That’s the title of an essay by Australian law lecturer Amanda Alexander in the 2023 book, Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law. She writes:
The distinction between civilians and combatants and the protection of civilians are perhaps the central precepts of international humanitarian law today.
…Vietnam served as the archetype of the contemporary conflicts that had prompted the ICRC to draft new laws. When the ICRC began calling for new laws of armed conflict it was concerned by military developments, such as aviation, that had “almost wiped out” the fundamental distinctions between combatants and civilians. It was also troubled by the rise of a “truly enormous tidal wave of guerrilla activity” that had not been anticipated by earlier conventions.
The Vietnam War was the consummate example of these concerns. Moreover, the Vietnam War informed the drafting process by challenging the traditional Western understanding of the laws of armed conflict. The revolutionary writings on people’s war, put into practice in Vietnam, shaped a new language and paradigm of a just war, while advocating for the legitimacy of guerrilla warfare.
This language was adopted by Palestinian movements, which presented their struggle as analogous to the Vietnamese people’s war. Support for the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to a series of United Nations resolutions, proclaiming the rights of national liberation movements and their fighters in a quasi-legal language that would later be repeated at the Diplomatic Conferences.
There was also growing support for the Palestinian and the Vietnamese resistance in the West. Wars against imperial powers were increasingly accepted as just and the means used to oppose them seemed shocking.
Popular and academic commentary in the West questioned the lawfulness of counterinsurgency techniques, in particular attacks on civilians. These discourses were reflected in the debates at the Diplomatic Conference and ultimately in the provisions of the Additional Protocol I.
Before the 1970s, a fighter had to carry arms openly and wear a distinctive sign to receive legal protection. The 1977 Additional Protocols softened that standard. A combatant now only needs to carry arms openly during deployment and the actual engagement, which allows him to blend back into the civilian population the rest of the time. Alexander calls this a “legal and political achievement” for national liberation movements. It was also, from another angle, a legal architecture built to serve a political agenda.
The framework she describes did not emerge from neutral legal reasoning. It came out of a specific historical moment when newly independent states and revolutionary movements pushed to reshape who the law was meant to protect. Anti-colonial fighters gained recognition that professional armies had previously monopolized. Carl Schmitt would not find this surprising. For him, legal arguments are political arguments expressed in juridical language, and the sovereign is the one who decides the exception. The modern laws of war reflect the balance of forces that created them, not some timeless principle of justice.
Iran understood this well. Its gray-zone strategy, built around the Axis of Resistance, exploits every protection the 1977 framework offers. Hezbollah fires missiles into Israel. The Houthis attack shipping. Iraqi militias hit American bases. Under international law, attributing those attacks to Iran is legally complicated, and that ambiguity is the point. Meanwhile, Iran-aligned groups embed themselves in hospitals, schools, and dense urban neighborhoods, knowing that any military response will trigger the disproportionality traps built into humanitarian law. The side with identifiable military forces carries the legal burden. The side blended into the civilian population gains protection from the rules. This asymmetry did not begin with Iran. It appeared in Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Iran institutionalized it across a regional network.
The 2026 conflict changes something. For decades Iran relied on deniability and the reluctance of its adversaries to pierce that ambiguity. Operation Epic Fury punctured it. The gray zone only works when the opponent accepts the terms. Once the opponent decides to ignore them, the entire model collapses. The U.S. and Israel are now operating under what some call an “illegal but legitimate” framework, bypassing the UN Security Council and targeting Iranian leadership directly. International law scholars call this a collapse of legal constraint. The administration calls it national interest.
Alexander’s framework described how weak actors used the law to survive against strong ones. The 2026 conflict shows a state using those same irregular tactics, proxies, drones, cyber operations, as tools of national power rather than grassroots resistance. This flips the revolutionary war model. Iran is not a peasant movement. It is a state that spent decades dressing its strategy in the language of anti-imperialism while building a transnational militia network. The legal protections designed for the weak became instruments of a regional power.
The quieter tone from the usual critics reflects something real. International law rhetoric works when the targeted government cares about reputational pressure. The current administration has made clear it does not. Diplomatic actors conserve energy when they believe pressure will not change behavior. The old Global South bloc that once dominated UN debates is far less cohesive today. Many states that led anti-imperial rhetoric in the 1970s now have deep economic ties with the United States or the Gulf. That produces caution. The media frame has also shifted toward military and strategic analysis rather than humanitarian outrage, which reduces the oxygen that UN rhetoric depends on.
The legal professionals who devoted careers to refining the 1977 Protocols now watch their work set aside in real time. Some will pivot to defense and security law, where the money follows the military-industrial complex. Others will move into sanctions, trade policy, and export controls, areas where law still produces consequences. The next generation of relevant lawyers will probably focus on autonomous weapon systems and military AI rather than the combatant status of guerrilla fighters. The useful work has moved from the courtroom to the situation room.
Alexander was right that war reshapes law. The 2026 conflict suggests war may now dissolve it. The humanitarian framework assumed that major powers would broadly accept its terms. When they no longer do, the rules still shape language, but not much else.
