There was a time—not so very long ago—when world leaders felt obliged to lie to us.

They didn’t always lie convincingly, but they went through the motions. When they violated international law, their lawyers produced lengthymemos explaining why, if you squinted just right, apparent violations weren’t actual violations. When they invaded other sovereign states, they invoked the U.N. Charter’s right to self-defense. When civilians were killed, they expressedregret and pledged to investigate. When they tortured detainees, they justified it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” States frequently ignored international law, but they took pains not to dismiss it outright.

These days, major powers often dispense with the performance of adhering to international law altogether. In January, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, distilled the Trumpian view of the world: It’s a world “that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” A few days later, President Donald Trump drove home the point: The only check on his power, he told the New York Times, was his own morality: “It’s the only thing that can stop me. … I don’t need international law.” Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin declared last year that “no one is ready to play by rules set by someone far away”—certainly not Russia, when it comes to fulfilling the Motherland’s “destiny” or completing the task of “gathering the Russian lands.” Even China, usually more nuanced, has been abandoning the pretense that international law serves as a restraint. Reunification with Taiwan “cannot be stopped by any force or anyone,” President Xi Jinping declared in 2019. Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year derided an adverse decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration as “nothing but a piece of waste paper.”

The old vocabulary of international law, with its invocations of universal values, now sounds antique. For all intents and purposes, international law is dead. Like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, international legal institutions continue their frenzied activity, but no one expects them to matter.

But if international law is dead, who killed it? Was it Putin in Ukraine, with his talk of Russian destiny? Or Xi in the South China Sea, with his artificial islands? Or was the killer Trump, with his tariffs, his threats, and his war on Iran?

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In truth, the story of international law’s demise looks less like a game of Clue than the plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: Everyone did it, and the victim mostly deserved it. It’s tempting to pin the murder on Putin and Trump, but international law has been mortally wounded for decades—and many who claimed to be its greatest supporters struck some of the most devastating blows. By the time Putin and Trump plunged in the final daggers, international law had become so riddled with internal contradictions that it had, in some sense, invited its fate.

Modern international law traces its roots to thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, who envisioned natural law-derived rules governing war and sovereignty that would transcend kingdoms and faiths. As it matured, international law did at times function to restrain state violence, but just as often, it legitimized state violence, rationalized imperialist conquest, and excluded colonized peoples from the “civilized” community it purported to govern.

After the Holocaust and the stunning carnage of two world wars, the international lawmaking enterprise acquired unprecedented urgency, idealism, and ambition. The U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions all represented, in effect, a wager that sovereign states would trade a degree of freedom for greater security and embrace a vision of a more just and equitable world.

And it worked—almost. For a while. The second half of the 20th century saw a sharp decline in interstate armed conflicts. After a period of Cold War paralysis, the events of the 1990s briefly seemed to vindicate that daring postwar wager: The U.N. Security Council authorized peacekeeping missions, created international criminal tribunals to hold officials accountable for genocide and war crimes, and launched ambitious efforts to grapple with poverty, climate change, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.

But the rapid expansion of international law and institutions had unintended consequences, supercharging the system’s internal contradictions—particularly the profound disconnect between international law’s commitment to state sovereignty and its commitment to fundamental human rights. Taking sovereignty seriously meant states could not intervene in one another’s internal affairs. Taking human rights seriously meant that such interventions might sometimes be required. As it evolved, the domain of international law became simultaneously vaster and less coherent, giving opportunistic actors ample room to exploit ambiguities and enforcement gaps while still gesturing toward compliance.

A certain amount of hypocrisy became accepted as part of the system. The Cold War powers were prodigious hypocrites: The Soviet Union crushed workers’ uprisings in Hungary while insisting it was liberating the working class; the United States devastated Vietnam while insisting it was defending freedom. When the Cold War ended, the hypocrisy accelerated. In 1999, NATO intervened militarily in Kosovo, then a semi-autonomous province of Serbia, on urgent humanitarian grounds, although most commentators agreed there was no legal basis for the intervention inside another state’s sovereign territory. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo later judged the intervention “illegal but legitimate”—but once legality and legitimacy were disaggregated, the door was left wide open for an ever-expanding number of “extralegal” moves.

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In 2008, when Western powers—despite prior diplomatic assurances that Serbia’s territorial integrity would be respected—recognized Kosovo as an independent state, Putin didn’t let this bit of Western hypocrisy pass without comment. He called it a “terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations.” The Western states that recognized Kosovar independence had “not thought through the results” of their actions, he warned: “At the end of the day, it is a two-ended stick, and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.” He was looking forward to wielding that stick himself.

The United States ignored this, and the hypocrisy continued. The Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attacks by weaponizing legal indeterminacy: Its lawyers argued that torture wasn’t torture, indefinite detention was compatible with due process, and invading Iraq was consistent with the U.N. Charter. At the same time, human rights and humanitarian actors began to argue for a creative new understanding of sovereignty, arguing that the “responsibility to protect,” or R2P, sometimes required states to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Structurally, this argument paralleled those made by apologists for the Bush administration. Officials asserted that if a state would or could not prevent its territory from becoming a staging ground for terrorists, other states had a right to use military force inside that state’s borders to prevent those terrorists from exporting violence. Advocates for R2P argued that if a state would or could not protect its own population from harm, other states had—at least in extreme circumstances—a right to use military force inside that state’s borders to protect the population.

The Obama administration repudiated many of its predecessor’s legal positions but embraced much of its logic when it came to drone strikes and other targeted killings. The administration also embraced R2P, relying on the doctrine to urge the U.N. Security Council in 2011 to authorize a humanitarian intervention in Libya’s civil war. Russia’s and China’s abstentions during the Security Council vote were initially greeted by many as a positivedevelopment for international law. In retrospect, Putin was simply sharpening the two-ended stick—and China was taking notes.

By 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Putin was ready to deploy the other end of the stick. He acknowledged that the United States and other Western states “say we are violating norms of international law” by annexing part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory but added: “What exactly are we violating?” The Kosovo precedent—in which Western powers trampled on Serbian sovereignty by recognizing Kosovar independence—was one “our Western colleagues created with their own hands.” Fast-forward to 2022: To justify Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a still more blatant act of illegality, Putin again cited Western recognition of Kosovar independence to justify Russia’s recognition of so-called breakaway republics from Ukraine—and supplemented this by invoking humanitarian intervention to protect Russian speakers and claiming preemptive self-defense against NATO expansion.

China, meanwhile, was wrapping its baseless maritime claims in the South China Sea in the dense jargon of historical rights and administrative jurisdiction—and responding to U.S. criticism by noting, in 2016, that the United States is “always selective … citing international law when it sees fit and discarding international law when it sees otherwise.”

The hypocrisy endemic to the international legal order wasn’t immediately fatal. In a system rife with unresolvable contradictions, some degree of hypocrisy arguably served as a necessary pressure release valve. And by taking the trouble to lie, hypocrites may paradoxically reinforce the power of the norms they are violating: As La Rochefoucauld famously observed, “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

A virtuous legal system can survive a certain amount of vice. What it cannot survive is the wholesale withdrawal of homage. When hypocrisy spreads too far, becoming the norm rather than the exception, the law ceases to be viewed as legitimate—and when that happens, actors stop taking the trouble to be hypocritical. Call it the Tinkerbell Theory of Law: When states no longer even pretend to believe in international law, it dies.

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So who killed international law? All the passengers on the International Express. The U.S. security state hollowed it out; liberal internationalists overextended it and generated a sovereigntist backlash, one with genuine democratic force. International lawyers spoke more to one another than to global publics. The Security Council immunized its permanent members. The global south, tired of an international legal system that encoded colonial hierarchy while preaching universalism, withheld the political support that might have saved it. Russia struck obvious blows, while China focused on patient subversion. And under Trump, the United States—once the proudest supporter of the rules-based international order—contemptuously rejects the idea of being bound by any law at all.

At the end of Murder on the Orient Express, detective Hercule Poirot allows the multiple killers to go free. After all, the victim had it coming. And at least to some extent, the same could be said of the international legal order.

Still, it would be a mistake to celebrate its demise. As a domain for moral reasoning about politics, international law was always imperfect. But it gave us a shared language, a discursive terrain in which states understood they had to operate. However arbitrary or biased its rules, it offered a mechanism for resolving conflicts and reducing unpredictability in an otherwise anarchic world. The need to make arguments using the normative grammar of international law—even insincere arguments—constrained state behavior at the margins. International law offered focal points that reduced unpredictability, making states’ behavior more legible and crises more containable.

The demise of international law isn’t a moral loss; it’s a structural catastrophe. And it comes at precisely the moment when the collective action problems we face urgently require the coordination mechanisms we are losing.

We may even come to miss the hypocrisy and the lies, for a reversion to the Hobbesian “warre of alle against alle” won’t usher in a better or more honest global order—just a more brutal one.