International law is not truthfully understood. Here is why.

28 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Law does not exist unless and until an enforcement mechanism exists which functions in such a manner that this enforcement mechanism is respected and trusted by at least a majority of the residents throughout the territory(s) that it applies to and which mechanism is believed by that majority to be independent of all other state and non-state powers with the sole exception that it obeys the commands/rulings of the relevant Judicial power, which is responsible for interpreting the laws. This is true regarding every government, regardless whether local, federal, or global (a government whose power is over international instead of intranational affairs, and which therefore would be a World Government — which still doesn’t yet exist, because the U.N. that exists is no such thing).

Whereas law, defined in that way, does exist at some local, ad some national, levels, it does not yet exist at the international level, because no such mechanism exists to enforce international ‘laws’ — those aren’t really laws but only ‘laws’ — and now with the ongoing blatant genocide against the Gazans proceeding apace and the U.N.’s acceptance that U.S. President Donald Trump and his still-forming ‘Board of Peace’ will rule over Gaza without any participation of or concern for the Gazans, the U.N. has thereby declared by this seminal action, that the U.N. is only a talking forum and one that despite all of its talking has no actual concern for international law, much less any ability to enforce it — and the main reason for this is that the U.N. has never been endowed with any mecanism by which it can enforce international laws, even if it were to take international laws seriously enough to actually want to enforce an international law.

The U.N. was actually designed for failure, and the person who was responsible for this was U.S. President Harry Truman who designed it. Regarding the San Francisco Conference at which the U.N.’s Charter was written, during 25 April 1945 till 26 June 1945, President Truman wrote to his right-hand man, James Byrnes, on 5 January 1946, “At San Francisco no agreements or compromises were ever agreed to without my approval.” Today’s U.N. was his creation, more than anyone else’s: Truman’s was the guiding hand that wrote all of it. It’s not 100% his; he compromised where he had to, but he was the document’s ultimate editor. Everything that’s in it was acceptable to him. The Conference’s attendees had far less power over the final document than he did. Everything that’s in it had received his “approval.” He wanted it to have no enforcement mechanism because he had no intention that any world government should exist because he wanted the U.S. Government, which by then was already by far the richest and biggest world power, to have total freedom-of-action. In fact, soon after the U.N. was formed, he made the decision on 25 July 1945 that the U.S. Government should ultimately become the dictator over all other nations (the world’s first-ever universal empire) — something that would have been impossible ever to happen if his predecessor FDR’s plan for the U.N. had been implemented at the San Francisco Conference. In fact, FDR had been passionately opposed to any and all empires, and his plan for the U.N. had been motivated, above all, by the goal to outlaw all empires and replace all of them by the world’s first-ever World Government, a democratic federal reublic of nations, which he named (in August 1941) the “United Nations.”

I first became interested in international law in the 1960s by reading The Strategy of World Order, by Falk and Mendlovitz, the classic work, which started the academic debate on its topic, and which criticized the U.N. as being ineffectual for its purpose and which proposed ‘solutions’ that were ignorant of what FDR’s plan for it had been and that were irrelevant to his plan and they thus failed to contribute anything toward improving the situation that they were complaining about in that massive, 4-volume work.

Only in subsequent decades, as a historian, did I come to figure out what FDR had had in mind for his U.N.; and the academic community still isn’t doing that research and doesn’t write about that; I’ve been alone in it; so, instead of Amending the U.N.’s Charter to bring it into line with what FDR had been intending (which would have been the U.N. as the democratic federal World Government — and no more empire allowed), we are continuing in the Trumanite system (neoconservatism — which Truman, reversing FDR on this, started) and therefore moving increasingly toward the Third World War that FDR had planned his U.N. so as to prevent — this competition between empires, which had already produced the prior two World Wars, would thus have been stopped in 1945 if FDR had served-out his 1944-48 term. To a considerable extent, this failure by the historians is also the result of the massive ongoing failure by social ‘scientists’, who ignore ideology as-if it’s just PR. And the FDR Presidential Library (the first to be established under the National Archives’ Presidential Library system) has been 100% passive about this failure, not at all pro-active on it to encourage historians (as they should be doing) to research FDR’s ideology regarding international relations (nor even his ideology on domestic affairs). FDR and Lincoln were the two most progressive U.S. Presidents; there is lots of public knowledge about Lincoln’s ideology (because the Civil War was fought over that), but little about FDR’s ideology (though his ideology was just as important) — more is written about FDR’s style than about his substance, and the FDR library doesn’t even try to do anything about that. Like any research library, that library helps scholars locate documents to answer their questions, but it does nothing to encourage them to research his ideology — which drove his decisions. If he had been a regular President (such as Eisenhower was), it — this pro-activity — wouldn’t have been needed, but FDR had a carefully and fully worked-out ideology, so it’s needed in his case. For example, a ChatGTP AI search of “What is known about FDR’s ideology?” produced some outright falsehoods, such as “The U.S. should help build rules-based international institutions. This thinking helped shape The United Nations.” Both assertions are the opposite of the reality, which was: “The U.S. should help build the international-law based institution, the U.N. (which in recent decades the U.S. has been aiming to replace by its own international rules in order to replace the U.N.’s international laws).” This — such blatant falsehoods — is the sort of thing that results from the FDR library’s passivity. It’s very harmful. In FDR’s case, ideology drove — it MOTIVATED — all of his most important decisions. So, it was extremely relevant to most of the issues that historians of FDR are concerned about. Passivity by that library is therefore very inappropriate.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.