Fergus Finlay: Iran conflict shows Trump has no regard for global law — and Netanyahu exploits that

You couldn’t be sure from one day to the next whether Donald Trump was arriving at the G7 Summit or leaving it, apparently because it was urgent for him to preside over the erection of two flagpoles beside the White House.

Perhaps more importantly (though it’s impossible to know what that man considers important), you couldn’t be sure from one minute to the next whether he wanted Iran to negotiate or surrender. He said both things in the course of a day. In the meantime, when Iran wasn’t on what is sometimes referred to as his mind, he was obsessed with Los Angeles, where some minor riots became an excuse for him to send thousands of American troops, the US National Guard, and marines, into an American city to wield arms against American people.

So it’s really not clear what Donald Trump’s understanding of “law and order” is. Either at home or abroad.

One thing is clear now: As far as Trump is concerned, international law is whatever Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be, and its application is determined by whatever mood Trump is in on whatever day of the week it happens to be.

The opening lines of the United Nations Charter set out the overwhelming reasons for having a codified system of international law and processes to protect it.

You can still find online a remarkable speech made by Tony Benn in the House of Commons when he voted against the Iraq War, and quoted the opening lines of the charter — it’s especially moving because he quoted it from memory.

“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained …”

It is one of the great historical tragedies of human history that those weighty lines have been undermined again and again by the actions of tyrants and despots. And even by democratically elected politicians in some cases believing they were serving a higher cause.

But nothing surely encapsulates the total collapse of the meaning and hope of the UN Charter than its manipulation by Netanyahu and the man who has become his puppet.

Since the October 7 atrocity by Hamas butchers, Netanyahu has waged a 100 times more horrible war against the entire people of Palestine. And he has done so largely to keep himself in power. For years and years now, he has announced that Iran is on the brink of developing nuclear weapons and represents an imminent threat to the world. Now, he has clearly cajoled Trump to join him in attacking Iran — raising the stakes as high as possible.

We always knew Netanyahu wouldn’t bother himself with the niceties of UN resolutions and the like. But even in the war against Iraq, that George W Bush was determined to prosecute, the US (and Britain) went through the motions of trying to persuade the UN about the so-called weapons of mass destruction — which never existed then. One of the dilemmas facing the world now, in the aftermath of Trump’s bombs away, is that it is impossible to believe a word out of the mouths of any of the principals involved.

They lie casually and constantly, and they completely ignore any of the principles that have sought to hold the world together in the aftermath of catastrophic wars.

We don’t know how big a threat Iran actually posed to the world.

What we do know is that the only UN resolution still alive is the one that endorsed an agreement negotiated between Iran and the West about limiting its nuclear capacity in return for a gradual lifting of sanctions. That agreement was, of course, negotiated under former US president Obama. It was repudiated by Trump in his first term (when he was trying to repudiate everything Obama did), and Trump effectively gave Iran a green light to develop its nuclear capacity.

So what happens now? Trump’s hapless spokespeople are going around saying this was a limited, once-off operation and they have no interest whatever in changing the Iranian regime. Last week, Trump offered to negotiate with Iran (provided they agreed to immediate surrender), then told them he’d give them two weeks to think about it, then sent a massive bombing mission, and this weekend he used his own version of X to suggest that regime change in Iran would indeed be desirable.

Should the rest of the world fear Iran? The answer is surely yes.

If recent history teaches anything, we need to be prepared for an upsurge in terrorist activity.

Iran has the capacity to do immense economic damage by blocking trade routes, but they also have the ability to send out little teams of people on suicide missions.

If they do that, attacks will be indiscriminate.

They won’t be setting off their bombs only in places they have defined as the enemy — they’ll do it wherever they can get access.

If a country like Iran decides to start a campaign like that, nowhere will be safe.

And every act of terrorism runs the risk, of course, of further retaliation and escalation.

This could get very ugly, very fast.

WOULDN’T you love to be wrong about all this? You’d love to think that cooler heads will now prevail and that, after a little flurry of tit-for-tat bombing, Israel and Iran would find a way to back off from each other. But there’s no reason to believe that Netanyahu won’t seek to press home what he sees as his advantage now. He’s got Donald Trump on board, and he will seek to continue until he has completely laid waste to the world around him.

There is astounding immorality in all of this. And an astounding lack of responsibility. But none of that will influence either him or Trump. The one thing we know for sure about Donald Trump is that a moment will never come when he takes responsibility for his actions.

We don’t know where the most corrupt president in American history thinks he’s leading us, but we can be pretty sure it’s not going to be good.