Your reflection reaches beyond commentary and into the deeper grammar of political realism — that austere tradition once known, without embarrassment, as Realpolitik. To place figures such as Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, or Keir Starmer alongside the architects of the mid-twentieth century order is not merely to invite comparison; it is to expose a civilisational shift in how power is understood, exercised, and, perhaps most tellingly, justified.
For the world order we continue, however precariously, to inhabit was not conceived in abstraction. It did not emerge from seminars, nor from the careful moral calibrations of legal doctrine. It was forged in extremis — amid ruins, under the shadow of annihilation, and in the presence of men for whom history was neither metaphor nor memory, but immediate burden.
When Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met at Yalta and Tehran, they did not deliberate upon ideals so much as upon realities: spheres of influence, the redrawing of borders, the arithmetic of force. International law, in their hands, was not an ethical aspiration but a stabilising instrument — a means of containing the aftershocks of catastrophe. Likewise, in the later decades, figures such as de Gaulle or Kennedy navigated a world in which sovereignty was not a rhetorical flourish but a measurable capacity: the ability to command nuclear force and, crucially, to refuse submission even to allies.
In that earlier epoch, law derived its authority from power, and its purpose from fear — above all, the fear of total war. It was less a universal code than a pact of survival, grounded in the recognition of facts on the ground and the balance that sustained them.
It is precisely here that the dissonance with the present becomes most acute.
Contemporary Western leaders speak readily of a “rules-based order”, invoking a language that aspires to universality but is heard, beyond the West, with increasing scepticism. To states such as Iran, Russia, or China, this vocabulary often appears less as a neutral framework than as a rhetorical instrument — a means by which particular interests are elevated to the status of general principles.
The friction is not merely semantic; it is structural. Where earlier generations understood law as the outcome of equilibrium, many of today’s European leaders — Ursula von der Leyen among them — tend to approach it as an extension of normative commitments: human rights, procedural fairness, the dignity of the individual. These are not trivial achievements. Yet detached from the conditions that once underwrote them, they risk acquiring an air of abstraction that invites challenge.
Critics — and your argument places you firmly within this lineage — suggest that something more fundamental has been lost. The absence of lived experience of total war has altered the temperament of leadership itself. Diplomacy, once tempered by existential risk, is now frequently perceived as managerial, even declaratory: rich in language, poorer in consequence.
Your metaphor — contrasting the rights of “wolves and dogs” with the brutal contest over strategic waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz — is deliberately jarring. It points to a perceived inversion of priorities, in which public discourse fragments into morally charged yet strategically peripheral concerns, while the underlying structure of power politics reasserts itself with little regard for such refinements.
It is against this backdrop that the remarks of Esmaeil Baqaei acquire their full resonance. They are not simply polemical; they articulate a broader indictment, one increasingly echoed across what is often termed the Global South: that international law has ceased to function as an impartial arbiter and has instead become selectively applied — a repertoire from which powerful actors draw as convenience dictates.
The charge is threefold. First, that enforcement is inconsistent: that principles such as freedom of navigation are invoked with vigour where Western interests are engaged, and with hesitation where they are not. Second, that allies are treated with indulgence, while adversaries are disciplined in the name of legality. Third, that instruments such as economic sanctions, presented as lawful pressure, are experienced by those subjected to them as forms of collective punishment — indistinguishable, in effect, from economic warfare.
Whether one accepts this indictment in full is, in a sense, secondary. What matters is that it is believed — and increasingly so. For belief, in international politics, has consequences no less tangible than force.
We thus arrive at a curious inversion. The rhetoric of law persists, yet its authority erodes; the language of universality expands, even as its reception narrows. What emerges is not a stable order, but a bifurcated one: on one side, a West committed to sustaining the narrative of rules; on the other, a constellation of powers insisting that rules, absent enforceable symmetry, are merely instruments of hierarchy.
The result is paralysis masquerading as procedure. Strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz cease to be governed spaces and become instead theatres of leverage. Institutions designed to mediate conflict drift towards performative arenas, where positions are declared rather than reconciled.
In such a setting, your central thesis acquires a certain severity: that international law, deprived of the credible force that once sustained it, risks becoming not a framework for order but a vocabulary for contest.
The contrast with the mid-century statesmen is instructive, and perhaps uncomfortable. When Churchill or de Gaulle entered negotiation, they did so with a clear understanding that the stakes were existential. Their language, however elevated, was anchored in that reality. By comparison, the contemporary “war of statements” — conducted across digital platforms and amplified through the cycles of instantaneous communication — suggests a dilution not only of gravity, but of consequence.
Your blog entry, read in this light, functions less as commentary than as admonition. It reminds the reader that the system within which Europe continues to operate — though increasingly strained — was not constructed upon the sensibilities of moral progress alone, but upon the memory of devastation and the discipline it imposed.
Three lines of argument emerge with particular clarity.
First, the distinction between genesis and interpretation: between a legal order born of “tears, sweat, and blood”, and one now articulated in the language of normative reassurance. The former was forged under compulsion; the latter is often expressed under conditions of relative safety.
Second, the tension between natural limits and moral expansion. The widening catalogue of rights, however admirable in isolation, risks appearing disproportionate when set against the re-emergence of elemental struggles over territory, resources, and strategic access. The charge, put starkly, is not of error but of misalignment — a politics increasingly preoccupied with refinement while its foundations are contested.
Third, the question of power itself. Principles, absent the means of their enforcement, tend to invite testing. When leaders invoke law without the capacity — or willingness — to sustain it under pressure, they do not strengthen its authority; they expose its fragility.
The conclusion that follows is not a comfortable one. It suggests that we may be returning, not rhetorically but structurally, to a condition in which legal arguments derive their weight less from their intrinsic merit than from the power that stands behind them.
In that sense, Baqaei’s intervention is not merely a gesture of defiance. It is, more pointedly, an act of exposure. It reveals a widening gap between the language in which the contemporary order describes itself and the realities by which it is increasingly judged.
Europe, in your account, stands at a moment of quiet but consequential reckoning — a moment in which it must decide whether it remains the heir to a system forged in necessity, or merely its custodian in decline.
/English transposition from the Polish original — executed, with due restraint, by ChatGPT AI./
