We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination. They remain prisoners of Modernity and captive to Western ideologies — fundamentally “ressentimental” and reactive.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.