The question sounds provocative, but it cuts straight into a real tension: international law presents itself as the law of a community of states, yet the system clearly bends around a handful of powerful players. If international law simply mirrored what those powers want, it would stop looking like law and start looking like a diplomatic costume for power politics. But if those powers walk away, large parts of the system stop working.
What does it mean for international law to “depend” on a few states?
International law can “depend” on powerful states in at least three different ways.
- It can depend on them for its very existence.
That would mean that international law is nothing more than what those states say it is. If the US or the US–Russia–China triangle do not accept a rule, then the rule would not exist at all. - It can depend on them for law-making.
That would mean that these states dominate the agenda, shape the big treaties, and can block or dilute any rule they dislike. - It can depend on them for effectiveness.
That would mean that a rule may exist on paper, but its real impact depends on whether these states decide to comply, to enforce it, or at least not to sabotage it.
If we look at the first sense – existence – the answer is relatively straightforward. International law does not depend on the will of one or three states for its validity. The basic sources of international law are still treaties, custom and general principles. The UN Charter does not contain a secret article saying that norms only apply if Washington, Moscow and Beijing approve.
If we look at the second and third senses – law-making and effectiveness – things become much more uncomfortable.
Great powers and the “hard core” of international security
International law has always lived in the shadow of power. The current system, built around the UN Charter, makes that shadow explicit.
The structure of the Security Council gives five permanent members – including the US, Russia and China – a veto over binding resolutions on peace and security. That veto is itself a legal device. International law does not just tolerate power politics from the outside; international law incorporates power politics inside its institutional architecture.
This power shows up in several ways.
- Powerful states can block collective action. Even when a large majority of states condemn an act of aggression, the Council may remain paralysed because one permanent member vetoes any resolution.
- Powerful states can shape or stall new regimes on disarmament, arms control, cyberspace, or emerging technologies. Without their participation, many global agreements either never emerge or remain weak and fragmentary.
- Powerful states can violate existing rules – in particular the rules on the use of force – with limited immediate legal consequences, especially when they control or influence enforcement mechanisms.
In this sense, parts of international law – especially the law of collective security – do depend, in practice, on the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of a tiny group of states.
Why international law cannot be reduced to “what the great powers say”
If we move from practice to structure, the picture changes. International law cannot be reduced to the will of one or even three states without erasing its own basic concepts.
First, customary international law does not arise from a private deal between great powers. It requires a general and consistent practice of states, accepted as law (opinio juris). Great powers carry significant weight, but they do not form custom alone. Smaller and middle powers, regional organisations, and courts all contribute to the emergence and crystallisation of customary norms.
Second, some norms claim a special status that explicitly transcends the will of individual states:
- Peremptory norms (jus cogens) bind the international community as a whole and cannot be derogated from by treaty.
- Obligations erga omnes are owed to all states; every state has a legal interest in their protection.
These categories cover prohibitions such as aggression, genocide, slavery and torture. Great powers have violated some of these norms, but they have not been able to eliminate them. In fact, even powerful states tend to justify their actions by appealing to international law rather than openly denying it. That rhetorical strategy matters: it shows that they still feel the need to talk the language of law.
Third, a wide range of international courts and tribunals operate on the basis of consent that is broader than any single power’s control. They decide boundary disputes, maritime delimitation, human rights cases, trade disputes, investment claims, and environmental controversies involving states of very different sizes. These courts are not immune from politics, but they are not simply instruments of a US–Russia–China triangle.
If international law were nothing but a projection of great-power will, these institutions would make little sense. Their everyday practice suggests something messier: a legal order that is unequal and often distorted by power, but not fully captured by it.
From US hegemony to fractured rivalry
The old cliché of a “US-centric” international order did capture one aspect of the post-1945 reality. The US played a central role in designing the UN system, in dominating many international financial institutions, and in underwriting certain security guarantees.
Today, the picture looks more fractured.
- The US remains a central actor, but it faces a systemic challenger in China and a disruptive, revisionist Russia.
- The veto politics in the Security Council have become more toxic and more visible, especially around crises where permanent members are directly involved.
- Middle powers and regional organisations – from the EU to the African Union, from India and Brazil to ASEAN – claim growing space in global norm-setting.
This world does not look like a neat “triangle” where the US, Russia and China sit in a room and decide the fate of international law. It looks more like a fragmented landscape in which different clusters of states and institutions push competing visions of what international law means and how it should evolve.
International law, in this environment, functions both as a constraint and as a weapon. States invoke legal arguments to legitimise their policies and to delegitimise those of their rivals. They litigate against each other. They sponsor resolutions in international organisations. They reinterpret old rules to fit new technologies. No single actor fully controls this process.
A system pulled between community and hierarchy
International law constantly oscillates between two poles.
On one side, there is the community narrative: the idea of a legal order based on the sovereign equality of states, the prohibition of aggression, the protection of basic human rights, and a set of shared interests in areas like climate, oceans, and global health. This narrative emphasises that rules bind everyone, including the powerful, and that certain norms cannot be unilaterally set aside.
On the other side, there is the hierarchical reality: a Security Council built around veto powers, a global economy structured by financial and technological asymmetries, and enforcement mechanisms that often bite hardest against weaker states. Powerful actors can obstruct, reinterpret, or selectively apply rules to protect their interests.
International law survives inside this contradiction. The system clearly depends, for many of its most dramatic decisions, on the behaviour of a few great powers. At the same time, the system still claims to represent a broader community and produces norms, institutions and practices that those powers do not fully control and occasionally find constraining.
The question is not whether international law belongs to the United States, or to a club of the US, Russia and China. The question is how long an order that speaks the language of community and equality can coexist with structures that embed hierarchy and rivalry at its core.
Realist perspectives on the power politics behind international law
A realist would answer your earlier question much more bluntly than I did:
Yes. In any meaningful sense, international law does depend on the great powers – and mostly reflects what they are willing to tolerate.
Then a realist would add: that is not a bug, it is exactly what you should expect in an anarchic system.
1. The realist starting point
A (mainstream) realist in International Relations begins from a few hard assumptions:
- The international system is anarchic: there is no world government above states.
- States are the key actors, and what ultimately matters to them is survival, security and power.
- Great powers are in a particularly dangerous game: they cannot rely on others, so they must remain free to violate rules when vital interests are at stake.
From this angle, international law is, at best, a tool that states use when it suits them, and ignore when it doesn’t. There is no independent “moral authority of the law” that can consistently override power politics.
2. “Law follows power”: how realism reads your question
If you ask a realist:
Can international law and its force depend only on one state (the US), or on the US–Russia–China triangle?
The realist answer is roughly:
- In practice, yes.
The parts of international law that really matter for security – use of force, nuclear issues, big sanctions regimes, strategic technologies – exist and are enforced only to the extent that the great powers accept them or find them useful. - Formally, no – but that’s not the interesting part.
Of course, the UN Charter does not say “the law is what Washington, Moscow and Beijing want”. But for realism this is secondary. The real question is: who can be stopped, punished, deterred? And the honest answer, from a realist point of view, is that international law is much more effective against weak and middle powers than against the very strong.
So a realist would say your intuition is essentially correct: in the fields that matter most for high politics, international law is deeply dependent on a small club of states.
3. Classical realism: law as “thin” and fragile
For classical realists like Hans Morgenthau, international law is not meaningless, but it is primitive and fragilecompared to domestic law.
They would emphasise:
- There is no central authority to make and enforce the law.
- There is no effective monopoly of force to punish violations.
- The most powerful states can often escape legal consequences, especially when they control key institutions (for example through the veto in the Security Council).
From this perspective, law is:
- Useful as long as it helps stabilise expectations, facilitates diplomacy, or gives states a common language.
- Ineffective when it collides with vital security interests of great powers.
So classical realism does not deny the existence of international law. It simply insists that law is always subordinate to power and interest, particularly for the most powerful actors.
4. Structural and offensive realism: institutions and law as “window dressing”
With neorealism / structural realism (Kenneth Waltz) and especially offensive realism (John Mearsheimer), the scepticism goes even further.
The key ideas, translated into your question, would be:
- In an anarchic system, states – especially great powers – will never accept rules that seriously constrain them when their core interests are at stake.
- International law and institutions reflect the underlying distribution of power; they do not transform it.
- When power shifts (from US unipolarity to a more contested order with China and Russia), the legal order also shifts, because the bargains that once made sense for the hegemon no longer hold.
Mearsheimer’s famous claim about the “false promise of international institutions” can be applied to law as well: rules and institutions can matter at the margins, but they rarely determine the behaviour of great powers in high-stakes situations.
5. Realists on US hegemony and the “triangle”
What would a realist say specifically about the US and the US–Russia–China configuration?
Roughly:
- During US unipolarity, many legal regimes and institutions (WTO, some human rights and security arrangements) were tolerated or promoted because they were compatible with US interests. When they stopped being compatible, Washington pushed back, ignored decisions, or paralysed mechanisms.
- As China rises and Russia acts as a spoiler, the system moves towards a more conflictual multipolarity. A realist expects:
- more selective compliance with international law,
- more forum shopping and use of law as a rhetorical weapon,
- more fragmentation into blocs or spheres of influence with their own legal preferences.
In that sense, a realist would say: yes, the law is increasingly shaped and limited by the interactions between a small number of great powers. Not because they have a formal monopoly over the sources, but because they hold most of the military and economic leverage that matters for enforcement.
6. Where sophisticated realists still leave a little space for law
The more nuanced realists do not say “international law is completely irrelevant”. They usually concede that:
- Law can serve as a coordination tool where interests already converge (e.g. technical standards, some trade rules, aviation, telecommunications).
- Law can reduce transaction costs and uncertainty, making cooperation cheaper and more predictable.
- Law can sometimes constrain states at the margins, where the issues are not existential and the political costs of blatant violation are high.
But the hierarchy remains:
For realism, interests and power explain why states accept rules; rules do not fundamentally reshape interests and power.
So yes, international law has a role, but it is derivative. It depends on the willingness of powerful states to live with those rules because they see some advantage in them, or at least no unacceptable cost.
7. One sentence version
If you force a realist into a one-liner about your original question, you get something like this:
International law is not literally only what the US or the US–Russia–China triangle say it is, but in the issues that matter most, it survives and has “force” only insofar as those powers find it compatible with their interests.