AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In early January, weeks before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, President Trump brushed aside the idea that international law could constrain him.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah. There's one thing - my own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop. And...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Not international law?
TRUMP: ...That's very good. I don't need international law. I'm not looking to hurt people.
RASCOE: That was during an interview with The New York Times. Since the war began in late February, legal experts have been sounding the alarm. Last week, more than a hundred of them signed an open letter saying the attack was a clear violation of the U.N. Charter and that actions during the war may amount to war crimes. Joining us now is one of the letter's signatories. Allen Weiner's the director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law. Thank you so much for being with us.
ALLEN WEINER: Pleasure to be with you.
RASCOE: So let's start with the U.S. and Israel launching this war. From the beginning, the president has justified the attacks as eliminating imminent threats. Is that a legal use of force?
WEINER: The rules on the use of force are pretty clear and pretty simple. States aren't allowed to use force unless they have suffered an armed attack. Now, I think many international lawyers, and I would put myself in this category, would say you can use force if you face a threat of an imminent attack. The problem for the Israeli and Trump administration position in this case is that I don't think there's any credible evidence that Iran presented a threat of imminent attack against Israel or the United States. I think Iran did pose, and has for decades posed, a threat to the region. The question, though, is, should states be allowed to use force whenever they perceive another state posing some vague or undefined threat to it?
RASCOE: So President Trump set a deadline for tomorrow to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has threatened to attack Iran's power plants and water desalination plants if Iran doesn't comply. What does international law say about destroying infrastructure like that?
WEINER: Well, it's not too enthusiastic about it, Ayesha. The most fundamental rule is that it's permissible to target military objectives, but it's forbidden to target civilians or civilian objects. And this is what is known as the principle of distinction. And for the president to say that we're going to intentionally target desalinization plants or all of Iran's energy infrastructure is quite clearly a threat to hit targets that should not be the subject of military operations under the law of armed conflict.
RASCOE: But what about the mechanisms for enforcing international law? Because even before the Trump administration, when the U.S. has been accused of breaking international law, it doesn't seem like there have been consequences.
WEINER: There's no international police force to enforce the law. The rules of international law are rules that the United States voluntarily agreed to because we thought it was in our interest for those to be the rules.
RASCOE: These are, like, precedents that we have agreed to, just like, you know, you might agree, when you go to somebody's house, you don't start tearing up the whole house. It's just, like, kind of - these are constructs that we agree to to be in a part of a society.
WEINER: The key is reciprocity, right? If I don't target your civilian objects, you won't target my civilian objects. And we decided that that's a better world than when people have the right to target one another's civilian objects. When I was a lawyer in the State Department - and I was an international lawyer, you know, working for the government for 11 years - what I would try to remind my clients, when they wanted to do something that maybe would not be consistent with international law, is to remind them we agreed to these rules because we thought they were in our interests. And if we violate them, that's a signal to everybody else that they can violate them, too. So not only when I go to my friend's house am I going to tear up their house, but when they go to their friend's house, they're going to tear up that house.
RASCOE: Is Trump doing something different than what past administrations have done? Because, as I said, other administrations have been accused of war crimes, of breaking international law.
WEINER: You know, you're right. The United States' track record here is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I think what is maybe different about the Trump administration is when we invaded Panama, when we invaded Grenada, when we used force against Iraq in 2003, we advanced legal justifications. I think on balance, they were, for each of those cases, losing arguments. But we tried to justify our conduct within the framework of international law. And President Trump, in the interview with The New York Times that you played a clip from, said, I don't need international law. That, to me, seems to be very different if we are concerned about the systemic impact of U.S. actions on this international society that we live in.
RASCOE: That's Allen Weiner, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law. Thank you so much for joining us.
WEINER: Thank you for having me today.
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