Alan Bickley’s recent essay on international law and the Russo-Ukrainian war is, as always, articulate and refreshingly free of the sanctimonious posturing that pollutes so much of Western political commentary. Bickley, a man of intellectual rigor, correctly identifies the hollowness of modern invocations of “international law,” which serve more often as camouflage for power than as meaningful constraints upon it. Yet while I find much to admire in Bickley’s argument, particularly his dissection of the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy, I believe his analysis ultimately underplays the deliberate and engineered nature of the moral chaos he laments. Where Bickley sees contradiction and miscalculation, I see a consistent and deeply cynical strategy of deception—one in which international law is not merely a failed mechanism of restraint, but a tool consciously weaponized to advance imperial interests under the guise of universal virtue.

Bickley opens with a useful framing: the dichotomy between those who see international law as sacred and those who reject it as a meaningless façade. He rightly rejects both poles, opting instead for a third view—one in which norms are real, but grounded in interest and calculation rather than any metaphysical order. But what Bickley never fully confronts is how these norms are shaped, who shapes them, and to what end. When “norms” conveniently align with the interests of the global hegemon—and are abandoned the moment they do not—it becomes difficult to take seriously any claim that they are emergent features of the international system rather than top-down fabrications by those who control the global narrative.

In particular, Bickley’s treatment of the Ukraine war, while sensible in its depiction of Russian strategic logic, remains curiously detached in its attribution of blame. He describes the West’s support for Ukraine as “irresponsibility dressed as virtue”—which it is—but he treats this as a sort of tragicomic miscalculation rather than a deliberate provocation engineered by powerful interests with long-standing designs on weakening Russia. As others have long argued, the 2014 Maidan coup was not some spontaneous democratic uprising—it was a U.S.-backed regime change operation designed to wrench Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and transform it into a forward operating base of NATO power. The eight years of civil war that followed in the Donbas, culminating in the full-scale Russian intervention, were not accidents. They were the inevitable result of a geopolitical campaign rooted not in misjudged idealism, but in the cold calculus of destabilization.

Bickley is at his best when he turns his attention to Israel, offering one of the few intellectually honest assessments of its behavior to be found in mainstream or even alt-mainstream discourse. He notes the “extensive and credible allegations of atrocities,” and rightly sees Israeli conduct as representative of great power behavior stripped of pretense. But even here, he stops short of acknowledging the full extent of Western complicity—particularly the American political class, which has functioned for decades as little more than an extension of the Israeli lobby. The massive U.S. subsidies to Israel, the total impunity it enjoys in international forums, the coordinated media silence around its worst crimes, are not examples of moral hypocrisy—they are evidence of political capture. And any analysis that fails to reckon with the ethnic and institutional networks driving this exceptionalism falls short of explanatory power.

On the matter of “moral language,” Bickley’s core insight is sound: that states invoking universal principles to justify war are not making moral errors, but deploying rhetoric to disguise their interests. His point that “hypocrisy serves a civilizing function” is both clever and largely correct. But he fails to identify the most glaring example of this rhetorical manipulation: the post-World War II American empire, which has cloaked its global interventions in a shifting vocabulary of democracy, human rights, anti-communism, counter-terrorism, and now anti-authoritarianism. These slogans are not the accidental effluvia of moral confusion—they are crafted narratives, honed by think tanks and their intelligence agency controllers, and by media conglomerates, precisely to obscure the imperial project at the heart of U.S. foreign policy.

Indeed, Bickley’s emphasis on “calculation” over “idealism” risks obscuring the crucial role of propaganda in shaping public perception. When Americans were sold the Iraq War, they were not offered an unvarnished imperial calculus—they were fed falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda ties. Likewise, in Ukraine, the American and British publics were told that Russia’s invasion was unprovoked, that NATO expansion was irrelevant, and that Ukraine was a flourishing democracy. Every part of this narrative was false, and demonstrably so. Yet the architects of these deceptions remain in power, their institutions unchallenged. This is not a world of misaligned incentives—it is a world of lies.

Bickley’s argument would be strengthened immensely by considering the structural role of Western media in manufacturing moral consensus. The collapse of objectivity in journalism has not been accidental—it has been incentivized and institutionalized. From the CIA’s infiltration of the press under Operation Mockingbird to the more recent revolving door between the intelligence agencies and major news outlets, the informational environment in which “international norms” are discussed is thoroughly compromised. Under such conditions, to speak of international law as an “imperfect but useful fiction” is to ignore the degree to which fiction itself has become policy.

Perhaps Bickley’s greatest strength is his refusal to indulge in utopian thinking. His admission that “moral behavior can be reduced to nothing more than a pattern of actions deemed desirable by those who matter” is refreshingly honest. But this recognition, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads not to a world of contingent norms and limited wars—it leads to the exposure of the modern liberal order as a well-designed fraud. The Westphalian system, whatever its limitations, was at least coherent. Today’s international order is not merely post-Westphalian—it is post-rational. It is a system where crimes are ignored if committed by allies, where interventions are launched under humanitarian pretexts while far greater atrocities are ignored, where moral outrage is manufactured to serve elite agendas.

In sum, Alan Bickley’s essay is a commendable attempt to strip international law of its unearned sanctity and return it to the realm of human interest. But it does not go far enough. It fails to name the architects of the chaos he describes. It underplays the deliberate, not accidental, destruction of stability by those who profit from endless war. And it stops short of naming the institutions—media, intelligence, and financial—that maintain the illusion of moral legitimacy while doing everything possible to ensure that peace remains out of reach.

A sober reading of international affairs today must recognize that we are not merely dealing with a clash of interests or a breakdown of norms. We are dealing with a ruling class—transnational in nature, ideologically unified, and institutionally entrenched—that has weaponized every element of modern life, from law to media to education, in order to maintain its dominance. Until that class is named and confronted, essays such as Bickley’s, however perceptive, will remain diagnostic rather than prescriptive.

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