Where's Your Soft Power And International Law Now?

The real world is not an academic exercise in so-called "human rights." It is divided into those who are willing to deploy power, and those who aren't; between those who possess the ability to use force, and those who don't or can't. Nicolás Maduro counted on the weakness of leaders like ours; he's now in a jail cell a continent away. The Iranian mullahs counted on the world's incapacity for bravery for four decades. As of this weekend, most of them are dead. Cuba's about to learn next you can't live next to an apex predator and expect your exiled victims to stay silent about what they want to happen to you.

Grey men in Whitehall who have never known danger draft statements. They choose their words with surgical precision; not to communicate, but to avoid committing to anything. They reach for phrases like "in accordance with international law" and "collective self-defence of longstanding friends and allies." They are paid well. They have been to good schools. They know exactly what they are doing.

Somewhere in Tehran, a sniper is aiming at a hospitalised protester's skull.

These two scenes are connected. The first makes the second possible.

The great lie of the post-war Western order is the feminised idea of "soft power." A term coined to dress up influence as something refined, something separate from the crude business of coercion. It is nothing of the sort. Every cultural export, every diplomatic handshake, every trade negotiation takes place in the shadow of aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and the capacity for devastating economic punishment. Remove the shadow and the influence evaporates like morning dew. What remains is a press release nobody reads, written by someone who will never experience the effects of hard power. Soft power is what a wife claims she has over her husband for use of the credit card.

This is not an argument for brutality. It is an observation so elementary it should not need making: the world is governed by force. It always has been. The question is not whether force exists, but whether the people charged with wielding it on behalf of civilisation possess the stomach to do so.

Britain's current governing class does not.

Covenants Without the Sword

Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 what remains the most concise statement of political reality ever committed to the English language:

Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.

Nearly four centuries later, the observation is treated as an exotic relic by people who should know better.

A court issues a judgment. If you refuse to comply, bailiffs arrive. If you resist the bailiffs, police arrive. If you resist the police, you are physically restrained and placed in a cell. Every piece of legislation, every parking fine, every contractual dispute rests on a chain of escalating coercion terminating in the physical power of the state. Max Weber defined the state itself by this principle — the monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory.

In "international law," there is no global sovereign. There is no world police force. There is no compulsory enforcement mechanism independent of the states being judged. The United Nations Security Council can pass resolutions until the paper runs out; if a major power refuses to comply, the resolution becomes a historical curiosity. The International Criminal Court issues warrants for leaders who will never be arrested. The International Court of Justice renders advisory opinions which are, by definition, advisory.

International law is not law in the same sense as domestic law. It is a set of conventions between sovereigns, observed when convenient, discarded when not. It is closer to the medieval agreements between rival princes than to the statutory framework governing a modern democracy. And yet an entire class of Western politicians and bureaucrats speaks of it as though it were sacred writ, self-executing, binding on all parties by the sheer force of its moral authority.

This is fantasy. It is dangerous fantasy. And over 36,000 Iranians are dead because of it.

The Fool's Ledger of Endless Blood

In January, the Islamic Republic of Iran massacred its own people on a scale the modern world has rarely witnessed. Leaked documents from the IRGC Intelligence Organisation, reported by Iran International, record over 36,500 killed in a two-day period on 8 and 9 January alone. Security forces deployed DShK heavy machine guns against unarmed crowds. Snipers targeted heads and hearts. Soldiers raided hospitals to execute the wounded in their beds. The regime imposed a near-total internet blackout to ensure the world saw as little as possible.

Before this, there was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, in which at least 551 people were killed according to Iran Human Rights, with other estimates ranging far higher. Before 2022, there were the 2019 protests in which somewhere between 300 and 1,500 died. Before 2019, there were the 2009 election protests, the systematic execution of political prisoners throughout the 1980s, and the 1988 massacre in which estimates of those killed range from 1,000 to 30,000.

The regime has been butchering its people for over four decades. And the international community's response, for the overwhelming majority of those decades, was: condemnation. Sanctions. Reports. Expressions of concern. Referrals to committees. Speeches at the General Assembly.

In short: words without the sword.

The condemnation did not stop the killing. The sanctions did not stop the nuclear programme. The reports did not stop the snipers. The General Assembly speeches did not stop the hangings. Nothing stopped it — until overwhelming military force arrived.

What Abolition Actually Looked Like

There is a comfortable myth, popular in lecture halls, which holds the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was a triumph of moral persuasion. William Wilberforce gave speeches. Parliament legislated. Enlightenment values prevailed.

The reality involved considerably more gunpowder.

After Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807, the Royal Navy was tasked with enforcing it. The West Africa Squadron was dispatched to patrol over three thousand miles of coastline and interdict slave vessels. At its peak in the 1840s and 1850s, the operation involved up to 36 vessels and more than 4,000 men, consuming an estimated half of all naval spending — between one and two per cent of total British government expenditure.

The Squadron boarded ships. Seized cargo. Engaged armed slavers in combat. HMS Black Joke, a captured Brazilian slaver repurposed by the Royal Navy, took eleven slavers in a single year. Between 1808 and 1860, the Squadron captured approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed around 150,000 Africans. Nearly 2,000 British sailors died in the effort, primarily from tropical disease.

Treaties followed cannon. Diplomatic agreements with Portugal, Spain, and eventually Brazil were secured not by gentle persuasion but by demonstrated willingness to use force on the high seas. When Brazil refused to cease trading, Lord Palmerston in 1850 simply ordered the Royal Navy into Brazilian territorial waters. The trade collapsed within two years.

Moral law existed on paper. Guns made it real.

This is not an incidental historical footnote. It is the foundational example of how civilised values are actually defended in a world populated by actors who do not share them. The abolitionists wrote the law. The Royal Navy enforced it. Without the ships, the legislation was a wish.

The Disastrous Chamberlain Model

History furnishes no shortage of leaders who confused paperwork for statecraft. But the archetype remains Neville Chamberlain, a man not stupid, not cowardly in the cartoonish sense, but catastrophically wrong about the nature of the threat he faced.

It doesn't matter your view on why Chamberlain did what he did, or whether he was doing it to buy time to re-arm.

Chamberlain believed Hitler could be contained, temporarily or otherwise, by agreement. He believed stability could be preserved through concession and diplomatic reassurance. He believed the horror of another European war was so overwhelming that almost any alternative was preferable. He returned from Munich with a piece of paper and declared peace for our time.

Hitler did not share the same moral universe. He was not operating within a framework of reciprocal obligation. He was operating within a worldview of territorial expansion enforced by armoured divisions. The piece of paper was irrelevant the moment it was signed.

And this is the catastrophic error modern revisionists make when they attempt to argue Hitler didn't want to invade England. They selectively omit the idea would lie.

Churchill understood this. Not because he was a warmonger — he had seen the trenches, he knew the cost — but because he recognised the categorical difference between an adversary who fears consequence and one who does not. Against the first, diplomacy works. Against the second, it is surrender by installment.

The lesson was supposed to be permanent. It lasted about a generation.

An Administrator in An Age of Predators

Keir Starmer's statements to the nation this week, regarding Iran's sustained missile attacks across the Gulf region, are documents worth preserving for historians. Not because of what they say, but because of what it reveals about the psychology of the man who said them.

The United Kingdom was not involved in the strikes on Iran.

There it is, the first instinct — distance. Not "we stand with our allies." Not "Britain does not flinch." The reflex is exculpation: we didn't do it. The instincts of a defence lawyer.

Our decision that the UK would not be involved with the strikes on Iran was deliberate.

He is proud of this. He is telling you he chose to stand aside while the United States and Israel struck at a regime responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of its own citizens.

The United States has requested permission to use British bases for that specific and limited defensive purpose. We have taken the decision to accept this request.

Passive. Bureaucratic. Reactive. The United States requested. Britain accepted. Even the granting of base access is framed as compliance rather than resolve.

We are not joining these strikes, but we will continue with our defensive actions in the region.

This is the line of a man who wants to be near the fight without being in it. It is the posture of someone standing at the edge of a bar brawl, holding coats.

I want to be very clear: we all remember the mistakes of Iraq. And we have learned those lessons.

The ghost of Iraq haunts every sentence. The trauma of 2003 has been metabolised into permanent institutional timidity. The lesson drawn was not "verify intelligence more carefully" or "plan the occupation before the invasion." The lesson drawn was: never act. Never decide. Never risk blame. Process everything. Qualify everything. Commit to nothing.

Compare this to his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, who declared in June 2025 international law goes "absolutely to the heart" of the government's foreign policy. Hermer — a man who, before his surprise appointment, had no political profile whatever other than being a committed "antifascist" for Searchlight magazine — told the BBC with evident pride Britain succeeds because:

we comply, and we're seen to comply and indeed lead on international law issues.

He boasted that the government's legal credibility had enabled trade deals with the US, India, and the EU. He was more vicious with Southport protesters than the murderers of Tehran.

One wonders how Hermer's legal credibility doctrine reads in Tehran. One wonders whether the (now former) IRGC, tabulating 36,500 dead protesters, paused to admire Britain's compliance record.

Geopolitics Is Not Litigation

The fundamental error is categorical. It treats international relations as though they were a court proceeding. The lawyer's instinct (what is permissible under existing rules?) replaces the statesman's instinct: what preserves the realm?

Edmund Burke called prudence the first political virtue. He did not mean caution. He meant the capacity to perceive what is actually happening and act accordingly, rather than retreating into abstract principle when the house is on fire.

A Prime Minister is not a judge. He is the executive guardian of the state. Judges interpret rules after the fact. Statesmen confront enemies in real time. When the executive behaves like a barrister awaiting permission from supranational bodies, power drains elsewhere.

And it has. Consider Chagos. The government's proposed surrender of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (at a reported cost of £35 billion over 99 years to lease back Britain's own military base) has generated cascading consequences. The Maldives has now formally objected, launched legal challenges, and revoked recognition of Mauritian sovereignty over the archipelago. Mauritius has suspended diplomatic relations with the Maldives. Four Chagossians who returned to their homeland face eviction by the very government claiming to champion human rights. Donald Trump called the deal "an act of great stupidity" and "total weakness." An injunction has blocked the removal of the returnees. Indigenous Chagossians are now accusing the Prime Minister of crimes against humanity.

This is what happens when a government treats sovereignty, as The Restorationist puts it, a legal compliance exercise rather than a strategic asset. Every concession invites another claim. Every gesture of procedural piety invites another litigant. The lawyer's reflex (settle, compromise, comply) produces not stability but chaos, because it signals to every watching power a willingness to be pushed.

The Broader Spectrum of Coercion

Force does not mean only missiles. This is where the analysis must widen beyond the military. The threat of force underlies every human transaction in the history of our species.

Tariffs are economic coercion. When the United States imposes them, they reshape entire industries overnight. Sanctions are financial coercion. When the dollar system freezes an adversary's assets, it is exercising the monetary equivalent of a naval blockade. Intelligence disclosures — the release of documents, the exposure of networks — are reputational coercion, altering the political survival calculus of leaders who believed their secrets were safe.

All of these are instruments of hard power in the broader Foucauldian sense: power as relational, not merely kinetic. The United States wields dollar dominance, global surveillance infrastructure, control of sea lanes, air superiority, technological chokepoints, and now the demonstrated willingness to use all of them in concert.

Against this reality, what does "soft power" offer? Cultural prestige? Diplomatic reputation? A seat on committees? These things function only because the actor wielding them possesses the harder instruments underneath. Hollywood matters because aircraft carriers exist. The City of London matters because Britain sits in the nuclear club. Trade negotiations proceed smoothly because both parties know the cost of defection.

Soft power divorced from hard power is a smile without teeth. It is the polite request of someone with no recourse if refused. It is, in the diplomatic context, the language of the powerless describing their powerlessness as strategy.

The Decay Cycle We Need To Break

Britain's current predicament is not the failure of a single leader. It is the product of decades of compounding institutional drift.

The mechanism is straightforward. As the governing class became increasingly managerial (drawn from law, policy think tanks, party staffing, and media) it lost its institutional memory of what power actually requires. Political pathways began selecting for risk minimisation, media fluency, procedural caution, and legal defensibility rather than strategic nerve, executive courage, or the willingness to bear moral responsibility for irreversible decisions.

As temperament shifted, spending priorities followed. UK defence expenditure fell from 7.6 per cent of GDP in the mid-1950s to 1.8 per cent between 2016 and 2019. Real-terms spending fell 22 per cent between 2009 and 2017 alone. The current figure sits at around 2.3 per cent. Plans exist to reach 2.5 per cent by 2027 and aspirations float as high as 3.5 per cent by 2035, but aspirations are not ships, and plans are not ammunition stocks.

Plans to reach 2.5%. It's just embarrassing.

As capacity declined, caution deepened. Leaders who lack the tools for decisive action become even more risk-averse, because the consequences of failure with diminished resources are disproportionately severe. This selects for still more cautious successors, who further deprioritise the instruments of power, which further constrains the next generation of leaders.

The feedback loop is self-reinforcing. Temperament erodes capacity. Diminished capacity entrenches timidity. Timidity selects for managers. Managers further erode capacity. By the time a Churchill arrives — if one ever does — there is nothing left to wield.

Right Without Might Will Be Extinguished

There are moments in history when the refusal to wield power is not moral restraint but moral abdication. Churchill understood this. He did not celebrate war. He endured it, because the alternative (a continent under totalitarianism) was worse than the terrible cost of resistance. His courage was not the absence of fear. It was the willingness to risk everything for a cause he judged worth the price.

The British strategic tradition at its best combined moral conviction with operational ruthlessness. The same Parliament which debated abolition funded the warships to enforce it. The same nation which valued international order maintained the world's dominant navy to guarantee it. Moral language and physical power were not opposites. They were partners. The words gave legitimacy to the force; the force gave reality to the words.

What we have now is words without force. Moral language deployed as camouflage for inaction. Procedural rectitude substituted for strategic decision. Legal compliance elevated above the survival of those the law was supposed to protect.

Over 36,000 Iranian men, women, and children were massacred in two days by a regime that international law was supposed to restrain. Security forces used heavy machine guns on crowds. Soldiers executed wounded protesters in hospital beds. Families were pressured into silent burials. The internet was cut so the world would not see.

And Britain's response, from a government that places international law at "the heart" of its foreign policy, was to make absolutely clear, before anything else, that "the United Kingdom was not involved."As well to equivocate over "international law" while women and children were being killed, in case the UN and our "Arab partners" might be upset.

Law without enforcement is theatre. Enforcement without law is tyranny. Civilisation survives only when power defends principle.

The question for Britain is no longer whether this is true. The question is whether anyone with the authority to act still believes it. Whether somewhere in the corridors of power there remains a single person who understands what the Royal Navy understood two centuries ago on the coast of West Africa: moral conviction backed by nothing is a prayer. Moral conviction backed by force is history.

The gun is in the room. It has always been in the room. The only question is whose hand is on it. Welcome to reality, Whitehall.