The U.S. objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the U.N. and the international rule of law — an attempt that will fail.
Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s U.N. ambassador, briefing reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York on Monday. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares
Common Dreams
On Feb. 16, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass.
The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51.
They are trying to kill the U.N. Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.
At the Security Council on Feb. 28, the U.S. and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One U.S. ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.
The joint U.S.-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”
This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of Feb. 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018.
[See: WATCH: UN Security Council Debates Attack on Iran]
In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of U.S.-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-U.S. war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the U.S. and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the U.S.: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.
It is easy to understand why the U.S. allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the U.N. Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other 14 Council members host U.S. military bases or grant the U.S. military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama and the United Kingdom.
These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the U.S. The U.S. military bases house C.I.A. operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid U.S. subversion in their own countries.
James Kariuki, acting U.K. ambassador to the U.N. and president of the Security Council for the month of February, chairing the Security Council meeting after the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, Feb. 28. (UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host U.S. military bases and C.I.A. operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.
As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every U.S. talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the U.S. and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the U.S. will not play well for Denmark if the U.S. occupies Greenland.
The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States.
Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the U.S.) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation.
Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The U.N. representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.
When Iran retaliates against U.S. military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter.
We must remember that the U.S. and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.
The U.S.-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 (NYT now reports at least 175) young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime.
The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings — notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the U.S. — are also complicit in this war crime.
This U.N. Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil.
An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats U.N. Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience.
For the U.N. to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world — in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others — honoring the true multipolarity of our world.
Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The U.S. objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the U.N. and the international rule of law — an attempt that will fail.
Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).
The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The U.S. has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs.
The U.S. kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.
Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the U.S. similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose U.S. and Israeli hegemony in the region.
Those joint Israel-U.S. wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
One part of the U.S. global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The U.S. seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China.
U.S. sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the U.S. aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the U.S. aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.
The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea — that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states.
That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the U.N. The irony is bitter beyond measure.
U.N. Security Council meeting on Feb. 28 on Iran following U.S.-Israeli attacks. (U.N. Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.
We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the U.N. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population.
The world outside of the U.S. and the countries it occupies want the U.N. to live and thrive. The U.S. attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.
Jeffrey Sachs courageously confronts genocidal settler Danny Danon for his demagogic screed exploiting one Holocaust to justify committing another
Sachs has also correctly noted that Danon’s apartheid lobby has bought off much of the US Congress https://t.co/MiftEte0PM
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 1, 2026
Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress.
Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace.
The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.
A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.
The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the U.S. population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine.
Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.
These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The U.N. is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the U.S. and remember that they are the stewards of the U.N. Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.
This article is from Common Dreams
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
What Iran tomahawk , school girls , hah
Someone Sold them
They have no missles of accuracy
We think they did it to themselves
Hegseth didn’t choke it out
We sell them Trump pukes
We believe
Who the Eff is we
We will see , what difference does it make
Hillary , if they knew what were up to , ut oh
Were losing the dis info war
Short term pain , long term gain
We are plebs and too stupid
It seems like to me we truly need a revolution, a social transformation that is the definition of a revolution. Please look up in these terrible times, Clara Mattei and her book; Escape From Capitalism. Capitalism is a problem we must solve . Dependency on old resources that fuel hegemony is not the future. The future lies with not oil, but the directed energy that Tesla, the man, discovered. Our entire world could heal if the CIA and FBI had not taken Tesla’s research and misused it, but rather given it over, not to war, but to salvage humankind. What remains is the powerful interests of the oil and gas industry and their wars of aggression against those who live in oil rich areas.
I knew what I was doing getting arrested at a Support The Troops rally when I went in with a sign that said “genuinely support our troops, bring them home, now, alive.” I knew this would be a long going thing and I didn’t want my sons to be sacrificed for oil or US hegemony. And here we are. What can we do to keep our poorer kids out of recruitment when they offer them so much that our communities cannot offer? I get oil is a nation’s path to keep taking from others. I did not want my sons to be part of that. There are kids in my low income community who speak about stem cells and how cells work and mitrocrondia.
I was on the front page of a Yakima, WA newspaper, : a headline story. ( that should tell you something about your media feed.). That was the Gulf War under another Bush eugenics operation. We must not allow the pedo class to control us. Imagine how our children might be used for their DNA. And not only that, think about the erasure of a 6000 year old history that persisted for all those years and now we have a country that has only existed for how long? A paltry 2 hundred years. My dog thinks better than most Americans. She’s a healer and she has her problems, but she was born of a long history that is so much better than the batteries that last for a little while. She is humanity’s best friend and loves food like we all do.
We seen to have a religious BC-AC problem of monotheistic fantasy. Planet Earth is the promised land of life on Earth floating in hot air, part of the rule by earth,water, fire, and air. It doesn’t take a bible to figure it out rather than make matter worse.
I REALLY like the CONCEPT of the UN, and it — or something very similar to it — probably remains the best possibility of preventing full-scale nuclear war and disastrous climate change. That being said, there seldom seems to be enough cooperation between the major powers (especially the US) to make it a viable institution, which bodes VERY poorly for the future, to put it mildly…
Not sure if he is defending the UN ?
Its a useless body if one member can veto what the mockery stands for is as
useless as teats on a boar pig .
Besides boar meat stinks , enjoy your carboard pepperoni pizza .
Only congress can declare war that is in our US Constitution I am a us arm reserve veteran I am opposed to this war with Iran nothing good will come of it! No more disposable heros
Call democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer offices and tell them no war with Iran
And
Thank
You
Professor Sachs
I hear you loud and clear. A website to do what you ask would be greatly appreciated.
Paula please call those congressman up asap! I do not have a homepage
No blood for oil
Support our troops bring them home now and alive
No war with Iran
No more disposable heros
Are
U
In
Yakima Washington AKA apple capital of USA
Dated but relevant:
hxxps://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/08/11/on-the-brink-of-world-war-does-the-un-still-have-a-raison-detre/
The US now claims that Iran is violating the sovereign rights of the countries that host military bases. Great challenge to the concept of sovereignty: “…14 Council members host U.S. military bases or grant the U.S. military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama and the United Kingdom.
These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the U.S. The U.S. military bases house C.I.A. operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid U.S. subversion in their own countries.”
“It is clear that the economic, social and cultural rights in the UN Charter were only meant to be aspirational, and not enforceable. If they were enforceable, this would not be the case”:
It is also even clearer, today, that “the economic, social and cultural rights in the” US Constitution, quite apparently today, in retrospect, were not even minimally meant as aspirational!
If the U.S. Constitution is considered the supreme written document and foundational legal charter of the United States, and the US the primary foundational inspiration for the United Nations, driven by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who coined the term and initiated the vision for a postwar international security organization, then how did the governing US regime of today get to the point where they feel the country to be the most insecure nation on the face of the planet; that it has to oust Presidents, murder religious leaders and back Coups d’état’s the world over, instigating chaos that lead to human rights abuses, in order to feel secure again, all because supposedly other sovereign independent don’t agree with its model for life.
And as its final coup de grace, against a more truly all-encompassing humanitarian world, bring it all crashing down in a heap of criminal despoilment.
As Michael Parenti so aptly used to say, cui bono (who benefits)?
Constitutions, resolutions, regulations, statutes etc. etc. IOW LAWS are……….a fraud. There is only ONE law in the affairs of societies. It has NEVER been broken and never can be. It is true on every planet in every solar system in every galaxy in the cosmos and has been so forever and will remain so forever.
P O W E R
There is no other law. Sorry.
Truth.
The United Nothing has been and is powerless and irrelevant.
Please do not dismiss the United Nations.
We have domestic laws against murder, yet murder still occurs. This does not mean that domestic law is irrelevant.
The UN Security Council surely needs reform, beginning with abolishing the power of a single nation to veto a Security Council resolution.
The General Assembly is the democratic body of the UN. It has tremendous moral authority. You are correct that it is “powerless” insofar as its resolutions are not binding. Still, for those striving for peace on the planet, it’s something to hang your hat on.
Russia has never been against UN and in fact made a statement about NOT abolishing it but finding it a worthy institution. Because the USA has too much veto power against a larger majority is why it’s not working so well. Need to take that power away fromUSA and give back to the people who joined for good reasons gone wrong.
Then, you guarantee our genocide via WHO pandemics and “cures”. And, of course, climate change nonsense which will also kill billions when plentiful fossil fuels vanish and prople freeze bwvause they cannot heat their homes.
“The General Assembly is NOT the democratic body of the UN”; definitely not where the 54 actual African countries of the South are indebted to institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, which are instruments of the U.S. and do its bidding.
There, once upon a time, may have been International Law, promoted as well as promulgated by the United nations Organization.
When did these laws ever prevent the United States of America from committing any of the dastardly deeds it has done globally since its participation in the founding of the U.N.?
Is it necessary to name the atrocities for you to see the true picture?
As of this moment in time, if it is NOT obvious, domestic law IS irrelevant!
If you are unable to see this clearly, the most inappropriate recommendation is to visit with an ophthalmologist.