When Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, condemned Iran’s use of cluster munitions against Israel as “inherently indiscriminate,” he underscored a legal and moral critique long associated with these weapons — one that sits uneasily alongside the Pentagon’s own recent decision to purchase them.
On September 30, 2025, the Department of Defense quietly awarded an indefinite-quantity contract with a ceiling value of $829.1 million to Tomer, an Israeli-government-owned weapons company, for the manufacture, testing, and production of the 155mm High Explosive Advanced Submunition XM1208 projectile: a cluster munition. The contract was not publicly reported until February 2026 and represents the largest recorded weapons procurement by the Department of Defense from Israel.
Then, on December 5, 2025, the Army announced a market survey “to identify potential sources within the United States” for production of the XM1208 projectile, seeking responses from sources capable of consistently producing 30,000 cluster munitions per year. The stated purpose is to “broaden the target set, enhance lethality, and extend the reach of the current cannon platforms beyond the current…capability.”
These recent actions suggest the United States is recommitting to cluster munitions. Although it has not destroyed its existing stockpiles and has transferred cluster munitions to other countries, the U.S. has neither purchased nor itself used cluster munitions for almost two decades. Such a shift implicates international humanitarian law, breaks with longstanding policy and international consensus, and demands an according response from Congress.
Cluster Munitions and International Humanitarian Law
Cluster munitions are explosive weapons that disperse submunitions, or “bomblets,” over broad areas. The XM1208 cluster munition scatters nine submunitions that in turn explode and release around 1,200 tungsten steel fragments. These fragments have been found to disproportionately maim and kill children in Gaza.
By design, cluster munitions are explosive weapons with wide area effects. They saturate broad zones rather than strike discrete targets, making them exceptionally difficult to direct with precision. In practice, their effects often extend far beyond intended military objectives, with devastating consequences for civilians. Cluster munitions are among the deadliest weapons for civilians, who accounted for 91% of recorded casualties from cluster munitions in 2025.
The risks posed by cluster munitions persist long after active hostilities cease. Many submunitions fail to detonate as intended, with dud rates ranging from 2 to 40 percent depending on the system and conditions of use. These unexploded bomblets effectively become landmines, contaminating fields, roads, and residential areas. Their enduring presence renders land unusable, delays reconstruction, prolongs displacement, and poses acute risks to civilians — especially children. The small size of unexploded ordnance and, at times, their brightly colored casings or ribbons, make them particularly attractive to children who can mistake them for toys. Children accounted for 71% of deaths from cluster munition remnants in 2022 where age was recorded.
International humanitarian law (IHL) imposes clear limits on the means and methods of warfare. Central among these is the principle of distinction, which requires parties to a conflict to distinguish between civilians and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives. The principle reflects both customary international law and U.S. treaty obligations pursuant to the Geneva Conventions. Articles 51 and 52 of Additional Protocol I prohibit directing attacks against civilians and strictly limit lawful targets to objects that make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a definite military advantage.
Cluster munitions raise serious concerns with respect to distinction. Their effects are typically indiscriminate when used in areas where civilians are present: they disperse submunitions over large areas and often leave behind unexploded ordnance that continues to threaten civilians long after the initial attack. This combination makes it exceedingly difficult—if not impossible in many contexts—to ensure compliance with the rule of distinction. It was this concern that led Adm. Cooper to characterize cluster munitions as “inherently indiscriminate.”
Even where a legitimate military objective is present, the principle of proportionality further constrains attacks. Proportionality does not prohibit incidental civilian harm outright, but it forbids attacks in which the expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the anticipated, concrete and direct military advantage. The use of cluster munitions, especially in densely populated areas, complicates compliance as their wide-area effects and high dud rates create foreseeable risks of significant civilian harm both immediately and over time. Indeed, leading human rights organizations regard the use of cluster munitions in a populated area as a violation of IHL.
Experience bears this out. Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world: during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, it endured intense aerial bombardment by the U.S. More than two million tons of cluster munitions were dropped on the country. Roughly one-third failed to detonate on impact, leaving about 30% of Laos still contaminated with unexploded ordnance more than 50 years later. In Lebanon, Israeli cluster munitions have contaminated some of the country’s poorest regions. Dropped in the final 72 hours of Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, more than 4 million unexploded submunitions continue to kill and maim Lebanese civilians, particularly children, and have caused the displacement of some 200,000 people. Today, Russian forces have consistently deployed cluster munitions in densely populated areas in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have also deployed cluster munitions supplied by the U.S., discussed below. The 2025 Cluster Munition Monitor reported over 1,200 civilian deaths and injuries from cluster munitions across Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began.
In light of the inherent civilian harm risks that cluster munitions pose, 111 countries have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which bans their use, development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, and transfer. The United States—alongside Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and China—is not a party to the Convention. Yet before recent developments, the United States recognized the risks of cluster munitions and committed to policies and soft-law frameworks to constrain their use.
U.S. Policy Regarding Cluster Munitions
Historically, the United States has acknowledged the humanitarian risks associated with cluster munitions and taken steps — albeit short of a complete ban — to mitigate them. The U.S. has been a global leader in funding the clearance of unexploded ordnance, contributing more than $2.8 billion since 1993 to programs in over 100 countries. It has also endorsed the Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas (EWIPA), committing to avoid the use of such weapons in populated areas and to improve civilian harm mitigation and response.
The United States has not used cluster munitions in combat since 2003, aside from a single reported strike in Yemen in 2009, and no U.S. company currently produces them. A 2008 Department of Defense directive phased out the use and transfer of cluster munitions with high failure rates. And a longstanding U.S. law restricts the export of cluster munitions with a failure rate above one percent and requires specification that the cluster munitions will not be used against civilians, subject to only an override by the President in exceptional circumstances. Against this backdrop, renewed procurement marks a notable departure from prior U.S. practice and from the broader trajectory of international norm crystallization.
At the same time, U.S. policy has grown increasingly inconsistent. The longstanding 2008 policy (adopted under George W. Bush in 2008 and continued by Barack Obama) was significantly relaxed in 2017 by President Trump, allowing continued use of existing stockpiles and transfer to replenish munitions. President Biden also waived the appropriations restriction at least seven times to enable the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, drawing bipartisan criticism from Congress, other States, and the United Nations.
While these actions represent concerning backsliding in practices around stockpiling and transfer, the U.S. purchasing and seeking to produce cluster munitions for its own operations marks a troubling step toward renewed use.
Where Is Congress?
This episode reflects a broader pattern whereby the Executive branch plays a leading role in shaping—and at times weakening—international norms governing the conduct of war, often with limited legislative input despite relevant constitutional and Congressional authority.
Congress has several tools to respond to this procurement and to reassert its constitutional role and oversight function, especially with respect to the “power of the purse.” Other relevant constitutional authorities include Congress’ power to “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces” and to “define and punish… Offenses against the Law of Nations.” As far as transfers are concerned, the Foreign Commerce Clause assigns to Congress the authority to regulate exports from the United States.
When it comes to cluster munitions, Congress can convene hearings and oversight inquiries. It may also impose conditions through the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) or appropriations legislation, which may include requirements for reporting or limitations on the use and transfer of cluster munitions. Rep. Sara Jacobs (CA-51) has led amendments to the NDAA aiming to restrict cluster munitions transfers in recentyears.
In exercising its authorities, Congress should focus on increasing transparency around the rationale and implications of cluster munition procurement and use, and determine how the Department of Defense is assessing compliance with international humanitarian law and our commitments under the EWIPA framework. It should also seek information on stockpile management, ascertain the dud rates of cluster munitions in U.S. possession, and exercise scrutiny over further entrenching a partnership with Israel, which is credibly accused of gross human rights violations. Irrespective of passage, these measures serve important record-building interests and reinforce Congress’ authority in this space.
Absent meaningful congressional engagement, this procurement risks further enabling an Executive branch that has undermined and politicized international legal norms.
Consequences far beyond the battlefield
Taken together, the Department of Defense’s recent procurement and market survey represents a clear regression from prior U.S. policy commitments and normative leadership and undermines broader international efforts to protect civilians. Specifically, the policy shift risks alienating key NATO allies, many of whom are legally bound under the CCM. By moving in a direction that diverges from allies’ legal obligations and political commitments, the United States may introduce friction within alliance coordination and operations and weaken its credibility and role. For example, when the U.S. transferred cluster munitions to Ukraine via Germany, Germany violated its obligations under the CCM to not allow transshipment of cluster munitions.
More broadly, the move contributes to an erosion of the emerging norm against cluster munition use. Norms of restraint are sustained not only through formal legal obligations but through consistent practice. When leading military powers signal renewed reliance on controversial weapons, it lowers the political and reputational costs for others to do the same. Lithuania’s 2025 withdrawal from the CCM—citing security concerns related to Russia—illustrates how quickly such norms can come under pressure absent a robust, mutually accountable, shared-values based approach rooted in respect for international humanitarian law.
Concerning also is the brazen inconsistency in how cluster munitions are regarded. This article has already mentioned Admiral Cooper’s comments concerning the legality of Iran’s use of cluster munitions against Israel. Similarly, States have widely condemned Russia’s use of cluster munitions against Ukraine. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has said to Russia that cluster munitions “have no place on the battlefield.” Yet the U.S. supplied cluster munitions to Ukraine, which have been deployed on the front lines, and it is now pursuing further procurement apparently for its own use. This contradiction risks undermining the credibility of legal norms and invites accusations of selective enforcement and lawfare. A consistent application of principles is essential—not only for maintaining legitimacy, but for ensuring the strongest possible protection of civilians in conflict.
Perilous next steps
Ultimately, the Department of Defense’s recent purchase and market survey is a quiet deal with loud consequences. It signals a potential renewed reliance by the U.S. on a weapons type widely regarded as among the most harmful to civilians, and risks deepening fractures with allies and weakening emerging norms designed to protect civilian populations. And when America sneezes, the world catches a cold; these actions may encourage similar backsliding by other countries.
Most importantly, the decision carries human consequences that extend far beyond the battlefield. Long after conflicts end, unexploded submunitions remain embedded in fields, villages, and cities, continuing to injure and kill civilians, especially children.
It is too early to know whether and how the U.S. will put its procurement to use. But to maintain the norm against the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, States, civil society, and Congress must use their influence to oppose and scrutinize U.S. actions and enforce the norm.
Mina Nur Basmaci is a former Advocacy & Legal Fellow at Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC). John Ramming Chappell is an Advocacy & Legal Advisor at Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC).
On June 21, the U.S. military struck a speedboat in the Caribbean, killing at least two people in the attack. In a statement posted to X with black-and-white video of the strike, U.S. Southern Command described the killing as “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” and declared the dead to be “narco-terrorists.”
The death toll from the United States’ killing spree in international waters has now surpassed more than 200 people, and at least one international law expert is calling for criminal accountability. As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 quickly approaches, it is critical to recognize that the legal structures, tactics and rhetoric with which the Trump administration is purportedly combating these “threats” come straight from the grim collection of unlawful, immoral, and counterproductive choices that make up the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ playbook.
The loaded gun left behind
Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which granted broad powers that all post-9/11 presidents have used to justify U.S. military operations against groups they designate as “terrorist” in a total of 22 countries. While the Obama and Biden administrations retreated from “global war on terror” rhetorical framing, they maintained its core premise by asserting the authority to lethally target those they deemed to be associated with terror groups outside of actual on-the-ground armed conflict, including against U.S. citizens and groups that didn’t even exist in 2001.
The post-9/11 era also ushered in a more explicit framing by the U.S. government that immigrants are inherently suspicious potential “terrorists,” particularly those from Muslim-majority countries or people of color. This frame was used to justify and enable a host of rights-violating programs and practices, aimed especially at Muslim and South Asian noncitizen men. More than 1,000 were detained domestically by the FBI without charge immediately after 9/11. Close to 800 were seized abroad and held at Guantanamo, where 15 still remain in indefinite detention.
The abuses also included an openly discriminatory Muslim registry during the Bush administration, renditions to torture (like that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar), and the CIA’s own black-site torture program. On a structural level, Congress enshrined the notion that immigration law and policy was, first and foremost, a matter of counter-terrorism in the eyes of the U.S. government, by creating the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Both courts and Congress have declined to meaningfully check any of these blatant illegalities, leaving in place a dangerous legacy as Donald Trump was elected for president a second time.
In its first show of performative cruelty, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority from the 1700s to send over 200 Venezuelan men to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador without due process on the theory their migration was an “invasion.” Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posed for cameras in front of detained men, celebrating their detention and torture. Next, the administration began transferring immigrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay, and became the first to transfer individuals from the continental U.S. to the base, including holding some in one of the military detention facilities. In parallel, they sent people to South Sudan, Libya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other third countries where the government’s own reports document human rights violations like torture, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. This violated the principle of non-refoulement, enshrined in international and domestic law, and echoed earlier “war on terror” renditions.
Inside the United States, immigrants the administration claims are undocumented are also subjected to secretive detention and possible torture. A person who was formerly detained at the now-defunct “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility in Florida calls the place “a copy of Guantanamo.” Of the administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth repeatedly described the individuals and groups as “al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.” The comparison is not incidental, it is the point. The administration has underscored these actions by designating transnational drug cartels as “terrorist” in part because of their alleged role in facilitating U.S. border crossings. Each of these actions are part of the administration’s unified theory that migration is warfare, immigrants and cartels are terrorists, and so the war on terror continues.
What’s next
The counter-terrorism language and rationale are increasingly coming closer to home. The administration has unleashed militarized enforcement deployments to target immigrants throughout American cities and in response to protests. National Security Presidential Memorandum – 7 blurred the lines between counter-terrorism, immigration enforcement, and domestic dissent by directing federal agencies to expand investigations and surveillance against groups who oppose Trump’s vision of America. The White House’s Counterterrorism Strategy made this official in May by identifying “narcoterrorists” and transnational gangs, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” alongside groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS as threats.
We saw it in practice earlier this year when Renee Good and Alex Pretti of Minnesota were killed and labeled “domestic terrorists” before their bodies went cold. We continue to see it as the administration “designates” “antifa” as a terrorist group (despite there being no such thing legally as a domestic terrorist designation), and prosecutes left-leaning activists as “antifa terrorists.”
Until the U.S. meaningfully reckons with the legal and moral wreckage of the post 9/11 era, this cycle will not end. A real end to post-9/11 abuses means, at a minimum, eliminating mechanisms that allow for discretionary “terrorist” designations and repealing laws that punish peaceful speech and associations rather than actual violent conduct as “terrorism.” It means repealing legal authorities that have enabled presidents to wage open-ended military campaigns around the world, ending the use of force outside actual armed conflicts, responsibly ending military detention at Guantanamo Bay, and ensuring the base is never again used to house any groups. It means declassifying and releasing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “torture report,” providing redress to victims, and holding those responsible accountable. It also means abolishing all programs that militarize local law enforcement agencies and deputize them in the service of a system that treats migration like terrorism.
The idea that the U.S. president gets to decide who is and is not a “terrorist” and unleash the full power of the U.S. security state on those so labeled was wrongheaded from the outset and only becomes more so as it morphs and grows over time. Unless this framework is dismantled, the targets may change with the political winds, but the harms will remain the same.
Yumna Rizvi is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture. Elizabeth Beavers is an assistant professor of law at Widener University Delaware Law School.
In April, U.S. prosecutors indicted the sitting governor of Sinaloa state in Mexico along with nine other current and former officials for colluding with the Sinaloa Cartel to traffic fentanyl and other narcotics into the United States, and for violence carried out by cartel gunmen armed with machineguns and other firearms. Two of the officials have since turned themselves in to U.S. authorities – presumably to turn state’s evidence – while the rest remain in Mexico. The Trump administration declared the cartel as a foreign terrorist organization last year, so the indictment charges Mexican officials with colluding with terrorists.
During 2017 through 2020, the years that some of those same Sinaloa officials were allegedly colluding with the cartel, the United States licensed gun companies to legally export weapons that went to the Sinaloa police forces the officials ran – licenses that were approved or extended by the State Department during Trump’s first term.
Sig Sauer, Inc., based in New Hampshire, exported at least 243 firearms to Sinaloa state and municipal police from 2016 to 2020. During that time, José Antonio Dionisio Hipolito was Director of Sinaloa State Police and is accused in the indictment issued in April of being on the cartel monthly payroll.
Sig Sauer and Glock were founded and are still owned by Europeans. Sig Sauer’s CEO, Ron Cohen, was arrested in Germany in 2018 after firearms produced in that country for export to the United States were re-exported to Colombia, without a German export license to do so. (He was later released.) Since then, Sig has moved all of its production to New Hampshire. Glock is Austrian, but beginning in 2022, it began exporting thousands of firearms to Mexico from its U.S. production location in Georgia, according to Arms Trade Treaty records.
Glock exported 11,125 handguns to Mexico in 2022-2023. At least 58 of these firearms were sold to Sinaloa state and local police agencies during those two years, according to receipts for these transfers obtained through a public records request to the Mexican army.
During 2022-2023, according to the indictment, Dionisio Hipolito as well as other state and local police officials in Sinaloa were colluding with the cartel in exchange for bribes.
Mexico legally imports, by far, more firearms from the United States than any other Latin American country, in some years nearly as much as the rest of the region combined. The growth of such U.S. gun exports began with the Mérida Initiative in 2008, a U.S. assistance plan modeled on the militarized approach of Plan Colombia, but these sales continued after military and police assistance declined in 2010. It just meant that Mexico bought the weapons and other gear from U.S. companies, instead of having them paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
In some respects, this reflects an arms race of the Mexican military with criminal organizations, which have nearly unlimited access to military-grade weaponry in the U.S. retail gun market, and plenty of cash. But the acquisition of ever great amounts of weaponry by the state also assumes that the most effective means of weakening these criminal organizations, whose raison d’etre is to make money, is through military force. This turns out not to be true.
Since the declaration of the drug war in 2007 in Mexico, there have been more than 450,000 homicides and over 120,000 disappearances, most carried out by or against criminal groups, although many victims were simply in the wrong place, or fell to armed misogyny or conflicts between individuals.
Enter Trumpian hubris. Its peculiarity is to believe that going after the heads – of states or criminal groups – will eliminate the structural problems that lead to their behaviors. The current version builds on the kingpin strategy, in place for decades, by which the United States arrests or kills leaders of narcotics traffickers, who are then replaced through bloody succession battles.
Guns R Us
Even more U.S. weapons flow through the illicit trade to the Sinaloa Cartel and others in Mexico from retail gun shops and private sales in southwestern states. Between 70% and 80% of firearms seized in Mexico and submitted for tracing came from the United States. According to an investigation published in 2023 by N+, when one of the sons of cartel capo ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán was arrested earlier that year, dozens of weapons recovered during the operation were traced to gun purchasers in Arizona and Texas who illicitly trafficked them directly to his faction of the Sinaloa Cartel – the same faction that the Justice Department is now accusing of bribing state government officials in Sinaloa.
The pipeline of weapons trafficked from Arizona to Sinaloa has only gotten worse since then, according to data obtained from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In 2024, an intra-cartel war erupted in Sinaloa after one of its leaders, ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, was betrayed by a competitor and shipped to the United States. Last year, the Mexican army seized more than twice as many crime guns in Sinaloa as in any other Mexican state.
In 2024, according to ATF data, most crime guns trafficked to Mexico with a short “time to crime” – the time between purchase and confiscation in Mexico, a key indicator of deliberate trafficking – came from one state. 62% of U.S.-sourced guns with a time-to-crime of a year or less were procured from Arizona. In fact, a majority of these firearms were purchased in a single county – Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. Arizona and Texas, even more than most states, have enormous, permissive and militarized retail gun markets. There, if you have the cash, it is easy to purchase a .50 caliber Barrett rifle that can penetrate armor and shoot down helicopters. It can even be done without a background check.
In other words, U.S. weapons go both from U.S. retail gun shops to the cartel that the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization, and through licensed exports to police forces that the U.S. Department of Justice says collude with the cartel.
The Trump administration is beholden, politically and ideologically, to the firearms industry, whose vision of peace is no-holds-barred on weapons commerce. The ATF recently announced over 30 changes to firearms regulations that will make it easier to traffic weapons over the border to cartels in Mexico.
Still, if the administration has political will to weaken the hold of violent cartels in Mexico, it can effectively address its means of violence by focused efforts to reduce the illicit traffic of weapons to them from gun retailers. In March, the DOJ indicted an Arizona gun dealer for selling weapons to cartel operatives and materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization. It could do more by deploying the ATF to inspect gun dealers instead of removing their enforcement authorities.
It should also control the end use for legally exported U.S. firearms to exclude police and military forces credibly documented to collude with criminal groups or violate human rights. The administration could accomplish this through policy or support for congressional passage of the ARMAS Act, which would establish stronger transparency and accountability for the export of U.S. firearms, while also increasing interagency coordination and international incentives to disrupt firearms trafficking.
Finally, the federal government should prohibit the retail sale to civilians of .50 caliber rifles highly desired by cartels through passage of the Stop Arming Cartels Act.
U.S. firearms enable a wide range of violence in Mexico and the United States – narcotics trafficking, violent conflict between criminal groups and state forces, homicides, forced disappearances, extortion, femicides, and control of migration routes. Any strategy seeking to reduce these harms must address the guns that make them possible. Reducing the illicit flow of firearms and working to keep those weapons – both licit and illicit – from those who would further the harm will benefit many thousands of families, on both sides of the border.
John Lindsay-Poland is coordinator of Stop US Arms to Mexico, a project of Global Exchange.
The capture in June 2024 of drug lord Ismael Zambada “El Mayo”, now on trial in the United States, decapitated the Cartel de Sinaloa, provoking a struggle for leadership between two factions and a war that has left thousands dead and disappeared. If there is no consensual leadership within the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, the situation could escalate exponentially.
Mexico has spent 20 years militarizing its drug policy—not just by bringing the army in to fight a drug war, but because cartels in response have transformed into armed criminal enterprises that not only sell drugs but also control territories through extortion, domination of local politicians, and many other criminal businesses, as already described by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. From the standpoint of peace and the rule of law, this policy has failed; from the standpoint of business, it appears to be a success, not only for the cartels.
The armed forces, like organized crime groups, have gained greater political and economic power as a result of a failed drug policy, and both are responsible for thousands of victims. According to official figures, from 2006 to 2025, there have been 497,446 intentional homicides—oscillating between 25 and 30 per 100,000 inhabitants—and as of today, 391,722 disappeared persons, of whom 131,819 remain missing.
The conditions that enable the growth of lethal power on both the military and criminal sides include corruption among political elites who co-govern with organized crime, the impunity that leaves crimes on both sides unpunished, and the lack of transparency and accountability among the military, political parties, and public representatives. The fight against organized crime must use the tools of democracy and justice. Weapons have only brought more violence.
The Secretary of Defense, General Trevilla, stated forcefully that the operation to capture “El Mencho” demonstrated the strength of the Mexican state. The truth is that the state’s strength lies in its civilian institutions. Instead of strengthening institutions of justice and transparency, the Mexican government and Congress have been dismantling them, creating conditions that undermine basic rights. This is why a group of Mexican human rights organizations has asked United Nations bodies to intervene to protect victims and guarantee their rights.
The current crisis of the multilateral system stems from the fact that the West, as Mark Carney noted at the most recent World Economic Forum, has been living in a “useful fiction” in which it pretends that the rules apply equally to all, including Mexico. The United Nations, and especially its member states, must embrace universal values for a “new world order” and demonstrate this through action by upholding human rights in any country, regardless of its degree of power. The authorization, support, and acquiescence of the Mexican government toward crimes committed by Mexican cartels must be a subject of discussion and decision-making in the UN General Assembly, as requested by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
Additionally, criminal organizations are enabled by weapons manufacturers, particularly in the United States, due to the ease of access to firearms. Arms companies benefit from this militarized policy because they sell to all sides of the conflict. Approximately 80% of the weapons used by cartels are acquired in the US. Still, they are also the main suppliers to the armed forces in Mexico—a win-win business that the United States Congress allows by failing to regulate the domestic and international sales and traceability of weapons. Congress must adopt comprehensive legislation—such as the ARMAS Act—beginning with restoring authority over controlled weapons sales to the U.S. Department of State rather than the U.S. Department of Commerce, followed by stronger controls on public sales in the United States to ensure traceability and prohibit transactions for individuals linked to criminals, including cartel members.
Criminal structures require “legal” business networks to transfer and launder money, such as banks, money transfer companies, currency exchange houses, and bitcoin networks that the U.S. Department of Justice has already detected. These transnational criminal enterprises rely on transnational complicity networks to move drugs to end consumers and bring money back. The U.S. government does not appear interested in dismantling these networks or regulating money-transfer and bitcoin businesses that become complicit service providers to criminals in the United States. A criminal policy focused on dismantling criminal networks—not just capturing drug lords, which is often popular for winning votes but ineffective at stopping criminal enterprises and violence—is needed. Along with conducting serious investigations into collusion between U.S. businesses and cartels, there must be greater oversight and monitoring to prevent transactions to criminal groups through banks, exchange houses, money transfers, and bitcoin.
The effects of the capture and killing of “El Mencho” remain to be seen. Still, organized crime will continue operating as long as drug policy remains militarized rather than civilian-led and focused on strengthening institutions of justice, transparency, and anti-corruption in both Mexico and the United States.
Michael W Chamberlin is a CIP Senior Non-Resident Fellow.
Warfare is increasingly conducted through sensors, networks, and remote platforms that keep their human operators far from danger. This distance has strategic, political, and ethical consequences that are only beginning to be understood. Erik Lin-Greenberg’s The Remote Revolution offers the clearest account to date of how uninhabited systems reshape leader behavior, crisis dynamics, and modern statecraft. His findings invite a second question. How should democracies design institutions that prevent unnecessary harm before it occurs and preserve accountability when conflict becomes remote?
Lin-Greenberg’s central insight is that remote systems introduce a predictable shift in how states initiate and manage the use of force. When leaders can act without risking their own personnel, their behavior changes. He writes that reduced risks “can lower the threshold for dispatching forces, creating a moral hazard that enables decision makers to launch military operations during interstate disputes when their state arsenals include drones.”1 His evidence spans wargames, surveys, and archival case studies. Participants accepted higher escalatory risk when uninhabited assets were involved. During the Cold War, both superpowers relied on remote reconnaissance for missions that would have been politically untenable with crews aboard. When Iran shot down a US Global Hawk drone in 2019, the absence of American casualties made it politically easier to absorb the loss and step back from escalation. These examples illustrate how distance alters strategic judgment, reducing both the barriers to initiation and, at times, the pressure to retaliate.
Lower risk expands what Lin-Greenberg calls the “menu of options.”2 Remote systems enable actions that fall between inaction and major escalation, including reconnaissance, limited strikes, and coercive signals that impose costs without creating public alarm. Azerbaijan’s reliance on drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war illustrates how remote tools expand operational choice while managing political exposure. Israel’s routine use of drones in cross-border operations against regional adversaries demonstrates how leaders create intermediate space between symbolic warning and high-intensity response. In episodes involving Syria and Hezbollah, remote systems have enabled calibrated signaling without the immediate risks associated with crewed aircraft.
Clankers and Casualties
One of Lin-Greenberg’s most distinctive findings concerns how states respond to attacks on uninhabited systems. Rivals often treat drone shootdowns differently from incidents involving inhabited aircraft. These losses rarely generate public pressure for retaliation. Decision-makers frequently see shooting down a drone as a low-risk signal of dissatisfaction.3 Cold War episodes show that remote-platform losses were treated as manageable setbacks rather than triggers for escalation.4 Israeli cases confirm similar restraint. These dynamics produce what Lin-Greenberg describes as “more but milder conflicts.”5 Remote systems do not eliminate escalation. They change its form, making crises more frequent but less likely to cross into major interstate war.
Public opinion plays a central role in this transformation. Lin-Greenberg notes that reduced risk “mitigates the political obstacles often associated with sending troops into harm’s way.”6 When political costs fall, strategic discretion expands. Drone campaigns in US counterterrorism operations illustrate this pattern. Casualty aversion remains a constant in democratic politics. Remote technology changes how leaders weigh those incentives.
For policymakers grappling with the expanding role of autonomous and remote systems, The Remote Revolution provides a rigorous and indispensable foundation.
Lin-Greenberg’s contribution is descriptive and theoretical. He explains how remote systems alter incentives and behavior. The next task is institutional. Democracies must translate this knowledge into preventive design. Recent analysis in the International Policy Journal has argued that compliance with the laws of war should be engineered directly into autonomous and remote systems. Embedding discrimination and proportionality requirements is a start. But engineering norms into code is insufficient without reforming the institutions that authorize and oversee lethal force.
Oversight and Operations
Oversight becomes more complex when remote operations move across statutory authorities. Military operations conducted under Title 10 are subject to armed services oversight and reporting requirements. Covert actions conducted under Title 50 are reported to intelligence committees and often operate under tighter secrecy. The migration of drone strikes between these frameworks during the post-9/11 era demonstrated how lethal authority can shift between oversight regimes with different transparency standards. Designing for prevention requires harmonizing expectations across authorities so that distance cannot exploit jurisdictional gaps.
Recent allegations of unlawful airstrikes against civilian vessels underscore the institutional stakes. When force is projected at distance against targets that are difficult for the public to visualize or verify, the risk is not only civilian harm but erosion of democratic accountability. The problem is structural rather than partisan. Any administration operating with remote tools faces incentives to lower political friction. The question is whether institutions are strong enough to resist that pressure.
A durable institutional response requires at least four changes:
Congress should require sunset provisions for semiautonomous lethal authorities, mandating explicit reauthorization every two years. This would prevent normalization of delegated force.
Agencies conducting lethal operations should submit public civilian harm prevention certifications before deploying new remote or AI-enabled systems, reviewed by an independent inspector general.
Lawmakers should codify a named human decision authority requirement for every lethal action conducted through remote or autonomous systems, with documented reasoning preserved for review.
Congress should establish automatic reporting triggers for the use of force against civilian vessels or non-state maritime actors, requiring public disclosure within a fixed timeframe.
These reforms do not prohibit remote warfare. They restore friction where political cost has diminished.
Designing for prevention also requires cultural change. Officers and analysts should be rewarded for surfacing uncertainty and slowing operations when civilian risk is ambiguous. Near-miss reporting should be protected from reprisal. Restraint must be treated as competence rather than hesitation.
Remote technologies are diffusing rapidly across state and non-state actors, normalizing distance in both surveillance and strike capabilities.7 The incentives Lin-Greenberg identifies are unlikely to remain confined to major powers. That makes institutional design more urgent, not less.
Distance changes what leaders see and what the public feels. Without institutional reform, it will erode the accountability that gives democratic uses of force their legitimacy. Democracies must build systems that prevent unnecessary harm, maintain human judgment at the center of lethal authority, and preserve moral clarity even when conflict unfolds beyond the horizon of public view. Remote systems may change the character of war. Deliberate design must determine how democracies respond.
Lucas F. Schleusener is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Bluesky at @lfschleusener.bsky.social.
1 Erik Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025), 5. 2 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 25. 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Ibid., 108. 5 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 5. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for example, Faine Greenwood’s reporting and analysis on the global diffusion of drone technologies and the regulatory lag surrounding remote systems.
As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy faces a critical test. Mega-events no longer function solely as platforms for projecting democratic values; they increasingly expose the gap between international rhetoric and domestic governance. The tensions between the internationalism of global sport and hardline migration and border-control policies—particularly in the U.S. context—show that debates around boycotts are not causes but symptoms of deeper governance failures. There are reputational and democratic risks at stake, but action can restore credibility to democratic sports diplomacy.
In a former contribution published in 2024, The US and EU Can Build a More Democratic World with Sports Diplomacy, I argued that sport could serve as a strategic vector for democratic cooperation and international leadership. At the time, sports diplomacy was largely framed as an opportunity: a shared platform to project values of openness, inclusion, and dialogue in an increasingly polarized world.
Today, that proposition faces a far more demanding test. As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy has shifted from aspiration to accountability. Mega-events no longer merely project democratic values; they expose whether those values are sustained through policy, governance, and institutional coherence. In this new context, sport has become a stress test of democratic credibility.
The 2026 World Cup illustrates this transformation with particular clarity. As a tri-national tournament, its success depends structurally on cross-border mobility. Fans, athletes, journalists, officials, and civil society actors must be able to travel freely and safely for the event to function as a genuinely global gathering. Mobility, in this sense, is not a logistical detail. It is a democratic condition.
That condition now sits uneasily alongside increasingly hardline migration and border-control policies in the United States. Expanded enforcement mechanisms, uncertainty around visas, and the growing prominence of a deportation-first logic risk transforming a global celebration into an experience marked by fear, exclusion, and arbitrariness. The tension between the internationalism of sport and fortress-style politics is no longer abstract; it is fast becoming operational.
Mega-sporting events are built on hospitality, openness, and shared experience. Restrictive border regimes, by contrast, are built on deterrence, suspicion, and control. When these logics collide, sport becomes politically incoherent. The reputational consequences are significant. Hosting a World Cup under conditions perceived as hostile or unpredictable does not enhance soft power; it erodes it. The very visibility that once made mega-events attractive as diplomatic tools now magnifies policy contradictions.
It is in this context that discussions of boycotts have resurfaced. These debates are often treated as emotional reactions or ideological gestures. That interpretation misses the point. Boycotts are not the cause of the problem, but a symptom of governance failure. They emerge when the gap between democratic rhetoric and administrative practice becomes too visible to ignore.
The question, therefore, is not whether boycotts are effective as a tactic. It is why they become thinkable in the first place. Concerns voiced by fan groups, journalists, advocacy organizations, and sporting stakeholders point to a deeper anxiety about access, safety, and rights during the World Cup. The potential chilling effect on attendance, participation, and media coverage represents not only a logistical challenge, but a profound reputational risk. When mobility becomes conditional and enforcement overshadows hospitality, the soft-power dividend of hosting rapidly evaporates.
This dynamic highlights a broader shift in sports diplomacy. Symbolism alone is no longer sufficient. Ceremonies, slogans, and narratives cannot compensate for governance gaps. Sport has entered a post-symbolic phase, in which policy choices and institutional arrangements matter more than messaging. Mega-events now test whether democratic systems can align domestic governance with international projection.
A brief comparative glance reinforces this point. The Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics offer an imperfect but instructive European benchmark. Framed around sustainability, territorial cohesion, and long-term legacy, the Games reflect an effort to embed sport within broader governance frameworks rather than treating it as a standalone spectacle. Europe’s own contradictions—particularly on migration—are well documented. Yet the lesson is clear: credibility does not stem from flawless performance, but from coherent governance and transparent commitments.
Looking ahead, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games represent a narrow but critical window for correction. Unlike the World Cup, they allow time for institutional learning and policy adjustment. Clear and transparent visa regimes, safeguards for freedom of expression, protections for athletes and journalists, and effective coordination across federal, state, and local authorities could transform LA 2028 into a credible demonstration of rights-based sports diplomacy. Failure to do so would have the opposite effect, amplifying perceptions of democratic inconsistency rather than leadership.
If sports diplomacy is to remain credible, values must be operationalized through policy. To that end, several concrete steps are essential.
Policy Recommendations
The U.S. federal government should establish a dedicated World Cup mobility framework guaranteeing transparent, expedited, and rights-based visa and entry procedures for fans, athletes, journalists, and civil society actors.
FIFA should condition hosting agreements on binding human-rights and mobility guarantees, including independent monitoring of border and enforcement practices during the tournament.
Host cities and states should adopt clear protocols limiting the role of immigration enforcement agencies in and around sporting venues to prevent intimidation and arbitrary detention.
The European Union and partner governments should articulate minimum democratic standards for mega-event hosting, using Milano–Cortina 2026 as a benchmark for rights-based governance.
The International Olympic Committee should treat LA 2028 as a pilot case for democratic hosting, integrating freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and independent oversight as core Olympic requirements.
Sport cannot repair democratic deficits. But it can reveal them with unmatched visibility. As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup and beyond, mega-events will not simply ask whether democracies can host the world. They will ask whether democracies are prepared to govern themselves coherently under global scrutiny.
Raül Romeva i Ruedaholds two PhDs, one in International Relations and another in Sport Science and Education. He is currently Professor of Global Politics and Sport Diplomacy at Universitat Ramon Llull and EADA Business School. He is also a former Member of the European Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Institutional Relations, and Transparency in the Catalan Government.
The first year of the second Trump administration can best be surmised as a series of crimes for which accountability remains nonexistent. His administration forcibly disappeared approximately 250 Venezuelan migrant men, rendered them to El Salvador, and detained them in a prison notorious for its brutality. Unauthorized lethal airstrikes targeted allegeddrug trafficking vessels off the coast of Venezuela as a prelude to removing the country’s leader, all under the threat of further military intrusion. Masked federal agents abducted people off the streets and bundled them into unmarked cars.
These made-for-TV displays of state violence define the second Trump administration. While certainly shocking in their brazen, even gleeful disregard for the rule of law and democratic norms, the abuses unfolding across the United States and beyond do not lack precedent. Instead, emboldened by the lack of comprehensive, meaningful accountability for similar conduct over the past decades, the Trump administration has chosen to escalate and expand preexisting abusive practices in pursuit of its authoritarian aims—with grave consequences for ordinary people and U.S. democracy.
Unaccountability as permission
Two years ago, I led a research study with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Stimson Center that investigated how the U.S. approaches accountability for civilian harm and law enforcement misconduct. The study found significant shortcomings in accountability across the U.S. security sector. In addition, the study warned that continued unaccountability risked creating a permissive environment for abuse while undermining democratic governance.
The Trump administration has repeatedly taken advantage of this permissive environment, from extraordinary renditions to illegal airstrikes to secret policing.
Extraordinary Renditions
In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration removed some 250 Venezuelan men from the United States to El Salvador. When relatives and lawyers sought to locate their loved ones and clients, U.S. officials refused to provide information. The U.S. and Salvadoran governments claimed the men were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan organized crime group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. However, the U.S. government appears to have alleged Tren de Agua membership based on inaccurate and unreliable methods.
Salvadoran authorities detained the Venezuelans incommunicado in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), a facility notorious for inhumane conditions and violence. Men interviewed by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal following their release from CECOT and return to Venezuela described frequent beatings, sexual assault, and the denial of basic hygiene, sanitation, and medical care.
Possibly fearing international consequences for this detention, officials in El Salvador wrote to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, trying to “assign the US government sole responsibility under international law for migrants detained in CECOT.”
The extrajudicial transfer of these men to torture in a third country closely mirrors the Bush administration’s post-9/11 extraordinary rendition program. Following the attacks, the CIA transferred terrorism suspects for interrogation to countries known to practice torture. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria was one such destination. Others included Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt. As in the case of CECOT, the rendition program ensnared individuals who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or terrorism. The CIA refused to allow the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate renditions, precluding any meaningful accountability.
Illegal Airstrikes, signature precedents
Prior to January’s invasion, the U.S. conducted a series of airstrikes off the coast of Venezuela, targeting vessels allegedly involved in drug smuggling. Thirty-five strikes have killed over 100 people. The U.S. has claimed these strikes constitute part of a non-international armed conflict against drug cartels. External legal experts, however, have concluded that the strikes not only lack a legal basis, but amount toextrajudicial executions. The Pentagon has also asserted that it does not consider it important for the military to know the identities of the people killed—or even whether they had been trafficking drugs. Fishermen from Trinidad, Colombia, and likely beyond have paid the price.
Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised to treat maritime drug traffickers, in his own words, “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda.” In fact, the administration does appear to be treating its targets exactly how the United States approached War on Terror “signature strikes.” Like their fishermen counterparts in 2025, ordinary Somalis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and others were targeted and killed based on observed “patterns of life” thought to resemble those of terrorist operatives. With accountability for these incidents of civilian harm largely absent, the recycling and escalation of signature strikes unfortunately cannot come as a surprise.
Secret Police
Perhaps the most emblematic visual of the second Trump administration is that of masked federal agents, often not wearing insignia or refusing to identify themselves, emerging from unmarked cars to snatch immigrants—or anyone determined to “look like an immigrant”—off the streets. Excessive force is standard. In addition, agents have tear gassed, manhandled, and pointedweapons at ordinary Americans and elected representatives seeking to protect immigrant community members and constituents. On January 7, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three, as she sought to protest for the rights of her immigrant neighbors.
Congress attempted to curtail the use of unmarked agents in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which required federal law enforcement officers to wear visible identification when policing protests. However, the migration of tactics used against protesters to immigration raids and the continued deployment of masked and militarized agents at protests highlights the lack of political will to enforce non-repetition.
Envisioning Accountability
Accountable government institutions are critical to a functioning democracy. Because security agencies are uniquely empowered by the state to deprive people of their lives and liberty, ensuring they remain accountable carries heightened significance. Americans, at least as of two years ago, agreed. A joint CIVIC/YouGov poll conducted in conjunction with CIVIC and the Stimson Center’s 2023 study found that 73% of Americans agreed that the strength of our democracy depended on holding law enforcement agents accountable for their actions.
Further, participants in CIVIC and Stimson’s research emphasized the need for a comprehensive approach to accountability extending beyond a narrow focus on legal liability. Alongside legal liability, this comprehensive approach encompasses acknowledgment, explanation, and apologies; taking responsibility and making amends; disciplinary action; and non-repetition. Participants additionally made clear that any approach to accountability should be grounded in the needs and perspectives of the communities harmed by security activities.
Securing comprehensive accountability, whether for present abuses under the current Trump administration or for the past abuses that enabled them will not be an easy task. The destruction and devaluing of existingsafeguards and accountability mechanisms since last January only compounds the challenge. At the same time, the past year has also demonstrated the power of creative and relentless organizing to defend democracy and protect targeted communities. With a commitment to sustaining this energy across what was already a protracted and grueling fight, genuine accountability—and the benefits it provides—might just be achievable.
Rosie Berman is a researcher and writer based in Washington, D.C.
The new year opened to the sound of airstrikes. On January 3rd, the world woke to reports that United States forces had launched a large-scale military operation against Venezuelan territory, an act that instantly sparked public debate, diplomatic channels, and professional legal discourse. The military operation, together with the broader policy choices of the United States, carries consequences extending far beyond Caracas, with profound implications for the future of force, legality, and authority in the international order.
United States forces targeted sites identified by Washington as integral to “state-backed transnational criminal and narcotics networks,” allegedly operating under the protection of the Maduro government. Operation Absolute Resolve was presented by U.S. officials as limited in scope and effect, and described as a lawful exercise of national security powers consistent with international law. The Trump administration relied on a highly controversial 1989 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum asserting that the President is not constitutionally required to comply with the United Nations Charter as a matter of domestic law, a position long regarded as incompatible with the United States’ international obligations.
The strikes, reportedly, achieved their immediate operational objectives and concluded without further escalation. Venezuela denounced the operation as a grave violation of its sovereignty and of the prohibition on the use of force under the United Nations Charter, rejecting the characterization of the strikes as law enforcement and calling for international scrutiny. These sharply opposed official positions crystallized the legal stakes from the outset. Absolute Resolve followed years of sanctions, indictments, and public accusations that steadily reframed force as an available policy instrument, setting the stage for a confrontation in which legality was asserted rather than debated, and consequences were left conspicuously undefined (DOJ; OFAC).
Everything turns on a basic rule that the system cannot afford to lose: no State, however powerful, may act as nemo iudex in causa sua; “no one is judge in his own case”. As long as the international rules-based order continues to breathe, however laboured that breath may now be, the legality of State conduct cannot be determined unilaterally by the acting State itself. International law rests on the fundamental premise that legal assessment is external, contestable, and grounded in shared normative frameworks rather than sovereign assertion. It is objective legal analysis, not official narration, that determines whether conduct complies with the prohibition on the use of force and related Charter obligations, and it is that same analysis that exposes the broader systemic implications of violations. When States collapse legality into self-validation, the function of law shifts from authorizing conduct to measuring deviation, allocating responsibility, and structuring the political and institutional costs that follow.
That premise is strained further when a State invokes domestic constitutional authority to displace its international obligations. In the context of the American intervention, the reliance on internal executive legal reasoning to justify action underscores a familiar but consequential disjunction: under international law, a State may not invoke its internal law to justify failure to perform treaty obligations or to excuse a breach of peremptory norms (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties Article 27; Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, Article 3). This asymmetry reflects a foundational choice in the international legal order to prevent States from insulating themselves from external scrutiny by recharacterising international constraints as optional or subordinate.
Error in Genere
Early official explanations from the Trump administration framed the strikes as action taken against a designated terrorist organization, invoking U.S. national interests and the collective self-defense of other States. Parallel reporting suggested that a classified Justice Department memorandum advanced a similar logic, asserting that certain drug cartels pose an “imminent threat to Americans” sufficient to justify the use of force. This reasoning depends on a crucial legal move: recharacterizing drug trafficking as an “armed attack” within the meaning of Article 51 of the UN Charter. In its seminal judgment in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua, the Court held:
“An armed attack must be understood as including not merely action by regular armed forces across an international border, but also the sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to an armed attack.” (para. 195)
Drug trafficking, however serious and destructive, has never been recognized as an armed attack triggering the right of self-defense. It does not involve the use of force by one State (or non-state armed group) against another State in the sense required by the Charter, nor does it amount to hostilities or combat under any accepted legal framework. International law has consistently rejected such attenuated chains of causation as a basis for self-defense, particularly where the alleged “attack” lacks immediacy, direction, and military character (Oil Platforms, para. 51).
The argument weakens further when extended from cartels to members of the Venezuelan government. Even assuming the truth of allegations concerning official involvement in drug trafficking, the connection between State conduct and the harms cited remains indirect and parasitic on criminal networks whose primary function is commercial, not military. If drug trafficking by non-state actors cannot plausibly be characterized as an armed attack, the claim that derivative State involvement in such activity triggers a right of self-defense is even less credible.
Recasting the Venezuela operation as an effort to neutralize narcotics networks by weakening the State institutions allegedly enabling them pushes the legal justification into dangerous territory. Once force is directed at the machinery of government rather than at discrete, imminent threats, it ceases to function as self-defence and begins to resemble intervention aimed at shaping another State’s political authority. The ICJ has treated similar attempts with consistent scepticism. In Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo, the Court rejected security rationales built on preventative logic and diffuse threat narratives, stressing that the Charter’s self-defence framework does not accommodate open-ended operations designed to stabilize regions, suppress criminal ecosystems, or preempt future risks (paras 143–147).
Sine Imperio
The strain on legality becomes most visible when the operation is recast as cross-border law enforcement. International law has long treated the extraterritorial exercise of enforcement powers as exceptional and strictly bounded, precisely because such acts cut directly into another State’s sovereign equality. This is especially true where senior State officials are concerned. Sitting heads of state benefit from personal immunity (ratione personae), which functions as a jurisdictional bar to foreign criminal process and to coercive measures such as arrest or detention for the duration of their term of office. The ICJ confirmed this protection as a structural rather than discretionary, reflecting the system’s interest in preserving the independence and equality of States rather than the merits of any particular officeholder or allegation (Arrest Warrant of 11 April 2000, para. 51).
While States may, in limited circumstances, extend their prescriptive jurisdiction beyond their territory, the physical execution of enforcement measures remains territorially confined unless the territorial State consents. This distinction between prescription and enforcement is among the oldest principles of international law. From the S.S. Lotus in 1927 onward, it has served as a bulwark against unilateral coercion disguised as legal process. The unlawfulness of enforcement without consent does not evaporate because the underlying conduct is egregious, criminal, or universally condemned (S.S. Lotus, page 18).
Historical practice reinforces the point. Israel’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentine territory in 1960 was not assessed through the lens of Eichmann’s crimes. Argentina’s complaint before the Security Council was upheld in principle, and the Council warned that repetition of such acts would undermine the foundations of international order and generate insecurity incompatible with peace. This call for reparation (legal redress) underscored a core lesson: even the most compelling enforcement objectives do not license territorial violation (SC Res 138).
As operations expand in scope and ambition, the legal tension sharpens further. Measures that predictably impair governmental functioning, constrain leadership choices, or reconfigure a State’s internal authority strain the concept of proportionality beyond recognition. At that point, the vocabulary of self-defence or law enforcement no longer describes what is occurring. In Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo, the ICJ treated such conduct as a grave breach of the prohibition on the use of force, particularly where it aligned with efforts to undermine or replace an existing government. The legal classification is a purely objective exercise.
Against this background, the central question shifts. If the operation is unlawful, what follows in a system where judicial avenues are blocked, and coercive enforcement is neither available nor credible? International law rarely secures compliance through immediate compulsion. Its influence is exerted through secondary mechanisms: the attribution of responsibility, the restructuring of institutional relationships, and the long-term recalibration of authority and credibility. When a powerful State acts in open defiance of Charter limits, the absence of courts or sanctions does not empty legality of meaning. It alters the register in which law operates. The inquiry moves from enforcement in the narrow sense to consequence in the systemic sense, asking how illegality constrains future claims, reshapes expectations among allies and adversaries alike, and redistributes who can speak persuasively in the language of law.
Hot and ColdWith theSame Breath
A State does not get to sit on two chairs, blowing hot and cold in the same breath. It cannot stretch the law when it suits and then insist on its strict observance when it no longer does. International law is not naïve about this tension, but it is also not vindictive. It is along that line that the estoppel doctrine comes into play.
Estoppel in international law is a narrow doctrine rooted in good faith. It is not a generalized penalty for inconsistency or illegality. At its core, it operates to prevent a State from departing from a clearand specific representation of fact or law on which another actor has reasonably relied to its detriment. The doctrine is situational and relational. Whether a representation becomes legally binding depends on context and circumstances, and estoppel must be distinguished from mere fluctuations in political or legal rhetoric (Temple of Preah Vihear, pp 23–26). In Nuclear Tests, the ICJ treated unilateral public statements as capable of generating legal effects, but only because they were addressed to a defined audience, conveyed with apparent intent to be bound, and relied upon in good faith (Nuclear Tests, paras 43, 46). Estoppel, properly understood, concerns holding a State to its own word in a concrete setting, not stripping it of the ability to invoke the law because it has breached it elsewhere.
That distinction matters for assessing the systemic consequences of expansive self-defence claims. A State’s unlawful conduct does not confer legal permission on others to act unlawfully in response. The prohibition on the use of force does not operate on a reciprocal or retaliatory logic. Accordingly, another State does not acquire a legal entitlement to disregard Article 2(4) merely because prior practice has stretched or violated it. Illegality remains illegality, assessed independently against the Charter framework and the absence of a valid Article 51 predicate.
Where the analysis does shift is outside estoppel in the technical sense and into the domain of practical credibility. The Charter system depends on a shared willingness to treat the prohibition on the use of force as a genuine constraint rather than a default rule riddled with exceptions. When a leading State advances elastic justifications that reframe armed attack as long-term risk management or diffuse threat suppression, it weakens its capacity to insist on stricter readings when confronting other uses of force. This does not legalize subsequent violations by others, but it alters the terrain on which interpretive disputes unfold. Over time, repeated reliance on expansive self-defence narratives lowers the persuasive force of objections to aggression, accelerates erosion of the armed attack threshold, and complicates collective resistance to unlawful force. The cost is not paid in a single case, but cumulatively, as the language of exception becomes easier to invoke and harder to contest.
Legal Consequences of War
Irrespective of how Washington framed Absolute Resolve, once force was used by one State against the territory of another, the situation crossed into the domain of international armed conflict as a matter of law. This classification does not depend on political labels, rhetorical minimisation, or unilateral characterisation. Under Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, the existence of an international armed conflict turns on objective facts. Where armed force is employed between States, the law of international armed conflict applies, even if one party denies that a conflict exists or portrays the operation as something else.
This is not a marginal or contested threshold. While international humanitarian law does wrestle with difficult classification questions at the edges, such as indirect involvement, proxy warfare, or support to non-state armed groups, those complexities are beside the point here. The scale, directness, and State-to-State character of the U.S. operations against Venezuelan territory placed them comfortably within the core of Common Article 2. From that moment, the relationship between the two States was governed by the full corpus of the law of armed conflict, not by analogies to law enforcement or counter narcotics cooperation.
Statements by U.S. officials following the operation only reinforced this legal transformation. President Trump described the outcome in terms of administrative control, asserting that the United States would “run the country” pending a future transition. He explicitly linked that role to Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, outlining plans for U.S. companies to enter, repair, and restart production, with costs recouped from extracted resources. Such language matters legally. Where a foreign military power exercises effective control over territory, even temporarily and even without sustained resistance, international humanitarian law classifies the situation as an occupation. Occupation, per se, is neither a bad nor a good thing. It, on the other hand, is not a political designation but a legal condition triggered by facts on the ground.
Most importantly, an occupation carries its own, distinct legal regime. That makes every occupation a hard amalgamation of legal and factual realities. The Hague Regulations of 1907 establish the foundational framework, defining occupation through effective control and characterising the occupier’s authority as provisional and non-sovereign. They strictly limit the exploitation of public property and natural resources and prohibit permanent alterations to the occupied territory’s legal and economic order. The Fourth Geneva Convention complements these rules by detailing obligations toward the civilian population, confirming that its protections apply in all cases of occupation, and imposing duties related to public order, welfare, and the continued functioning of local institutions. The occupier does not acquire ownership, trusteeship, or entitlement to restructure the territory’s economy for its own benefit.
The legal consequences extend well beyond questions of governance and resources. Once an international armed conflict exists, the entire targeting framework of the law of armed conflict becomes applicable. Members of the opposing State’s armed forces become lawful military objectives by virtue of their status, wherever they may be found, subject to the spatial limits of the conflict and the rules governing hostilities. At the same time, civilians and civilian objects remain protected against attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. These rules apply symmetrically. Venezuelan forces acquire corresponding rights and obligations vis-à-vis U.S. forces, and the conflict is regulated by the same legal constraints on both sides.
This has immediate implications for the idea that operations against drug-related targets could continue under a law enforcement logic. Once an international armed conflict exists, the permissibility of attacks is no longer assessed through domestic criminal categories or counter-narcotics frameworks. Targets must qualify as military objectives under humanitarian law, and attacks must comply with distinction, proportionality, and precautions. The recharacterization of criminal activity as “combat” does not expand the lawful scope of force; it narrows it. What began as an asserted effort to suppress transnational crime thus triggers a legal regime that imposes far stricter limits on the use of force than those invoked to justify the operation in the first place.
Credibility, Mediation, and Norm Leadership
The deeper impact of unlawful force is rarely found in immediate reactions. It unfolds over time, in the quiet redistribution of authority and influence within the international system. International law does not operate solely through adjudication or enforcement. Much of its constraining force is exercised upstream, through agenda setting, coalition building, and the ability of certain States to frame conduct as lawful or unlawful in ways that resonate with others. Credibility is the currency that enables this function. It is accumulated through consistency in legal argument and restraint in the invocation of exceptions, and it is expended when legal categories are stretched to accommodate immediate policy objectives.
This matters most in contexts where persuasion substitutes for compulsion. Mediation, facilitation, and norm leadership depend on a State’s capacity to invoke shared legal standards without appearing selective or instrumental. When a State advances expansive readings of self-defence or collapses the armed attack threshold into long-term threat management, it weakens its ability to insist on disciplined interpretations when confronting later crises. The effect is not symmetrical. The prohibition on the use of force remains binding on all States. Yet the authority to articulate what the prohibition requires in contested situations becomes more diffusely distributed and more easily challenged.
This dynamic is visible in responses to aggression more generally. When violations of Article 2(4) occur elsewhere, their wrongfulness does not hinge on the prior conduct of third States. Russia’s use of force, for example, stands or falls on its own legal merits, assessed against the Charter framework and the absence of a valid Article 51 justification. No amount of inconsistency by others converts that conduct into something lawful. What does shift, however, is the terrain on which condemnation and collective response unfold. Legal arguments grounded in restraint carry greater weight when advanced by actors perceived as having treated the prohibition as a genuine constraint rather than a flexible tool.
The consequence is cumulative. Each instance in which exceptional justifications are normalised makes subsequent invocations easier to contest and harder to police. Norm leadership erodes not because the rule disappears, but because fewer actors can defend it without qualification. In a system already strained by selective compliance, that erosion accelerates the drift from prohibition to permissibility, and from rule to rhetoric.
Signalling Costs Without Enforcement
When formal enforcement is blocked and coercive countermeasures are politically or strategically unrealistic, international law does not fall silent. It operates through indirect but consequential channels that signal costs, recalibrate expectations, and shape future behaviour. These mechanisms are often dismissed as soft or merely political, yet they perform a critical stabilising function in a system where compliance depends as much on credibility and coordination as on compulsion.
One such channel is reputational downgrading, understood not as abstract loss of standing but as a concrete shift in how a State’s legal claims are received. States that repeatedly advance expansive or elastic justifications for the use of force find that their subsequent objections to illegality elsewhere are met with greater scepticism. This does not alter the substantive law, but it affects its traction. Legal arguments that once anchored collective responses become easier to contest, fragmenting alignment among allies and partners. Over time, this erosion raises the transaction costs of coalition building and weakens the ability to mobilise shared legal positions.
A second mechanism lies in institutional distancing and conditional cooperation. Participation in international and regional frameworks often rests on assumptions of reciprocal restraint and respect for baseline norms. Where those assumptions are undermined, cooperation may continue formally while thinning substantively: reduced leadership roles, narrower mandates, greater scrutiny, or the quiet reallocation of agenda-setting authority. These shifts rarely announce themselves as sanctions, yet they register disapproval and constrain influence in ways that are difficult to reverse.
Economic and regulatory relationships provide another vector. Even in the absence of overt retaliation, States and private actors adjust risk assessments in response to perceived legal volatility. Trade, investment, and energy cooperation are sensitive to signals about the reliability of legal commitments and the predictability of State conduct. Where national security is invoked expansively to justify the use of force, counterparties may hedge, diversify, or renegotiate terms to insulate themselves from future disruption.
Domestic political processes also function as a signalling mechanism. Parliamentary inquiries, litigation strategies, and shifts in political rhetoric do not enforce international law directly, yet they shape how breaches are narrated and remembered. These processes matter because international legality is sustained through repetition and reference. When violations are framed as exceptional, contested, or unresolved rather than absorbed into routine practice, the normative baseline remains visible, even if temporarily displaced.
The Allies’ Burden
Great powers rarely stand alone when they breach foundational rules. What gives such breaches their systemic force is not only the act itself, but the response of those who claim to stand for the law. The United States’ actions in Venezuela arrive against a backdrop of repeated strain on the prohibition on the use of force, visible across multiple theatres and justified through increasingly elastic narratives of necessity and security.
If the international legal order is to retain any stabilising force, responsibility does not rest with one State alone. U.S. allies with deep investments in the rules-based system, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, play a decisive role in signalling whether foundational norms remain operative constraints or have become discretionary. Their reactions shape not only the diplomatic atmosphere but also the legal expectation. Silence, acquiescence, or purely instrumental alignment communicates tolerance for exceptionalism. Principled distancing, even when costly, preserves the distinction between rule and power.
That burden is particularly heavy for States whose own security depends on the integrity of the prohibition on the use of force. Against this background, remarks by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, suggesting that if the United States knows how to deal with dictators in Venezuela, it may also know where else such methods could be applied, take on significance beyond their immediate political context. Read charitably, the statement reflects frustration and a search for solidarity in a system that has often failed to deliver timely protection. Read legally, however, it gestures toward a line of reasoning international law has deliberately and repeatedly rejected: that the permissibility of force turns on judgments about regime character rather than on objective legal criteria.
Ukraine’s subsequent clarification, delivered by Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, reanchored its position in more orthodox terms, emphasising non-recognition of the Maduro administration and support only for developments consistent with international law. That recalibration matters. It underscores the difference between opposing a government politically and endorsing the use of force against it legally. International law draws that line for a reason. Once assessments of legitimacy or authoritarianism are allowed to substitute for Charter-based limits, the system slides toward outcome-driven justification. History offers no shortage of reminders of where that path leads.
States that rely on the prohibition on the use of force for their own survival have the most to lose from its erosion. Arguments that appear expedient in one context are rarely confined to it. The distortion of the self-defence doctrine by the United States in 2003 was later echoed by Russia to rationalize its aggression against Ukraine.
This is why demonstrating distance from unlawful uses of force, even at the price of trade friction or economic retaliation, is not an act of disloyalty. It is an investment in systemic stability. Without such signalling, the costs of illegality are externalised, the armed attack threshold continues to erode, and the incentive structure tilts toward replication. What restrains further escalation, by Russia or by others watching closely, is not rhetorical commitment to order, but visible insistence that law continues to matter when it is inconvenient.
In earlier periods, European States could perhaps afford ambiguity. Isolated violations could be treated as aberrations, absorbed with minimal damage in the expectation that equilibrium would return. That assumption no longer holds when expansive interpretations of self-defence and enforcement are not episodic, but articulated as policy. Silence in such circumstances does not preserve flexibility. It signals acceptance.
The temptation to accommodate is understandable. Close alignment with Washington offers security guarantees, economic advantages, and political leverage. Yet accommodation premised on selective legality is a fragile bargain. In a world where power defines spheres of influence and law becomes optional, middle powers cannot rely on favours without paying a price. Recent U.S. strategic documents leave little doubt that loyalty does not insulate allies from coercion when interests diverge.
When Venezuela turned to the United Nations Security Council to denounce the U.S. operation as a blatant violation of the UN Charter and territorial sovereignty, it was a reminder of the foundational promise embedded in that Charter: that no State may lawfully use force against another’s territorial integrity except in the narrowest of circumstances. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, underscored this obligation in his remarks to the Council, reaffirming that all States must comply with the Charter and international law, and warning that unilateral military action against a neighbouring sovereign poses grave risks to the peace and security the organisation is mandated to uphold.
Among national responses, Spain’s stance offered perhaps the clearest articulation of disciplined non-recognition. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made a pointed distinction between political non-recognition and legal non-recognition. Madrid has long viewed Nicolás Maduro’s government as lacking democratic legitimacy, yet Sánchez was emphatic that such illegitimacy does not translate into legal license for foreign intervention. Spain will not recognize an intervention that contravenes international law, even if it purports to challenge an undemocratic regime.
This emphasis resists a dangerous slippage common in political discourse, in which illegality is conflated with rightful intervention because the target is unpopular or repressive. Even deeply flawed governments remain objects of legal protection under the Charter; breaches of legitimacy do not erase the prohibition on force. As Spain’s diplomatic statements at the Security Council made clear, respect for sovereignty and peaceful dispute resolution must be sustained “always and everywhere,” rather than deployed selectively in response to convenient ends. Crucially, this position also demonstrated an attempt to anchor state responses in legal categories rather than in transient political alignments.
Normalization is the Real Danger
The central danger exposed by Absolute Resolve is not confined to the operation itself. It lies in the gradual normalisation of legal exception. When the use of force is justified through elastic concepts, law enforcement reframed as self-defence, armed attack diluted into long-term threat management, and occupation redescribed as temporary administration, the prohibition on the use of force does not collapse outright. It thins. Its edges blur. Over time, what was once exceptional becomes available, and what was once prohibited becomes contestable.
International law has never relied solely on courts or coercive enforcement to survive. Its resilience has always depended on shared discipline in argument, on restraint in invoking exceptions, and on collective insistence that legality continues to matter even when it is inconvenient. That discipline is most tested when powerful States act. If their departures from Charter limits are absorbed without consequence, the system does not simply tolerate a single violation; it recalibrates its baseline.
The effects are cumulative and asymmetric. Each expansive justification lowers the cost of the next. Each failure to signal distance accelerates erosion of the armed attack threshold. The result is not immediate anarchy, but a steady redistribution of legal authority away from rules and toward power. History suggests that once this shift takes hold, it is rarely confined to its point of origin. Arguments migrate. Precedents are repurposed. Exceptionalism travels.
What remains, then, is a choice about friction. The international legal order cannot eliminate unlawful force, but it can make it costly. That cost is not always imposed through sanctions or judgments. More often, it is imposed through credibility loss, institutional distancing, economic repricing, and the narrowing of who can speak persuasively in the name of law. These are imperfect tools, yet they are the only ones available when enforcement is blocked.
Seen in that light, the stakes of Absolute Resolve extend well beyond Venezuela. They concern whether the prohibition on the use of force remains a meaningful organising principle, or whether it becomes a rhetorical reference point invoked selectively and abandoned when inconvenient. Preserving what remains of international stability requires more than condemning violations after the fact. It requires sustained resistance to the quiet transformation of exception into norm.
Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.
January 3, 2026 – In response to the United States launching military attacks in Venezuela, Center for International Policy Executive Vice President Matt Duss issued the following statement:
“Donald Trump has launched an illegal and reckless regime change operation in Venezuela. This act of war violates both U.S. and international law, and follows nearly one hundred extrajudicial killings at sea on Trump’s orders.
“None of this use of military force has been authorized by Congress. Lawmakers must assert their constitutional war powers and force the president to remove U.S. armed forces from the hostilities with Venezuela that he has started. They should also seek other possible legislative measures to impose accountability on this administration for its lawless actions.
“Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly do not want to fight another war of choice. 70 percent of U.S. voters oppose taking military action in Venezuela.
“Trump was elected on a promise to end wars, not start them. His illegal aggression against Venezuela once again breaks that promise, and threatens to repeat some of the worst moral and strategic failures of past U.S. military adventurism, for which the American people and communities around the world have paid enormous costs.”
The Judge Advocate watched the feed from the tactical operations center alongside her commander. The screens, each attended by systems monitors, showed more than a dozen developments unfolding at once. An artificial intelligence (AI) led drone swarm was closing on the front line through the city, coordinating its movements faster than any human pilot could direct, an artificial flock of mechanical starlings like a cloud on the radar. A civilian aid convoy had stalled on the northern approach. An enemy artillery battery was repositioning south behind a residential block. In the nearby valley, friendly units were maneuvering under fire. All these pieces were in motion, lives and vehicles and weapons. The soldiers’ behavior would be determined by interactions between their commander and AI.
The challenge here is not as simple as claiming that AI cannot comply with the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the law of armed conflict. The fog of war complicates decision-making for both humans and machines, but does so in profoundly different ways.
For a human commander, the chaos of the battlefield is filtered through layers of training, doctrine, experience, and instinct. Even when overwhelmed, a person can weigh incomplete facts against their mental map of the situation, recall comparable past events, and fall back on moral and legal anchors. This does not mean humans do not make mistakes; they do, often with serious consequences. But even in error, their reasoning is shaped by caution, hopefully empathy, and the capacity to interpret ambiguous information in light of their own individual understandings of humanitarian obligations.
AI processes that same chaos as streams of probabilities. Every sensor reading, target profile, and movement pattern is reduced to statistical likelihoods: how probable it is based on the training data that this object is hostile, how urgent its engagement appears, how likely a given action is to produce the “correct” result as defined in training. In its logic, the most probable option is the correct one. Under extreme operational pressure, the AI focuses on the statistically most plausible, while rare possibilities drop toward statistical zero, far less likely to be considered than they would by a human.
This difference in reasoning is why training environments must be built to include not just the probable, but the improbable: those outlandish, once-in-a-century battlefield events that stretch judgment to its limits. For AI, these scenarios must be constructed, repeated, and reinforced until they occupy a permanent place in the machine’s operational vocabulary.
A credible arms control position would be to prohibit or pause the development of certain autonomous capabilities. Nevertheless, this article proceeds conditionally because much of the stack is already fielded (AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance triage, targeting support, and navigation), and because dual-use diffusion (commercial drones, perception models, planning tools) makes a clean prohibition hard to sustain. If states continue down this path with minimal international instruments the question becomes how to embed legal restraint so that rare, high-stakes judgments are not optimized away. What follows sets minimum safeguards if development and deployment proceed.
How AI Learns
If AI’s logic is built on statistical reasoning, the way it acquires those statistics determines the boundaries of its thinking. This is true for AI in general, whether in a medical diagnostic tool, a financial trading algorithm, or a targeting system on a battlefield. The patterns an AI recognizes, the probabilities it assigns, and the priorities it sets are all downstream from its training.
In the military domain, an AI’s training determines how it operates in relation to the law of armed conflict and the unit’s rules of engagement: what it accepts as positive identification (distinction), how it trades anticipated military advantage against collateral damage estimation (proportionality), when feasible precautions require warning, delay, or abort, and when uncertainty triggers a mandatory hand-off to a human. The two dominant machine learning paradigms, imitation learning and reinforcement learning, can both produce highly capable systems. Yet without deliberate safeguards, neither inherently preserves the kind of rare, high-stakes judgments that human decision-makers sometimes make under the fog of war, moments when they choose to forego an operational advantage to prevent civilian harm. Statistically, those moments are anomalies.
Imitation Learning: The Apprentice Approach
Imitation learning (IL) is essentially training by demonstration. The AI is shown large datasets of human decision-making, each paired with the information available at the time. In a military targeting context, this might include annotated sensor feeds, mission logs, and after-action reports: strike approved, strike aborted, target reclassified, mission postponed.
The model’s task is to learn the mapping between conditions and human actions. If most commanders in the dataset abort strikes when civilian vehicles enter the target zone, and there are enough entries of this behavior in the dataset to show that, the model will learn to mirror that restraint.
IL captures the statistical distribution of decisions in the training data. Rare but important choices, such as holding fire in a high-pressure engagement to comply with proportionality, will be underrepresented unless deliberately oversampled. Left uncorrected, the AI may treat those lawful restraint decisions as statistical noise, unlikely to be repeated in practice. Additionally, because much of the data on which machine learning models reflects past military experience, many AI models will echo the implicit bias shown in the past human decisions on which they train.
Reinforcement Learning: The Trial-and-Error Arena
Reinforcement learning (RL) works differently. Instead of copying human decisions, the AI is placed in a simulated environment where it can take actions, receive rewards for desirable outcomes, and penalties for undesirable ones. Over thousands or millions of iterations, the AI learns policies, decision rules that maximize its cumulative reward. At scale, this training is highly compute– and energy-intensive. That matters because it concentrates capability in a few well-resourced programs, slows iteration and red teaming, and creates pressure to trim the very rare event scenarios that protect civilians and support compliance, while adding a nontrivial environmental footprint. Programs should, therefore, set minimum scenario coverage and doubt-protocol testing requirements that are not waivable for budgetary reasons.
In a military context, this means an RL agent might repeatedly play through simulated scenarios: neutralizing threats, protecting friendly forces, and avoiding civilian harm. The way those objectives are weighted in the reward function is decisive. If mission success is rewarded heavily and civilian harm only lightly penalized, the AI will statistically favor the course of action that maximizes mission success, even if that means accepting higher risks to civilians.
RL’s strength is adaptability. Its weakness is that low-probability events, rare civilian patterns, and unusual threat behaviors will remain statistically insignificant unless the simulation environment repeatedly forces the AI to confront them.
IL can pass down the shape of human judgment; RL can provide flexibility in novel situations. But each carries a statistical bias against rare, high-impact decisions, exactly the kinds of decisions that can determine the legality and morality of military action. Only by deliberately elevating those rare cases in training, through curated datasets and stress-test simulations, can either method hope to produce systems that behave lawfully and predictably under the fog of war. On the evidence of deployments to date, achieving this level of end-to-end compliance remains out of reach.
The Simulation Imperative
Actual combat records, produced by soldiers in logs, after-action reports, or targeting databases, are skewed toward the typical patterns of engagement that happen often enough to warrant recording after the fact. Unprecedented and chaotic situations will strain both the law and the system’s decision-making, yet they appear so rarely in historical data that, in statistical terms, they are almost invisible. An AI, left to its statistical logic, will not prepare for what it has seldom seen.
This is why simulation is the decisive safeguard1. In imitation learning, rare but critical decisions must be deliberately overrepresented in the dataset, so they carry enough statistical weight to influence the model’s behavior. In reinforcement learning, the simulated environment must be constructed so that “once-in-a-century” scenarios occur often, sometimes in clusters, forcing the system to learn how to navigate them. A humanitarian convoy crossing paths with an enemy armored column, loss of communications during a time-sensitive strike, sensor spoofing that turns friend into apparent foe, these cannot be treated as peripheral edge cases. They must be made routine in training.
The more frequently the AI encounters these manufactured crises in simulation, the more space they occupy in its decision-making horizon. If and when similar scenarios arise in operations, the system’s response should not be improvised.
This imperative has repeatedly been encoded under International Humanitarian Law. In the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions2, the obligation to take “all feasible precautions” and to cancel or suspend an attack if it becomes apparent that it would cause excessive civilian harm relative to the anticipated military advantage operationalizes the humane minimum in treaty law. Critically, however, many key decision-making states have not ratified all the precepts articulated in the Additional Protocols. Customary IHL Rule 15 similarly requires constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects, and Rule 19 codifies the requirement to cancel or suspend attacks when doubt or changing circumstances create excessive risk.
Faced with ambiguous intelligence or conflicting imperatives, human commanders can recall a doctrinal anchor and choose that privileges restraint over risk. Even when they err, that error is shaped by a human blend of caution and interpretation of context.
For AI, the same scenario unfolds differently. Without explicit design, there is no natural “humane fallback” in its logic. In the face of uncertainty, an unmodified reinforcement learning policy will still pursue the statistically most rewarding action, and an imitation learning model will default to the most common decision in its dataset.
This is where simulation and legal doctrine intersect. Embedding the humane minimum into AI means that in every training run, whether through curated historical cases or artificially generated edge scenarios, the option that aligns with humane treatment under uncertainty must be given decisive weight. In imitation learning, that means oversampling “hold fire” or “switch to non-lethal” decisions until they are no longer statistical outliers. In reinforcement learning, it means structuring the reward function so that restraint in doubtful cases earns more cumulative value than aggression, even if aggression sometimes yields short-term operational gains. The aim is not to teach machines to imitate human morality, but to hard-code a structural preference for restraint even and especially when the law is unclear.
Risks of Omission
Systematic vulnerabilities in decision-making compound in coalition or joint operations. Different states may train their AI systems with different datasets, simulation designs (if any), and legal interpretations. When such systems operate together, the seams between them can become legal blind spots. A particular AI system might abort an engagement that another proceeds with, creating conflicting operational tempos and complicating attribution if civilian harm occurs.
The danger is not limited to catastrophic, one-off mistakes. Over time, small, repeated deviations from IHL in marginal cases, where human commanders might have exercised restraint, can erode the protective function of the law. The result is a slow normalization of riskier behavior, driven not by political decision or doctrinal change, but by the statistical inertia of machine learning models. This is the core paradox: without safeguards, AI systems can become more predictable in some ways, yet less reliable in the moments when unpredictability, when acting against the statistical grain, is essential for lawful conduct.
Finally, military AI does not fail or succeed in complying with IHL by accident. Its behavior is the predictable result of how it is trained, the data it is given, the scenarios it is exposed to, and the rules embedded in its decision logic. How AI functions and the choices it takes is downstream from decisions made by humans in developing, training, and fielding it.
Governance, Audit, and Human Control
Bridging the gap from promising lab results to lawful behavior in the field requires more than good training runs. It needs an end-to-end governance spine that links data, models, code, test harnesses, deployment configurations, operators, and independent oversight into a single chain of accountability. That spine assigns clear decision rights, specifies the artifacts required at each stage, and shows how evidence of compliance is produced and preserved. It starts with curated, documented datasets and explicit problem statements; runs through model specifications, reward functions, and constraint schemas; includes scenario-coverage plans, legal reviews, and red-team evaluations; and culminates in authorization-to-operate, humane control interfaces, and post-incident audits. Every hand-off, data steward to model owner, model owner to system integrator, integrator to unit commander, should be traceable, signed, and reversible. In effect, the system deploys with its own accountability case: a living dossier that ties design choices to legal obligations and links runtime behavior to reviewable logs. Without that spine, even a technically impressive model becomes an orphan in the field, fast, capable, and difficult to supervise precisely when the fog thickens. The pathway from design to deployment rests on a few non-negotiables.
Data governance as policy, not plumbing. If models think with the statistics we give them, then data curation is a legal act as much as a technical one. Training corpora should be versioned and signed; every inclusion and exclusion choice documented; every oversampling decision for restraint labeled with a rationale. That record is what allows commanders, investigators, or courts to see how humane fallbacks were embedded by design rather than inferred after the fact.
Test what you train, and then test against what you didn’t. A system that performs well on its own distribution can still fail in the wild. Beyond standard validation, mandate distribution shift drills: deliberately swap sensor suites, degrade GPS, introduce spoofed friend/foe signals, and remix civilian movement patterns. In each drill, the system should either preserve lawful restraint or trigger a doubt protocol that defers to a human. Where it does neither, the failure should feed back into simulation design and reward shaping.
Non-overridable guardrails in code and command. Constraint layers (identification gates, collateral damage thresholds, no-strike lists) must be technically non-overridable by the model and procedurally difficult to override by humans. If escalation is necessary, require dual-key authorization with automatic logging. The goal is not to box out judgment but to ensure extraordinary actions leave extraordinary traces.
Responsibility matrices are embedded in the system. Every deployed AI component – classifier, tracker, recommender, fire-control interface – should write structured, time-synchronized logs that include model version, data slice identifiers, intermediate confidence values, triggered constraints, and who approved or halted an action. Think of this as a living annex to rules of engagement: not just “what the machine did,” but why it “thought” that was permissible, and who remained on the loop.
Human-on-the-loop that actually has leverage. Meaningful human control is not a checkbox; it is the ability to intervene in time with understanding. Interfaces must surface uncertainty (not just a single confidence score), show near-miss counterfactuals (“if civilians are within X meters, the system will abort”), and offer safe, low-latency actions (pause, shadow/track, switch to non-lethal). If the only human interaction available is “approve” under time pressure, control is nominal, not meaningful.
Coalition interoperability without legal dilution. Joint operations will mix systems trained on different data and doctrines. Interoperability standards should cover not only communications and formats but also minimum legal behaviors: shared constraint schemas, common doubt thresholds, and audit fields. The safest path is least-common-denominator legality: when systems disagree under uncertainty, the coalition default is restraint.
Pre-deployment red teaming and post-incident review. Before fielding, require adversarial evaluations by teams empowered to break things, reward hacking hunts, “blinking target” scenarios, and deception trials. After any incident with potential civilian harm, pull the synchronized logs, reconstruct the model’s decision path, and replay counterfactuals to see whether humane fallbacks would have triggered with slightly different inputs. Treat these reviews like flight-safety boards: technical, blameless, relentlessly corrective.
Make restraint measurable. What we measure, we secure. Track deferred engagements under uncertainty, rate of doubt-protocol activations, guardrail trip frequency, and time-to-human-intervention. Trend them over time and across theaters. If these metrics decay as models “improve,” it’s a warning that optimization is outpacing law.
In combination, these measures transfer human judgment (IL), secure robustness under uncertainty (RL and simulation), and institutionalize restraint via governance, constraint architectures, and independent audit, so that compliance is an engineered property rather than an assumption. The result is a verifiable accountability chain, datasets that show why restraint was learned, reward functions that make it valuable, guardrails that make it non-optional, and logs that make it reviewable. And because what we measure we secure, the system ships with metrics for doubt-protocol activations, deferred engagements, and guardrail trips, so commanders can see whether lawful caution is holding under stress. Only then does lawful behavior become the default under pressure, an engineered property of the system, rather than a hope we place in the gaps between probabilities and intent.
Growing a Governance Spine
Military AI will not “grow into” compliance with the law of armed conflict. It will do what it is trained, rewarded, permitted, and audited to do. In the fog of war, humans and machines both falter, but in different ways. Human commanders can depart from statistical expectations to privilege restraint; unmodified systems, bound to their learned probabilities, will not. That is why the humane minimum cannot sit at the margins of development. It has to be engineered into the center of learning, testing, and command.
Imitation learning can transmit judgment; reinforcement learning can build adaptability; simulation can force the improbable to be routine. Around that technical core, a governance spine, constraints that do not yield under pressure, doubt protocols that default to caution, signed datasets and reward functions, synchronized logs and metrics, turns legal aspiration into operational behavior. In coalitions, common constraint schemas and reviewable audit trails keep interoperability from becoming a legal blind spot.
At this point, two mistakes will sink this project: treating compliance as a software patch added after performance, or assuming that speed and scale will eventually smooth away edge cases. They will not. The edge cases are where the law does its most important work.
Compliance with the law of armed conflict must be an engineered property of the system: competence built through training, judgment transferred via imitation learning, robustness under uncertainty secured by simulation, and a non-derogable humane floor enforced by constraints and audit. What ultimately matters is evidence, datasets, reward functions, constraint triggers, and synchronized logs, showing that restraint prevailed when uncertainty was greatest. Only on that basis can militaries credibly claim that lawful conduct remains the default under operational pressure.
Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.
1Where states choose to pursue development and fielding, simulation is the decisive safeguard. A different policy path is to forgo development or to prohibit particular applications outright.
