It’s Hard & Often Pointless To Regulate War

Carl Schmitt argued that law cannot control politics in moments of existential conflict. His famous formulation, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” means that real authority belongs to whoever can suspend normal rules when survival is at stake. Schmitt was skeptical that wars could be regulated through humanitarian legal frameworks. When existential conflicts occur, political actors decide based on survival, not legal principle. Survival should be every nation’s first principle. Law won’t tame violence without hard men to enforce it.
The legal order, Schmitt believed, works only in normal situations. Liberal legal systems assume stable conditions where rules apply consistently. But when a state faces a serious threat to its existence, leaders treat rules not as binding constraints but as tools that can be suspended. The political decision overrides the legal framework.
Schmitt also thought humanitarian language often masks political struggle. States justify wars in the language of humanity, peace, or justice, but these universal terms get used to delegitimize enemies and claim moral authority. Humanitarian rhetoric becomes part of the political battlefield.
Beneath all of this sits what Schmitt called the friend-enemy distinction. Politics revolves around identifying a collective enemy that threatens the group’s survival. When that distinction grows intense enough, violent conflict becomes possible. Legal norms can shape how war is fought. They cannot eliminate the underlying conflict that drives it.
This is why wars like the 2026 Iran conflict look Schmittian. Conflicts involving nuclear programs, regional power struggles, or ideological regimes get perceived by the actors involved as existential threats. When leaders believe the stakes involve survival or strategic transformation, the calculus shifts. Strategic necessity outweighs legal caution. Deterrence outweighs reputational concerns. Power determines outcomes more than rules. That pattern is exactly what Schmitt predicted.
Schmitt provides the missing link between Amanda Alexander’s history of humanitarian law and the current reality of the Iran war. Alexander details how the West tried to capture irregular war within a legal cage. Schmitt argues the cage is an illusion that vanishes the moment a sovereign perceives a threat to survival.
The 2026 conflict adds several layers to this analysis. Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty typically applies to physical borders, but the current administration has extended the logic of exception to the digital and logistical sphere. By ignoring international outcries over disrupted global shipping and the cyber fog used to mask operations, the U.S. acts as global sovereign. It decides that the normal situation of global commerce gets suspended to achieve the existential goal of neutralizing the Iranian network.
Alexander’s essay describes a world where humanity became a legal currency the weak used to handicap the strong. Schmitt would say the current administration has simply stopped accepting that currency. When the president asserts that his own morality outweighs treaty obligations, he strips the humanitarian mask from the conflict. He treats the war not as a legal problem to be managed by bureaucrats in Geneva but as a struggle for survival where the only rule is the friend-enemy distinction.
Schmitt warned that when war gets fought in the name of humanity, the enemy ceases to be a justus hostis, a legitimate adversary with rights, and becomes an outlaw who must be destroyed. The 2026 war moves toward that total pole. By targeting the Supreme Leader and aiming for obliteration rather than containment, the U.S. and Israel treat the Iranian regime not as a state actor to be countered but as an existential threat outside the protection of any law.
Alexander shows that the liberal legal order tried to create a world where everyone followed the same rules. Schmitt argued this was never possible because power is never symmetrical. The moment the U.S. decided that the Iranian proxy network could not be stopped by the old rules, it suspended those rules. The unwilling or unable doctrine is a Schmittian exception dressed in legal language, a way for the sovereign to say the rules don’t apply here because I say so. That logic suggests Alexander’s history is not a story of progress but a story of a temporary normal situation that has now ended.