In their recent article Might Unmakes Right (Foreign Affairs July/August 2025 Published on June 24, 2025), Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the international legal order—painstakingly built over the past century—is unraveling under the pressure of great power politics and the instrumentalization of law by powerful states, particularly the United States. Their thesis is striking: rather than preserving a rules-based international order, dominant powers are increasingly dismantling it when it no longer serves their interests. In a reversal of the Kantian and Wilsonian hopes for global governance under law, the world seems to be slipping back toward a pre-Charter logic, where might not only makes right but unmakes law altogether.
The authors begin by revisiting the Athenian ultimatum to the Melians, immortalized in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, where law and morality were dismissed in favor of brute force. That ancient logic, they suggest, has resurfaced in the conduct of major powers today. The United States’ retreat from international institutions, its weakening of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement mechanism, and its ambivalence toward international adjudication are presented as emblematic of a broader disregard for legal constraint. For Hathaway and Shapiro, these choices are not isolated acts of realpolitik, but symptoms of a deeper, systemic unraveling: the idea that law can meaningfully constrain the powerful is collapsing.
The critique is particularly pointed when it comes to U.S. policy. The authors describe how Washington has moved from shaping the law to selectively ignoring or actively sabotaging it—most notably through its refusal to reappoint judges to the WTO Appellate Body, thereby crippling a central pillar of the multilateral trading system. This is more than a legal maneuver; it is, in their view, a conscious dismantling of the very structure that the United States helped create after World War II. Likewise, the article notes how international norms against aggression—enshrined in the UN Charter—have been weakened not just by Russian or Chinese assertiveness, but by the failure of liberal democracies to uphold and reinforce them.
Yet for all its rhetorical force and historical resonance, the article invites several critical reflections. First, while the diagnosis of legal erosion is compelling, the account occasionally veers toward a U.S.-centric perspective that risks obscuring other dynamics. The decline of the rules-based order cannot be attributed solely to American actions. Other actors—including the EU, middle powers, and international civil society—have played important roles in resisting or reshaping legal norms. Their agency is largely absent from the narrative. In that sense, the article presents the erosion of legality as a unilateral process rather than as the contested and uneven transformation it likely is.
Second, the tone is unapologetically alarmist. The collapse of legal order is presented not as a risk or a trend, but as a fait accompli. This leaves little room for ambiguity, and perhaps too little space for countervailing evidence: that international courts continue to operate, that global trade remains surprisingly resilient, that some regions—such as Latin America or the African Union—have made meaningful legal commitments to collective security and supranational adjudication. By foregrounding disintegration, the authors downplay continuity and adaptation.
Third, the policy implications remain underdeveloped. If the rules-based order is collapsing, what should be done? The article hints at possible alternatives—reforms to multilateral institutions, new forms of accountability, or domestic reinvestment in legal internationalism—but stops short of articulating a clear roadmap. This may be intentional, given the urgency and gravity of their warning, but it limits the piece’s usefulness for those seeking constructive responses to the problems it describes.
In the end, Might Unmakes Right is a powerful, intellectually rigorous, and emotionally urgent piece. It succeeds in drawing attention to the fragility of the international legal order and the growing tendency of powerful states to privilege discretion over law. At the same time, its focus on rupture over resilience and its emphasis on American choices to the exclusion of others leave certain aspects of the global picture underexplored.
Still, it serves as a sobering reminder that law, like peace, is a political achievement—never inevitable, and always at risk.
One might say that international law has died a thousand deaths and yet refuses to stay buried. From the collapse of the Concert of Europe to the carnage of the World Wars, from the paralysis of the League of Nations to the violations of the UN Charter, legal order has been repeatedly declared obsolete—only to resurface, reimagined, sometimes fragile but rarely absent. This long history of resurrections should temper both apocalyptic despair and naïve legalism. What seems like collapse may sometimes be transformation. What appears as erosion might, in time, provoke renewal.
That doesn’t weaken Hathaway and Shapiro’s warning—it deepens it. If the rules-based order is in crisis, this is not unprecedented. But neither is recovery automatic. The law’s survival has always depended on acts of political will, strategic patience, and institutional reinvention. The question, then, is not whether international law will vanish, but what kind of international law will emerge from the current unmaking—and who will shape it.