(We reproduce below an article from the Times of India dated 27 June 2025 by Rashmee Roshan Lall. The writeup brings up the present worrying spectacle of how mighty regimes ensure even in the present day that their writ runs wherever they like in whatever manner they choose without caring the least for international law, ethics and humanity. Their penchant for waging war resulting in indiscriminate killing of civilians including women and children is alarming and leads to self-doubt as to how we can call ourselves civilised. It is dangerous and sad that we are dropping down the precipice so fast and, even worse is the fact that, as the article rightly points out, no one seems to care. The TOI also ran a series of articles on evaluation of the irreparable damage that the present wars wreak to the world order in social, economic and other spheres. Everyone must do his bit urgently to rectify the terrible situation. We from Sanatana Dharma have certainly a solid responsibility and role to play. – Editor)
‘Someone recently likened the current condition of our bombed and bloodied world to the ‘Warring States period’, a centuries-long era in ancient China that was marked by the brutal logic of zero-sum politics and unremitting violence.
The term may be an eminently good fit. “Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win,” Margaret Atwood wrote 30 years ago, in her bleak, beautiful poem ‘The Loneliness of the Military Historian’. It serves as a platitude in free verse for the political order in the painful process of being birthed today, one in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Today, we live as if suspended in the imaginative aspic of that Atwood poem.
On June 21, celebrated in the northern hemisphere as summer solstice, Trump dispatched B-2 bombers from Missouri to drop over a dozen 30,000-pound bunker-busters on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the most direct and consequential US military action against Iran since its founding. Unlike George ‘Dubya’ Bush planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Trump didn’t even bother to seek UN authorisation for this use of force. Dubya didn’t get UN’s green light, but went ahead anyway, his Iraq invasion eventually left about half a million dead. Trump didn’t even care to try. The distance between the two events is greater than the arches of the years.
Though Trump revels in his strongman image, he appears to have merely followed in the wake of Netanyahu’s military campaign against Iran, assassinating its generals and scientists at will and killing hundreds of civilians on Iran’s streets.
This display of US and Israeli impunity with respect to a sovereign country is of a piece with Russia’s Feb 2022 unprovoked war on Ukraine as well as Israel’s 20-month collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. Both conflicts still continue, tragic in their scale of human suffering and destruction.
So, yes, we are in the 21st century’s warring state- period, an historical era distinct from the relative stability of the previous three decades. How long will it last? Can it last? It’s complicated. What distinguishes all of these acts of aggression is their casual, even blithe defiance of international law.
– Military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities are explicitly prohibited under Article 56 of the additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions because of the danger of nuclear contamination. Israel cast its military assault on Iran as pre-emptive – a permissible form of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter so long as the threat was imminent – but there was no evidence of this.
-Even if Iran were making a bomb, international law doesn’t give any country the right to attack the other citing self-belief.
-Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine violates a central tenet of the UN Charter that requires member states to refrain from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.
Though Russia categorises its invasion as a special military operation in line with the UN Charter’s right to self-defence, Ukraine did not commit or threaten to commit an armed attack against it.
-Finally, Gaza’s plight is addressed by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use of starvation as a method of warfare in international armed conflicts. But it isn’t even the naked aggression on display during this new warring states period that is so shocking as the lack of international reaction to it.
Very few countries have spoken up about the justice or injustice of Israel and America’s attack on Iran. It was left to Chile’s millennial left-wing president Gabriel Boric to call out the US action in the strongest terms. He noted that “having power does not authorise you to use it in violation of the rules that we as humanity have given ourselves. Even if you are the United States.”
Mostly, the world has stayed silent about the sanctity of nation states’ borders. Once, borders were considered sacrosanct and states regarded as sovereign entities, to be dealt with using channels such as diplomacy and treaties. Time was when countries behaving badly either faced punitive economic sanctions or were expelled from their preferred regional club. Pakistan is a case in point, having been ejected from the Commonwealth twice. But a country in violation of club rules wasn’t attacked with military force and threatened with annihilation and regime change.
As things stand, the rules-based international order is eroding so fast that future conflicts could become even more unpredictable. Countries powerful in themselves or that draw strength from their sponsors could launch offensive strikes on the pretext of pre-empting real or imagined threats. And everyone would be less secure.
The closing lines of Atwood’s poem on the female military historian’s perspective may be a fitting epitaph. Or a prelude?
‘I deal in tactics. / Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred/ years of war.’’’