With the USA’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities on 22 June 2025 (and I specify the date, because Trump is actively threatening further attacks), the USA not only violated UN Charter Article 2 (“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”), but at the same time, Article 56 of Additional Protocol I (1977) of the Geneva Convention. Given this legalistic reality, we now find ourselves in a global context in which 2 of the UN Security Council’s 5 Permanent Members (the ‘P5’), are actively involved in attacks on sovereign States: in violation of the very same UN Charter the P5 was entrusted with a ‘Primary Responsibility’ to defend. If we add to this China’s widely acknowledged material support for Russia’s ongoing occupation and annexation of Ukraine, we quickly arrive at 3/P5.

But let’s not stop there. With the United Kingdom, France and Germany (the ‘E3’) in the past week able to doublethink little more than “Israel has a right to defend itself” – by attacking any state(s) of its choosing, at any time of its choosing (although ideally no more than a few days before any planned international conferences on the taboo of Palestinian Self-Determination) in violation of Charter Article 2 – and we quickly arrive at 5/P5 Members now standing in either active or passive contempt of the UN Charter. Consequently, the E3’s moral euthanasia over the past week – from which we cannot separate the EU’s ongoing willingness to offer preferential trading terms to genocidal states – not only represents the collapse of the P5’s last moral bastion, but the death of the UN Security Council as an idea.

In April 1946, the British statesman and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Robert Cecil, delivered his eulogy at the laying to death of the ‘League of Nations’ (the United Nations v1.0) in Geneva:

Let us boldly state that aggression wherever it occurs and however it may be defended, is an international crime, that it is the duty of every peace-loving state to resent it and employ whatever force is necessary to crush it, … that the machinery of the [UN] Charter, no less than the machinery of the [League] Covenant, is sufficient for this purpose if properly used… The League is dead. Long live the United Nations.

Whilst it is manifestly provable that the UN Security Council (UNSC) is now also clinically dead, most fortunately, this is not the same as declaring that the UN as a whole is dead: Long live the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

To be fair, the E3 did make another statement in the past week: yet again without making any reference to the illegality of the attacks by Israel and the USA, against Iran. They declared that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, and can no longer pose a threat to regional security”. This was very interesting, because the E3 have never argued in the past that Iran does not have a legal right to enrich uranium under the 1970 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which it is party, and yet when those same enrichment facilities are bombed by Israel – a known nuclear power that is not signatory to the NPT – E3 doublethink instead informs us that we need “to ensure that Iran never obtains or acquires a nuclear weapon”: Israel’s nuclear weapons conversely being in very safe hands, despite having already been activated for use during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, thereby blackmailing the USA into providing Israel with any-and-all desired support (and given Trump’s only recently-discovered willingness to drop the USA’s extra-large – conventional – bombs on Iran, in a very rapid U-turn, quite possibly a second time since).

It should therefore surprise no-one that Iran has just initiated steps to withdraw from the NPT, leading to an immediate end to what the USA’s (dissociative) Secretary of State has since referred to as “the IAEA’s critical verification and monitoring efforts in Iran”, as well as a situation in which Western intelligence agencies no longer know where Iran’s 400kg of – already – highly-enriched uranium is located. There are additionally enough centrifuges currently missing for Iran to re-launch, only “in a matter of months, … a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that” timeframe.

If that doesn’t already sound like an atomic own goal, there is another pesky little detail that I have not once heard mentioned in the past 20 years, with regards to Iran’s desire to “Wipe Israel off the map”: Iran – unlike Israel – cannot possibly ‘drop the bomb’ (and not only because of the Supreme Leader’s fatwa against doing so). Israel, you may or may not be aware, has a population that is 21% ethnic-Palestinian. Were Iran ever to drop a nuclear device on the State of Israel, 1-in-5 people killed would be Muslim: assuming that the nuclear fallout stops precisely at each of Israel’s borders, and doesn’t move on to kill scores of others in the adjoining Muslim states. What’s more, the ‘Al-Aqsa Mosque’ in the Old City of (East) Jerusalem – the second-oldest mosque in Islam – represents one of the holiest sites on the planet for both Sunni and Shia: not exactly where you’d expect an Islamic theocracy to detonate a nuclear weapon?

This leads us to only one rational conclusion: IF Iran had indeed decided that it needed nukes (and that may well be the case), they were never wanted in order to attack Israel, but instead to dissuade attacks against Iran by – the far more powerful – P5 rogue states. Although some are likely to consider this conclusion ludicrous, let’s not forget that in 1994 Ukraine signed up to the ‘Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances’ – alongside 3 Members of the P5 – and agreed to surrender its own nuclear weapons stockpiles, in exchange for the iron-clad ‘Security Assurances’ offered by those 3 UNSC Members: the USA, the UK and Russia. As you are no doubt aware, attacked by one of those very same P5 Members in 2014, Ukraine had found itself completely unable to deter the attack. As you are also well aware, Iran was bombed by a different P5 Member in the past week – without authorization from the UNSC – for its violation of no legally-binding obligation whatsoever: instead owing to its hell-bent desire to “Wipe Israel off the map”.

IF Iran did indeed make a decision in the past to acquire nuclear weapons, in hindsight – and despite nukes being precisely what has kept North Korea unscathed, and what would likely have seen Ukraine untouched – it now seems that this was a bad choice in the example of Iran; although it was probably the only choice the Iranians felt they had, absent a comprehensively reformed UN Security Council that would actually defend it from – ALL – illegal foreign attacks. Most fortunately, the ‘Less-Developed World’ – representing 2/3 of the global population even once we exclude both China and Russia – has a second option: Disband the UN Security Council.

Given the UNSC’s ongoing seizure, the only hope the ‘Less-Developed World’ (to use official UN language) has to defend itself against the reawakening colonial ambitions of the P5, is to stand together in (rules-based) formation, at the UN General Assembly: where there is no such concept as a ‘power of veto’ (owing in large part to the Charter stipulation that “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members”). Even more fortunately, with the adoption of the UNGA’s “Uniting for Peace” resolution on 3 November 1950 – at the behest of the USA, the UK, France and China (4/P5) – the Charter interpretations thereby enshrined in law made explicit that the UNGA has absolutely all of the same powers as the UNSC under the UN Charter: whenever the UNSC is not fulfilling its ‘Primary Responsibility’ for International Peace and Security, owing to a lack of agreement amongst the P5 (for any sceptics, please consider the precedent set by UNGA resolution 1000 of 5 November 1956). Given this, the UNGA must now fully assume its ‘Final Responsibility’ for International Peace and Security, under the UN Charter: the UNSC having failed to assume its ‘Primary Responsibility’ for the same. All peace-loving UN member states must disavow themselves of the UNSC, and not countenance any discussion on its future restoration, until such a time as the P5 agree to ‘comprehensive reform’: meaning, they agree to an end to the (so-called) ‘power of veto’ in the UNSC, and a switch to ‘weighted voting’ (because might is not always right, but it always matters).

Should peace-loving and/or realpolitik UN member states elect to save the UN – by saving the UNGA – they can only do so by immediately adopting a new UNGA resolution declaring the recent attacks against Iran – that likewise went far beyond its nuclear facilities – to be violations of the UN Charter, and therefore contrary to international law and our (tumour-ridden) rules-based legal order. They should also vote on a separate resolution that revokes the earlier UNGA resolution 273 of 11 May 1949, which – under pressure from the USA – judged that “Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations”: thereby authorizing Israel’s membership in the UN, which can only be enacted with the UNGA’s consent. Once resolution 273 has been successfully revoked by the UNGA, a third resolution will be required to call for a ‘Judgement’ (let’s please stop wasting everyone’s time with non-binding ‘Advisory Opinions’) by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on Israel’s continued participation in the UN, given as it is that under the UN Charter, Membership is open only to “peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter”. The outcome of this ICJ Judgement should be considered at least as significant for Israel, as for Russia and the USA.

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