The following remarks were delivered during the May 15 EIR Emergency Roundtable, “The Iran War and the ‘Controlled Disintegration’ of the World Economy.” A detailed overview of the event, which included high-level speakers from around the world, is available here. Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2008 to 2014. The video is available here.

Thank you for those introductory words and greetings to all participants. It’s an honor to follow such eloquent contributions that have already been made to our roundtable. I want to stress in opening my remarks the dangers that are uniquely revealed by this war of aggression against Iran. It should not be forgotten that it is a war of aggression, and that the peace should not be dictated by the aggressor. That is not a feasible outcome. President Trump’s diplomacy has consistently tried to turn a disaster into a geopolitical victory of sorts by threats of unlimited devastation. He did this already in relation to Iran and could revive that kind of bullying geopolitics.

This is something new. Beyond militarist geopolitics is this phenomenon of bullying countries of less capabilities that are vulnerable to military devastation. A leading example is turning Israel’s genocide in Gaza into a diplomacy that rewards the genocide, the perpetrator of genocide, and further punishes its victims while the underlying ordeal persists. So that in addition to the dangers that have already been vividly depicted, is the danger of having this most powerful political actor in the world system under the autocratic control of a leader of demonstrated mental instability. The mercurial shifts of tone and policy are really an independent source of fear for the future of humanity when such an individual is entrusted with sole access to whether or not nuclear weapons will be threatened or even used.

This should be an intolerable situation for the entire world. And to look away from it because one feels helpless to deal with it is irresponsible on the part of both the populations of the world and even more so on the governmental authorities. And the UN has shown its helplessness before such diplomatic abuses by unanimously endorsing this so-called Board of Peace that was established to bring an Israeli political defeat into a diplomatic outcome of rewarding genocide, as I suggested.

The Iran situation is one where the whole discourse in the United States shifted from the debate over initiating an aggressive war to whether this was a prudent war of choice. The idea that countries have the choice of war as a foreign policy option is an unconditional denial of the relevance of international law, and of the whole idea at Nuremberg that a crime against the peace is the ultimate crime in international life, with all of the adverse consequences that have already been noted in our roundtable. And one should remember the admonition of the prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, who said in his closing statement that the justice that is imposed on these defendants, these Nazi survivors, will be tested by whether the victors in the war adhere to the framework that we are judging the losers of World War II by. And that has not been sustained in the future.

A brighter side of the Trump diplomacy, which was referred to by Helga [Zepp-LaRouche] in her opening remarks, is his appetite for some kind of positive relations with geopolitical rivals. And I think that the alternative idea that he has, and this is less destructive, I think, of the near future anyway, is some kind of compact between Russia, China, and the U.S. that does away with internationalism and returns to a world of spheres of influence under geopolitical guardianship. That is not a world we look forward to, and it defies the ecological logic of a world order grounded in the love of humanity and the destiny of the planet being tied up with the unity of humanity.

So, we are faced now with these challenges, both the short-term challenges of disengaging from this Iranian quagmire, of sorts, where the efforts at diplomacy were repudiated in such crude language by the American President, who called the quite serious negotiating proposals of Iran a piece of garbage that was totally unacceptable; without making any kind of comparable response, and without any regard for the well-being and security of Iran. In other words, when militarism fails, this recourse to geopolitical bullying compounds the destructiveness of militarism, and it creates a world where injustice becomes the vehicle of stability, so-called.

And again, the reference to Israel-Palestine is pertinent, I think, as a model for this kind of bullying plus militarism as a path toward an imposed and deeply alienating and unjust stability. It is a horrifying prospect for the future of humanity. And I would say that Iran has demonstrated a courageous resilience in the face of an aggression that is so hypocritical in its rationalization; supposedly objecting to Iran’s nuclear program while hiding the reality of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. How can a peaceful future for the region be established on that basis?

Iran, along with the main Arab countries, has long favored a nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, which alone would free the region from this kind of hegemonic efforts to exert Western control. And in this sense, Israel is the partner of the West or a member of the Western alliance, and Iran is the main obstacle to that vision of hegemony.

So, let me just conclude by saying that we’re at this crossroads, and it’s up to the people of the world, not the governments, to mobilize effectively in favor of a truly alternate vision of the future.