aggression still – A new book argues that after World War II’s landmark Nuremberg trials, the international justice system retreated from holding leaders criminally responsible for launching wars—leaving aggression largely outside enforceable accountability even as atrocities co
When World War I ended, the Allies wanted Kaiser Wilhelm II in the dock.. The problem was simple and brutal: he had fled to the Netherlands. taking 59 train cars of luggage with him—and the country refused to extradite him.. The Kaiser died in 1941 under German occupation, still an admirer of Nazi policies.
It is against that memory of justice going nowhere that Lawrence Douglas returns in his new book. *The Criminal State: War. Atrocity. and the Dream of International Justice* (Princeton University Press. 456 pp.. $35. April 2026).. Douglas. a scholar who weaves philosophy. history. and law. says the post–World War II drive to punish aggression was born with ambition—but then steadily lost its nerve.
At Nuremberg in 1946, the Allies convicted 19 Nazi leaders at the International Military Tribunal.. Douglas argues the tribunal’s real departure was not just punishment for atrocities tied to Nazi rule. but the audacity of putting war itself on trial.. “Any resort to war—to any kind of war—is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. ” Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said in his opening address as the United States’ chief prosecutor.. Those words marked an unprecedented break with centuries of international law by treating aggressive war as the paradigmatic international crime.
Yet Douglas portrays Nuremberg as both a revolution and the start of its own fade-out.. He writes the trials “marked both the triumph and the eclipse of the aggression paradigm. ” and the reason was stark: the Allies were divided over what “aggression” meant.. They chose not to define it.. With no settled definition. Douglas argues. the tribunal effectively ran on the instinctive standard of “I know it when I see it.”
The political disputes that plagued the Kaiser’s time didn’t disappear.. Douglas describes how the Allies. fearful of German nationalist backlash. tried many war crimes cases in Leipzig rather than at an international tribunal abroad.. The result was “an unmitigated disaster,” with only eight low-ranking soldiers convicted and sentences that were light or quickly commuted.. The most notorious outcome came when a secret military police officer accused of torturing and assaulting young Belgian boys was acquitted.. Douglas adds that the trials did little to stop backlash—Hitler and Hermann Göring first met at a nationalist rally against the Leipzig proceedings.
For those who wanted the Kaiser himself prosecuted. the obstacles were even sharper: squabbles over what to charge him with. and a reluctance to turn war-making—the “precious right of states”—into an international crime.. In the Ottoman Empire. where at least a million lives were claimed in the Armenian genocide. the legal posture wasn’t much better.. British jurists were more emboldened to criticize the Ottoman state’s treatment of its own citizens because the Western powers viewed the empire as a “semi-barbarous” state. yet Britain ultimately released 118 Turks. many high-level perpetrators of genocide. from its prisons.
Douglas argues this is how a pattern formed: international justice could expand when atrocities were already undeniable, but it pulled back when leaders might be held criminally responsible for choosing war.
In the years after Nuremberg, atrocity trials did multiply.. Other prosecutions of Nazi figures. including Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and Klaus Barbie—the “Butcher of Lyon”—in France. created space for victim testimony and helped anchor the Holocaust as the ultimate crime of the Nazi Verbrecherstaat. a criminal state whose criminality. Douglas writes. lay not only in extrajudicial abuses but in using law itself to subjugate and exterminate.
Still. Douglas also stresses the practical strain of delayed and distant justice: trials often take place far from the people affected. are regularly thwarted by underfunding and delays. and can become grotesquely late.. He invokes Irmgard Furchner. a former underage concentration camp worker tried in juvenile court in her 90s. to show what deferred justice can look like.
But the hardest gap remained the one Nuremberg tried to close: when is an act of war itself criminal?
Douglas points to the rise of what he calls an “atrocity paradigm.” In his telling. the legal system became increasingly emboldened—at least theoretically—to tackle genocide. crimes against humanity. and war crimes.. Yet it largely avoided the question of criminal responsibility for aggressive warfare. which Douglas argues often enables atrocities in the first place.. The result. he says. is a system that can document suffering and convict perpetrators while leaving the choice to start the conflict oddly out of reach.
The word “aggression” itself also proved politically explosive.. Douglas notes that even though aggression was enshrined as a violation of the U.N.. Charter in 1945, states could not agree on a criminal definition until 2010.. He adds that in 1956. Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula with French and British backing. while Soviet troops crushed a nascent uprising in Hungary—and the United Nations Security Council could not agree to condemn either action.. “Aggression and self-defense very much remained in the eye of the beholder,” Douglas writes.
For Washington, Douglas’s argument lands like a warning shot.. He describes the Trump administration as a “return to the pre-Nuremberg order. ” with airstrikes against eight countries in just one year and statements that dismiss international legal limits.. Douglas writes that Trump boasted. “I don’t need international law. ” and has said he will “get” Greenland “one way or the other. ” that the United States will politically control Venezuela. and has threatened to obliterate a “whole civilization” in Iran.. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Douglas adds, has reassigning military lawyers and vowed to abandon “stupid rules of engagement.”
Douglas’s larger point is that the legal system is ill-equipped to restrain the leaders who order force.. His example is Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes. but Douglas says he will never be charged with aggression even if he were to stand trial.. He notes aggression is technically within the ICC’s jurisdiction. but the concept has been “neutered. ” with member states able to claim exemptions to the clause and non-parties to the court—including the United States. Israel. and Russia—unable to be charged with aggression at all.. Ukraine has lobbied for an ad hoc tribunal on aggression via other means at the United Nations. Douglas writes. but it is unlikely to gather enough votes.
Douglas frames his book as a response to that reality: the international order that followed Nuremberg promises accountability for atrocities without delivering meaningful constraints on aggressive war.. As he puts it. the pre-Nuremberg world runs on a grim equation—“the strong do what they can. and the weak suffer what they must.”
His conclusion is a call to defend what he sees as an unfinished legacy.. Nuremberg. for all its milestones. did not fully deliver on the promise that aggressive war could be prosecuted as a crime—leaving a legal gap that. Douglas argues. can be filled only by reviving constraints before the cycle of war and atrocity becomes even harder to interrupt.
MISRYOUM Politics United States politics Nuremberg Robert Jackson international law aggression International Criminal Court Ukraine Trump administration Pete Hegseth war crimes crimes against humanity