Europe helped trash international law, and now it’s biting in Ukraine

The dramatic immolation of International Humanitarian Law in Palestine has been catastrophic, and not only for the Palestinians. Many warned that the fire would spread, and now, president Trump is offering a redux in Ukraine. The latest “ceasefire” deal being discussed there, or imposed, involves Ukraine relinquishing up 20% or more of its territory. The country will also be obliged to accept conditions that are “tantamount to capitulation,” according to the New York Times. That includes limiting the size of its army and committing to not joining NATO. Bloomberg reports that the “28-point plan [is] modeled on the Gaza ceasefire.”

The Europeans are apoplectic. They weren’t consulted, and neither were the Ukrainians. But the Russians were. That’s because, as Trump said during his long and windsome speech in Egypt in October, “I’m the only one that matters…”, and of course he’s half right. For Ukraine, the Russians matter too.

Kaja Kallas, the lead diplomat of the European Union and former Prime Minister of Estonia, a Baltic state, with particular exposure to Russia, has taken the lead in insisting that “for any plan to work, it needs to have Ukrainians and Europeans on board.” David Van Weel, the Dutch Foreign Minister has kicked the can over the Ukrainians. “It’s about Ukrainian territory. It’s about Ukrainian sovereignty. Without the buy-in of Ukraine, you won’t get the support of the Europeans,” he said.

The European line is markedly different in Palestine, which is where Trump seems to have developed his playbook. There, the president jammed through a ceasefire in name only—the Israeli army has killed nearly three hundred Palestinians since the ceasefire was proclaimed—with the support of European states, who were similarly cut out of the deal. Since then, the UN Security Council has voted to endorse the Trump plan and the Palestinians, like the Ukrainians, were cast aside.

As Chatham House explains, “there has been no significant Palestinian involvement in generating the Trump plan or the resolution.”

As a result, “there is likely little sense of local ownership and the entire arrangement may come to be regarded as an external imposition,” a statement which seems to account for Hamas’s rejection of the entire resolution. The militant group has also refused to relinquish arms, and has stated that any external group or force that seeks to disarm it would be treated as a party to the occupation of Palestine.

And yet, European leaders crowed at Trump’s accomplishment at the UN. Denmark described the resolution as “the best chance for lasting peace,” while France, a member of the UNSC, voted yes to “support the ongoing peace efforts.” Kallas, the EU diplomat described the Trump initiative as a “game changer.”

The behavior is consistent for European leaders, who have rushed to undermine international law in Palestine, and yet have entreated the world to observe its norms in Ukraine. Now Trump, who has been a remarkably steady operator—his main rule is that he does what he feels like whenever—has shown just how thin the veneer of international law is.

Before the genocide, many people rejected the idea that countries could acquire territory through force. The prohibition on the acquisition of territory through war has acted, since WWII, as a bedrock principle governing interstate relations. The rule also helped orient people around the rejection of the Israeli occupations of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon and for Russia, Ukraine.

And when Russia first invaded Ukraine much of the world rallied to Ukraine’s moral, if not actual, defense. Differences of opinion about whether NATO expansion may have triggered the war were subordinated to the primacy of one principle: that you can’t conquer someone else’s land and keep it.

Yet, when Israel began to work the horrors of the past two years, European leaders rushed to stand with Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. As recently as September of this year the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who has been named in the ICJ genocide submission as an agitator for genocide, visited Keir Starmer in London.

Now the chickens have roosted, and the Palestinians and Ukrainians, and all of Europe and the Middle East, are worse off. Trump has shown that he’s the only game in town—and he’s tired of playing. The realist scholar John Mearsheimer predicts a future for Ukraine in purgatory, neither permitted to develop as a normal country by Russia, nor supported adequately by the West to contest Russian dominance. For Europe, the Ukraine contest has meant a refugee crisis, disruption to supplies of energy, a smaller economy and almost certainly, future instability as Russia continues to assert its primacy over its near neighbors. In other words, the Middle East has crashed into the Baltics.