar order? Or would the new pole or poles, flush with victory, have embarked on a march to a new unipolarity? On all these questions, smart observers can disagree.
True multipolarity dies in the 19th century and is never properly resurrected in the 20th. And while World War II did result in a kind of bipolarity, the historical reality of Moscow as a schismatic satellite of Washington, much as Beijing was a schismatic satellite of Moscow, dictated a very different relationship than any that ever existed between Washington and Berlin. Nothing here to copy, gentlemen!
The 18th-century context
We do not find real, decentralized, multipolar international law, with a genuine connection to the ancient world, until the classical Europe of the 18th century.
The universal 18th-century textbook is Emeric de Vattel’s Law of Nations. Both sides in the American Revolution, for example, considered Vattel the standard. He is summarizing and condensing a long European tradition that goes back centuries, and is also fully aware of Greek and Roman thought on the matter.
Educated with even a smattering of “Model UN” 20th-century liberal international law, we are immediately shocked by Vattel’s bizarre, even evil, principles. For instance: if asked for the highest goal of international law, most American undergrads would say: outlawing war. Whereas according to Vattel, the right to make war is a fundamental attribute of national sovereignty. What is up with this guy?
If the decision to make war is taken outside the nation, a core aspect of the nation’s sovereignty lies outside the nation. This means it is no longer sovereign. On these grounds alone, Vattel would classify the post-1945 states of both Eastern and Western Europe not as states at all, but as protectorates—not countries, but external provinces. This is obviously consistent with our historical narrative of military unipolarity.
Under natural law, there is no government or court or “United Nations” or hegemonic power that can impose rules from above. Natural law confines itself to the perception of right and wrong as understood by all sincere good-faith actors. It does not require everyone to be friends. It is a formula for distinguishing between amicable and predatory behavior. The natural law of nations, and the natural law of individuals, operate in just the same way.
Combat is not an exception to natural law, but an aspect of it. Under natural law, combat is the only way to settle disputes: a fight, instead of a lawsuit. Louis XIV had the motto “ultima ratio regum,” or “the last argument of kings,” cast into his cannons.
Who attacks first is not at all an issue. The 20th-century concept of “aggression” does not exist in Vattel, to whom it would be like automatically preferring the defendant to the plaintiff in a court. Of course, if you have been wronged, you have a natural right to redress that wrong—which inherently involves attacking.
Vattel’s law of nations assumes that the ostensible purpose of every war is to assert right against wrong—either to redress some past or current wrong, or to proactively prevent some future wrong. The plausibility of any such rationale is not for any central party to judge, but for every other sovereign to judge on their own.
Frederick the Great, when he invaded Silesia, produced an enormous legal dossier, involving distant chains of princely inheritance, which explained why he was the rightful owner of Maria Theresa’s province. Without weighing in on the validity of this legal case, historians can agree that Frederick’s army proved stronger—though not so much stronger as he had hoped.
The goal of classical international law is a stable, peaceful world of strong and independent nations. Every nation has an incentive to be strong, protecting its rights against all encroachments. Nations which use their power in bad faith, embarking on a predatory path, will be unable to disguise their contempt for the natural international law, and will excite self-interested defensive coalitions. Frederick was on the edge of this path—and still, he was no Napoleon or Hitler. The old system worked.
Peace will enforce itself when no power has an incentive to make war—an incentive which should be created only rarely and by pathological weakness. Rotting states are swallowed easily by their neighbors, giving their citizens the blessing of strong and vigorous government. Vattel is unambiguous that conquest produces valid title. If it did not, irredentism would never end. As indeed it has not.
And in the classical regime, war is a contest of militaries. These militaries ultimately command all the resources of the state, including its manpower as infantry. But war is confined to the state. The purpose of war is to capture and milk populations, not to decimate them, brainwash them, etc. War is about where you send your tax check.
The “cabinet wars” of the 18th century were not like the revolutionary or genocidal wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. They involved only professional soldiers. The 21st-century equivalent will probably be robot-on-robot. In case of war, remain indoors to avoid falling debris.
(You do have to evacuate if a robot-dog infantry zero-line passes through your zipcode. In this case there may unfortunately be property damage. The peace settlement will reinsure your insurer. If they still exist, make sure to check your security cams for anything kino to post.)
Working systems of natural law are all about incentives. By crisply defining what behavior is honorable, they maintain peace among reasonable, independent, good-faith sovereign actors. These mechanisms are often counterintuitive, especially to those deeply steeped in the Anglo-American narrative—as, of course, we all are.
Another principle of natural international law is the idea that “might makes right.” Again, this sounds downright evil! This is Hitler stuff. Or at least Nietzsche. The blond beast has come out of his cave, hungry for prey.
Under natural law, there is no system of positive law enforcement. Wherever possible, the law should enforce itself. If the set of actions you are legally permitted to perform is identical to the set of actions you can objectively to perform, the law enforces itself. While perfect alignment between might and right is never possible, the farther away they drift from each other, the more unstable the legal order. Ergo, might makes right.
Even positive law (which is found in all civilized societies, but always grows out of, clarifies, and modifies the natural law) cannot escape “might makes right.” We all know this saying as: “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Possession cannot be the whole of the law, or whoever stole a wallet would get to keep it. But, if I want to get something back from you, possession remains the default. Even in a fully-governed society with courts, police, etc.
Under mere natural law, I have to convince a sufficiently strong posse that it is in everyone’s interest to help me get my wallet back. The bigger the posse, the less likely actual violence is. Under positive law, I have to convince a court to take it from you and give it to me. Moreover—the longer you have had it, the harder it becomes for me to get it back. This is called “adverse possession,” yet another case of “might makes right.” Every anarchist squat in West Oakland is legally reliant on “might makes right.”
The evolution from posse to court is natural—depending on how often the posse is needed. Once the good citizens of our desert island have to turn out and bust heads three or four times a week, they are going to start thinking about more formal arrangements. But the modern world of domesticated man, however divided into countries, nations and sovereignties, hardly seems to require much head-busting. Maybe it’s best to keep it informal.
This “Westphalian” law of nations, this sublime cathedral of powerless laws, which held classical Europe together for centuries, was in the 20th century maligned as “isolationism” and in the 19th as “international anarchy.” It was all that any statesman before 1800 (or really 1795, with Kant’s pernicious pamphlet Perpetual Peace), knew as “international law.”
There are many statements of Vattelian principles from the American founders, most notably in Washington’s Farewell Address. I prefer John Quincy Adams, from the Monroe Doctrine Address (1823):
Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none.
Cynics will note that the USG, in subsequent centuries, did have some trouble in maintaining this abstemious oath. Even President Washington had to address the question for a reason. Interfering in the internal concerns of other powers is more American than baseball. Sovereign kibitzing of every kind has been a national pastime since the ink was dry on the Articles of Confederation. Americans are strongly urged to consider a less toxic hobby, such as sports gambling.
The 21st-century future
Is it possible to restore natural international law in the 21st century? It is more than possible. It is imperative.
Classical international law withered because, in a militarily and financially unipolar 19th century, it was no longer relevant. The 20th century, in the Cold War, developed a weird bipolar global empire. The bipolar world order was a mess, involved a mendacious narrative on both sides, and (frankly) did a lot of awful and/or retarded things. On both sides. We do not need any aspect of Cold War diplomacy back.
Classical international law is back because the world is now an objectively multipolar order, militarily and financially. We cannot fit Russia, Iran and China into an “axis of evil” sack. These nations do not trust each other. There is no “DragonBear.” At best their alliance is one of convenience—not ideology, and certainly not conspiracy.
The reasons for this mistrust (as with the mistrust within the original Axis, which largely lost them the war) are complex, but I blame the deep historical falsity of the post-Soviet model of international relations. Russia and China do not even realize, and cannot even realize, that they have become effectively right-wing powers. How can they cooperate when they are living in two different histories, neither one true?
What is certain is that the US cannot defeat Iran with direct military power, let alone Russia and China. Right now it is attempting to pull off an indirect, economic defeat by blockade. That might still work on Iran. Try it on China. When China wants Taiwan back, they will say: if serious final-status negotiations have not begun within 30 days, no more flights into Taipei. In 90 days, no more ships. What are we going to do, start bombing? The whole military scenario is a Pentagon contractor’s fantasy.
The reality of 2026 is that the world is a multipolar order—not normatively, but objectively. The world in 1826 was a unipolar order—not normatively, but objectively.
The classical international law is back, in the 21st century, because of a comment that an American “senior official” made, about a month ago, about the ill-fated Hormuz MOU. He said:
If Iran will behave like a normal country, we will treat it like a normal country.
Two things about this statement. One: it is a statement of natural international law. Two: part of it is missing. The missing part is, in my opinion, the solution in the Strait of Hormuz.
The missing part is that the US, too, needs to find a way to behave like a normal country—and find a practical road back to a John Quincy Adams foreign policy. At least, in the Middle East.
The US is not a normal country. It is not even a normal great power. In my humble opinion, it should become one—at least, in the Middle East. This cannot be done without returning to classical international law. It cannot be defined, except as returning to classical international law. But this return cannot be in any way unilateral. Both Iran and the US have to become normal countries, as does Israel. It’ll be great. But the path is not easy—spiritually. There has to be real truth and reconciliation.
Peace cannot be achieved without confessing the sins of the Iranian regime. If you don’t let people in the room until they do this, you can keep the Third-Worldists out. Where these post-Soviet theorists go wrong: Iran has not been behaving like a normal country. As a result, it has lost its right to complain. The Islamic Republic should not be surprised to be bombed. They have done so much to earn it!
The neoconservatives are right. Iran, for decades, has been behaving like a mad dog. Funding revolutionary movements in other countries is not neighborly behavior. It is very hard to explain as any kind of preventative self-defense. And one important Vattelian principle is reciprocity: if you break the rules, whether of war or diplomacy, you lose the protection of the rules you break.
Far from crying “genocide” (another 20th-century word), Vattel would find Israel’s handling of Hamas oddly half-hearted and timid—because Hamas decided, at the start, that the rules of their conflict would be those of Papuan cannibals. So be it!
Under natural international law, “asymmetric warfare” is not a thing. Hamas has given Israel the right to make war by indiscriminate pillage and murder—much as Nazi Germany gave the Bolsheviks that right (though they had no need to).
Israel should not use this right (since it has no need to). Israel should also put its October 7 GoPro snuff video online—for those who doubt. Palestine enjoyers must have a thousand times as many minutes of IDF POV war porn to comb through, to match it. Or try to match it. Good luck. No, I don’t actually mean that.
Israel has every right to commit any violence it militarily needs to commit—not even just because of October 7. Even regardless of reciprocity with Hamas’ happy fun time, Westphalian law does not bar any militarily effective strategy. It only bars unnecessary military action against civilians.
If respecting the natural law made war significantly harder, no reasonable war leader would respect the law; so it would not be the natural law. In the military law of Vattel, there is no such thing as a human shield. If you tie someone to the railroad tracks and the train comes, it is you who are the murderer, not the train. The same is true when you colocate military targets with civilian institutions, the repeated practice of Hamas.
Yet still, the smallest moment of pointless Israeli cruelty in Gaza is, as Talleyrand said, “not a crime, but a mistake.” Proper handling of the disarmed enemy combines decisive dominance with care and even hospitality—the winner owns the loser. When any power has sovereignty over a human being, it becomes that other’s guardian. Even Papuan cannibals adopt and/or enslave many of their captives, rather than just eating them all right away. Cool, overwhelming force is always better than mere hot violence. Israel’s cynical policy of “mowing the lawn,” war without victory, is contemptible.
Under Vattel’s law of war, the condition of Gaza is simple. It is a siege. Israel has every military advantage in this siege, and has every right to conduct a siege—including blocking food, power and water. It should evacuate Gazan civilians to secure housing through a secure corridor, then give martyrdom to whoever wants it.
While the fate of the Gazans is inherently shrouded in the contingency of war, they are human beings and should not be living in a war zone. (Actually forcing civilians to remain in the besieged city, consuming resources, is too hardcore for our century, but still traditionally permissible.) The bottom line: the complete subjugation of Gaza is not a hard military problem for Israel to handle, even (relatively) humanely. Indeed, it should have happened quite some time ago. Endless war is bad for people actually?
Enough about Israel. Who cares about Israel? Israel can take care of itself. Let’s get back to Iran. While they probably did not sign off on October 7 specifically, Iran’s Soviet-style foreign policy of supporting militant nonstate actors overseas, often actors with a serious taste for blood, is not the policy of a normal country.
Iran has not been a normal country. The US wants it to be a normal country—a normal Gulf state, much more populous, much less Arabic, much more Shia, and probably still much more traditional—but still, a Gulf state. The closest thing to Pahlavi Iran, or what it would be today if Jimmy Carter had not decided to overthrow the Shah. But with not quite as many bikinis.
Iran has not been a normal country. Does it want to be a normal country? Depends who you ask. But also, the US has not been a normal country—not in the Middle East. Not anywhere. Whether or not we should be a normal country, we are not a normal country. Do we want to be a normal country? Depends who you ask.
War is a funny thing. If you see a mad dog, you kick it to keep it away from you. But if you kick a dog every day, it might just go mad. Over time, the origins of this cycle become lost, and in fact irrelevant. The dog is mad. The dog gets kicked. The dog goes mad. The dog gets kicked. It’s yet another DC self-licking ice-cream cone.
My view, which is the view of an ignorant person who knows no one of any importance, is that the proper settlement across the Middle East—in the Strait, and beyond—involves three countries, none of which has been behaving as a normal country under the old law of nations, returning simultaneously to normal behavior.
These countries are the US, Iran, and Israel. All three are in the habit of behaving quite abnormally. (The Gulf states are much more normal—unsurprising, as they are monarchies.) To restore classical international law, and hence to restore peace, in the Middle East, first define normalcy, then work together on the path to it.
For Iran, what does it mean to be a normal country? It means Iran is a Gulf kingdom with Persian characteristics. With the Khamenei dynasty as the new Pahlavis. Still traditional. Never insane. Tourists welcome. Headscarves required. Don’t bring drugs or be gay. It’s fine. Impressive military parades, scientific achievements, architecture, etc. Typical Persian behavior. Moar Islam.
For Israel, what does it mean to be a normal country? I have no idea. I am not Israeli. And who can understand the Israelis? I suspect it means they kill everyone who messes with them, then settle down, make money and be gay. Have gay raves. Study the Talmud all day. This is also gay. It’s 2026, and everything is gay. It’s fine. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way—but it is.
Natural law is about living in reality as it is. No more liberal jihads to change the whole planet into something else it supposedly should be. Maybe Uganda doesn’t want to be gay. In that case, gay Ugandans should probably leave. The rest of our gay world can probably find a way to absorb them. Again, this is what “asylum” is for.
For the US, the meaning is very clear. Once we acknowledge without any pussyfooting that our precious “international community” is just FDR’s big gay Protestant world empire, and even that it goes all the way back to Cecil Rhodes’ Liberal-Imperialist secret-society boy-scout fantasies, we can acknowledge that America is not a normal country; and also, that the highest goal of our foreign policy is to find a way to become a normal country, without jeopardizing our national interest.
For a United States which is no longer a net energy importer, safely disengaging from the Middle East does not seem like the most trying of geopolitical challenges. Idk. Your mileage may vary.
Vattel in Hormuz
But let’s take a serious crack at applying these doctrines seriously to the sinister, ever-shifting swamps of Hormuz.
Alas, the Gray Mirror subscriber is too long neglected. I have to paywall you guys…
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