International Law  ·  Political Analysis  ·  10 min read

Trump vs. the World: What His Second Term Means for International Law

“Only my own morality can constrain my global power.” Those were Donald Trump’s words to reporters in January 2026. For international lawyers, they were not just a provocation. They were a legal philosophy — and one with consequences the whole world is now living with.

The post-Second World War international order was built on a simple but radical idea: that even the most powerful states are bound by rules they did not write alone. That wars require justification. That courts can hold leaders accountable. That borders are not for sale. For nearly eighty years, that framework — however imperfectly enforced — shaped how nations behaved, negotiated, and resolved their disputes.

Donald Trump’s second term has put that framework under the most severe stress it has faced since the Cold War. This is not simply a story about one unpopular president. It is a story about whether international law can survive when its most powerful architect decides the rules no longer apply to itself.

What Is International Law, and Why Does It Matter?

Before examining what Trump has done, it is worth clarifying what international law actually is — because it is widely misunderstood, and that misunderstanding is often weaponised by those who want to dismiss it.

International law is not a single rulebook enforced by a global police force. It is a complex web of treaties, customary rules, and institutions that states have voluntarily agreed to be bound by. It includes the UN Charter (which prohibits the use of force against other states), multilateral treaties on trade, climate, human rights, and arms control, and institutions like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) that adjudicate disputes and prosecute individuals.

Its critics — and there are many — argue that without a global enforcement mechanism, international law is essentially optional for powerful states. Its defenders respond that this misses the point: compliance with international law is actually very high, precisely because states recognise it is in their long-term interest. As one Chatham House analyst put it, international law is “very much a realist tool of international politics” — not the idealists’ fantasy its detractors claim.

What makes Trump’s second term genuinely different is not that the US is bending international rules — every great power does that. It is that the US is now openly hostile to the concept of rules itself.

The Scorecard: What Has Trump Actually Done?

The scale of the Trump administration’s departure from international legal norms since January 2025 is unprecedented in the post-war era. Here is the record so far:

Taken individually, any one of these actions would represent a significant departure from expected state behaviour. Taken together, they amount to what the American Journal of International Law described as a program that “questions, ignores, weakens, and undercuts, without compunction or hesitation, existing international processes, understandings, rules, institutions, and multilateral frameworks.”

Venezuela: The Case That Changed Everything

Of all the actions taken by the Trump administration, the military attack on Venezuela on 3 January 2026 — culminating in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro — represents the most direct violation of foundational international law norms.

The legal issues are not subtle. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits not only the use of force but also threats of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The principle of non-intervention — that no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of another — is one of the most established rules in international law, affirmed by the ICJ as far back as the 1986 Nicaragua v. United States case.

The Trump administration offered no credible legal justification. Instead, Trump described his actions in terms of US national interests and his personal moral compass — explicitly denying the relevance of international law to the decision. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, captured the administration’s worldview more bluntly, asserting that “strength, force and power are the iron laws of the world.”

The US Security Council veto ensures no formal UN response is possible. But the UN General Assembly — where the US has no veto — remains an option. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 140 states condemned the action in that body. Whether a similar coalition will coalesce over Venezuela remains to be seen.

The ICC Under Siege

Few episodes illustrate the Trump administration’s approach to international law more starkly than its treatment of the International Criminal Court.

The ICC was established in 2002 under the Rome Statute to prosecute individuals — including heads of state — for the most serious international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. The United States has never ratified the Rome Statute. But until recently, it generally tolerated the Court’s existence.

That tolerance ended. In February 2025, Trump issued an executive order authorising sanctions against ICC officials. The ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, was the first person formally sanctioned — meaning his assets in the US were frozen and he and his family members were barred from entering the country. Eight more judges and prosecutors followed.

The practical consequences have been severe. One sanctioned Canadian judge described losing access to all credit cards and basic services: “How do you order an Uber? How do you get a hotel? How do you do basic transactions?”

The administration went further still, reportedly demanding that the Court amend its founding treaty — the Rome Statute — to permanently exempt Trump administration officials from prosecution. This demand is legally absurd: amending the Rome Statute requires agreement from the 125 member states party to it. But its political purpose is clear: to signal that the US regards international criminal accountability as simply inapplicable to itself.

Withdrawing from 66 Organisations: What Was Actually Cut?

On 7 January 2026, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from 66 international organisations. The list is worth examining carefully, because the breadth of what was cut goes far beyond what most reporting captured.

Among the bodies from which the US withdrew:

• The UN International Law Commission — the body that develops and codifies international law itself
• The Office of the Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict — which monitors and reports on the use of child soldiers
• The UN Peacebuilding Commission
• The International Renewable Energy Agency
• The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• The Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation — a multilateral framework among Atlantic nations

The White House justified these withdrawals on the grounds that the organisations were contrary to US interests and promoted “woke” agendas. One analyst at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists drew the logical conclusion: under the Trump administration, “international law, conserving nature, protecting children from war, developing renewable energy, and building peace are issues antithetical to US interests.”

But Is International Law Actually Dying?

Here is where the picture becomes more complicated — and more interesting.

The assumption underlying much of the alarm about Trump is that international law can only survive if the United States upholds it. That assumption is being tested, and the results are not entirely what critics feared.

While the US retreats, other states are moving in the opposite direction. The Gambia is pursuing Myanmar before the International Court of Justice for the persecution of the Rohingya. South Africa has brought a genocide case concerning Gaza before the same court. European countries, despite their reluctance to confront Trump directly, have rallied in defence of Denmark over the Greenland threats and continued to back Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the face of US pressure to concede.

As Chatham House observed, rather than calling out the hypocrisy of the Western liberal order and walking away from it, many Global South states are now actively using its tools and defending its institutions. The institutions Trump is attacking are finding new champions precisely because he is attacking them.

What This Means for Everyday People

It is tempting to view all of this as abstract — a dispute among states and legal scholars that has little bearing on ordinary life. That view is mistaken.

International law shapes things people rely on every day: the rules that govern international trade and the prices of imported goods, the climate agreements that determine environmental policy, the humanitarian frameworks that govern how wars are fought and how refugees are protected, and the accountability mechanisms that deter the worst abuses of state power.

When the US withdraws from the UNFCCC, it does not just remove one country from a climate agreement. It removes the world’s second-largest emitter and its largest historical emitter, making the targets of every other signatory harder to reach. When it sanctions ICC judges, it does not just inconvenience a handful of lawyers in The Hague. It signals to every authoritarian government watching that international criminal accountability is a tool of the powerful, not a constraint on them.

And when the most powerful country on earth declares that only its own president’s moral compass constrains its conduct in global affairs, it does not just change US foreign policy. It changes the rules of the game for everyone.

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