Recent off their victory in World Conflict I, the Allies clamored for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s head. There was only one catch: The kaiser had absconded, 59 prepare automobiles of bags in tow, to the Netherlands, which refused to extradite him. He died in 1941 underneath German occupation, an unrepentant admirer of Nazi insurance policies till the tip.
Decided to not repeat that failure after World Conflict II, the Allies didn’t waver in searching for to ship justice, convicting 19 Nazi leaders on the Worldwide Navy Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Regardless of its affiliation with the Holocaust right now, the tribunal didn’t primarily search justice for the victims of considered one of historical past’s most systematic genocides. As a substitute, it was a chance for the Allies to punish Germany for going to battle within the first place.
Recent off their victory in World Conflict I, the Allies clamored for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s head. There was only one catch: The kaiser had absconded, 59 prepare automobiles of bags in tow, to the Netherlands, which refused to extradite him. He died in 1941 underneath German occupation, an unrepentant admirer of Nazi insurance policies till the tip.
The Legal State: Conflict, Atrocity, and the Dream of Worldwide Justice, Lawrence Douglas, Princeton College Press, 456 pp., $35, April 2026
Decided to not repeat that failure after World Conflict II, the Allies didn’t waver in searching for to ship justice, convicting 19 Nazi leaders on the Worldwide Navy Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Regardless of its affiliation with the Holocaust right now, the tribunal didn’t primarily search justice for the victims of considered one of historical past’s most systematic genocides. As a substitute, it was a chance for the Allies to punish Germany for going to battle within the first place.
Nuremberg thus marked a hanging departure from centuries of idea and authorized custom defending a state’s proper to wage battle, argues scholar Lawrence Douglas in his newest ebook, The Legal State: Conflict, Atrocity, and the Dream of Worldwide Justice. For the primary time, the very act of war-making, or “aggression,” was placed on trial.
Douglas deftly weaves collectively philosophy, historical past, and legislation to point out how the worldwide group has overwhelmed a hasty retreat from prosecuting the crime of aggression since Nuremberg. He argues that an “atrocity paradigm” has emerged as a substitute: a authorized system that’s more and more emboldened—not less than theoretically—to sort out genocide, crimes towards humanity, and battle crimes. But whereas atrocity trials have been important in legitimizing victims’ experiences and educating each perpetrators and bystanders, they’ve largely prevented the difficulty of legal accountability for aggressive warfare, which frequently permits these crimes within the first place.
Unchecked aggressive wars are proliferating by the day—from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to U.S. and Israeli interventions in South America and the Center East—whereas the worldwide authorized system stays largely powerless to constrain them or search even retroactive justice. Douglas’ historical past is a well timed reminder that the promise of Nuremberg stays unfulfilled, and that reviving constraints on aggressive battle is important to confronting the atrocities that so typically comply with.
Kaiser Wilhelm II (heart) with Paul von Hindenburg (left) and Erich Ludendorff circa 1917. Hulton Archive/Getty Pictures
For hundreds of years, a state’s resolution to wage battle was no one’s enterprise however its personal. Seventeenth-century English thinker Thomas Hobbes memorably claimed that the state of nature condemned males to lives that have been “nasty, brutish, and brief.” The answer was the state, which he believed was the one construction able to sustaining peace and safety. The issue, after all, was that peace and safety stopped at nationwide borders: Home civil society could possibly be tamed, however the area of worldwide affairs was nonetheless a dog-eat-dog world.
Philosophers and jurists have lengthy grappled with the query of what constraints, if any, might be positioned on battle. The worldwide group made notable progress in regulating the conduct of armies throughout battle—the physique of legislation often called jus in bello—within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the banning of sure inhumane weapons and laws on the remedy of prisoners of battle. However the realm of jus advert bellum, which refers back to the circumstances underneath which states might resort to battle within the first place, has confirmed extra slippery to articulate. When is resorting to battle respectable—and who will get to be the choose?
World Conflict I marked a attainable tipping level. “The staggering futility of trench warfare, the sheer wastefulness of males and matériel, gave highly effective impetus to deal with the launching of battle … because the principal disaster,” Douglas writes. The victors demanded not simply that rank-and-file German troopers stand trial for battle crimes, however that the kaiser himself be tried for “a supreme offence towards worldwide morality and the sanctity of treaties.”
Each political and juridical obstacles hampered these efforts. Fearing German nationalist backlash, the Allies allowed battle crimes trials to happen in Leipzig, slightly than at a global tribunal overseas. It was an unmitigated catastrophe: Solely eight low-ranking troopers have been convicted, their sentences gentle or shortly commuted; most notoriously, the court docket acquitted a secret navy police officer accused of torturing and assaulting younger Belgian boys. These trials did little to halt the backlash—actually, Hitler and Hermann Göring, later a prime Nazi official, first met at a nationalist rally towards the Leipzig trials.
Makes an attempt to attempt the kaiser fared even worse. Past the difficulty of bodily entry, World Conflict I’s victors squabbled over what to cost him with, finally balking on the concept of turning war-making—that treasured proper of states—into a global crime. Within the Ottoman Empire, the place not less than one million lives had simply been claimed within the Armenian genocide, British jurists felt considerably extra emboldened to criticize the state’s remedy of its personal residents, on condition that the Western powers noticed the Ottoman Empire (not like Germany) as a “semi-barbarous” state. Nonetheless nervous about piercing what Nuremberg prosecutor Hartley Shawcross referred to as the “mystic virtues of the sanctity of state sovereignty,” nevertheless, Britain finally launched 118 Turks, a lot of whom have been high-level perpetrators of genocide, from its prisons.
Regardless of the devastation wrought by the Nice Conflict, worldwide leaders and jurists failed, in its aftermath, to rework worldwide legislation in ways in which would both constrain states’ proper to wage battle or maintain them accountable for atrocities. It might take an excellent larger disaster to realize that.
Nazi official Hermann Göring throughout his trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946.Bettmann Archive/Getty Pictures
“Any resort to battle—to any form of battle—is a resort to means which are inherently legal,” stated Supreme Court docket Justice Robert Jackson in his opening deal with as the US’ chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. These phrases heralded an unprecedented break with centuries of worldwide legislation by recognizing aggressive battle because the paradigmatic worldwide crime.
Though Nuremberg was a revolution, the trials “marked each the triumph and the eclipse of the aggression paradigm,” Douglas writes, partly as a result of the Allies have been so divided on what the crime of “aggression” meant that they merely selected to not outline it. Given the dimensions and mass atrocities linked to Nazi aggression—its “monstrous peculiarity”—it was all too straightforward to forego a selected definition and run the tribunal on an “I do know it after I see it” foundation.
The idea of aggression has confirmed elusive and politically explosive ever since. In 1956 alone, Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula with French and British backing, and Soviet troops crushed a nascent rebellion in Hungary. Unsurprisingly, the United Nations Safety Council couldn’t comply with condemn both motion: As Douglas writes, “Aggression and self-defense very a lot remained within the eye of the beholder.” Regardless of enshrining aggression as a violation of the U.N. Constitution in 1945, states didn’t agree on a legal definition till 2010.
Itta Halaunbrenner and Fortunée Chouraki (heart), moms of Jewish youngsters deported from France throughout World Conflict II after arrest by Klaus Barbie’s Gestapo, arrive to testify towards Barbie throughout a trial in Lyon on June 2, 1987. AFP by way of Getty Pictures
In the meantime, one other form of worldwide legislation had begun to flourish. Regardless of the neglect of crimes towards humanity at Nuremberg, different trials towards Nazis delivered such convictions—Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”) in France, for instance. These trials gave extra space for sufferer testimony, highlighting human struggling and centering the Holocaust as the last word crime of the Nazi Verbrecherstaat (legal state), a regime whose criminality lay not in extrajudicial abuses, however in its use of legislation itself to subjugate and exterminate.
Courts all over the world thus developed a rising physique of jurisprudence on atrocity crimes. This has not been seamless: Trials are sometimes geographically and culturally faraway from the folks they have an effect on, and proceedings are commonly thwarted, underfunded, and delayed. Douglas invokes the picture of Irmgard Furchner, a former underage focus camp employee who was tried in juvenile court docket in her 90s, to underscore the absurdity of deferred justice. However flawed as they have been, these trials, and the worldwide tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda that constructed on this legacy, have been important in establishing oral histories of victims’ experiences and guaranteeing that perpetrators have been held to account.
U.S. Marines patrol in Fallujah, Iraq, on Feb. 7, 2005.Scott Peterson/Getty Pictures
None of those efforts have solved the issue that Nuremberg got down to sort out: When is an act of battle itself legal? If something, the rise of atrocity trials has sophisticated this effort, making a seemingly unresolvable rigidity in so-called wars of humanitarian intervention. Atrocities—actual or invented—have typically been used to justify armed motion to destabilizing impact: One man’s battle of liberation, from Kosovo to Libya to Iraq, is one other man’s crime.
Douglas makes an attempt to reconcile this rigidity, arguing that acts of aggression must be deemed legal when they’re the basis explanation for atrocity crimes. However although vital, Douglas’ arguments really feel considerably tutorial in an age through which states and worldwide leaders more and more and overtly ignore authorized pretense altogether.
Certainly, the Trump administration is in some ways the apotheosis of a return to the pre-Nuremberg order. Having launched airstrikes towards eight nations in only one 12 months, Trump makes little concession to niceties such because the U.N. Constitution or worldwide norms. “I don’t want worldwide legislation,” he has boasted. He’s stated he’ll “get” Greenland “come what may,” that the US will politically management Venezuela, and has threatened to obliterate a “complete civilization” in Iran. Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth has fortunately acted on these impulses, reassigning navy attorneys and vowing to desert “silly guidelines of engagement.” For the Trump administration, the dog-eat-dog world of the nineteenth century hasn’t gone wherever.
Alas, the worldwide authorized system is as ill-equipped as ever to cope with the crime of aggression. Take Ukraine: Whereas the Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for battle crimes, he won’t ever be charged with aggression even within the unlikely occasion that he sits trial. Whereas the crime of aggression is technically inside the ICC’s jurisdiction, the idea has been neutered; member states can declare exemptions to the clause, whereas non-parties to the court docket—together with the US, Israel, and Russia—can’t be charged with aggression in any respect. Though Ukraine has lobbied for an advert hoc tribunal on aggression to be established by means of different means on the United Nations, it’s unlikely to garner sufficient votes to make that occur.
Worldwide legal legislation has all the time been fraught with flaws and dominated by Western and imperial hypocrisy. However latest occasions reveal the wildly destabilizing results of a pre-Nuremberg world order, through which the sturdy do what they’ll, and the weak endure what they have to. Douglas’ ebook thus serves as a rallying cry: Reminding us that aggressive battle is commonly on the coronary heart of atrocity crimes, it calls on us to defend and construct on the legacy of Nuremberg earlier than it’s too late.
