By Dionisio Babo Soares
There are moments in the history of diplomacy when the distinction between a pause and a solution becomes the most urgent question leaders can ask themselves. We are living through one of those moments. The two week ceasefire between the United States and Iran — secured minutes before the expiry of an American ultimatum, through Pakistani mediation in Islamabad — has been widely welcomed as a relief. We should welcome it as well, but without deceiving ourselves as to its nature. It is a tactical pause in a conflict driven by deep structural incompatibilities. What has not been resolved far outweighs what has been agreed. And what has been agreed cannot endure without the only foundation that history has shown to be capable of giving peace real durability: International Law.
Ultimately, we are dealing with a security architecture deprived of solid legal anchoring, conceived more in the realm of strategic abstraction than in the solidity of law. The Islamabad negotiations — stretching over twenty one hours and ending without agreement — reveal with almost inexorable clarity the price of a policy detached from binding norms.
On one side, the United States is putting forward highly maximalist demands: the elimination of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, together with the removal of enriched uranium from Iranian territory. On the other side, Iran invokes a principle of sovereignty, grounded in the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy as set out in the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and recognized under international law. Both positions have internal coherence, and it is precisely this symmetry of legitimacies that prevents a merely political solution. History shows that lasting balances do not emerge from imposition; they stem from institutionalization. Only a binding legal framework, negotiated in a multilateral format and backed by credible verification mechanisms, can transform this stalemate into a stable arrangement.
The temptation to substitute International Law with a simple balance of power is old and recurrent. It is also, invariably, the source of subsequent crises. When a State accepts constraints on its nuclear program not because of a freely assumed legal obligation but because of coercion, the commitment lasts only as long as the pressure that imposed it. This is the lesson of the JCPOA — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015 — later abandoned unilaterally in 2018, and it is the lesson that the current crisis confirms with renewed urgency. Realpolitik without legal anchoring does not produce peace; it produces managed instability, which is merely another way of saying postponed war.
Gaza provides a paradigm of an order in which law is invoked but not implemented. In few other contexts is the erosion of the credibility of International Law as visible as in the Palestinian question. The Comprehensive Plan for Ending the Conflict in Gaza, enshrined by the Security Council in Resolution 2803 of November 2025, faces a real risk of unraveling barely six months after its adoption.
Its first phase outlined a ceasefire, the partial release of hostages, a limited withdrawal of Israeli forces, and humanitarian access. In practice, however, the reality on the ground reveals a structural gap between commitment and implementation: neither party has fully complied with its obligations. The result is predictable — an agreement without effective guarantee mechanisms eventually becomes a declaration of intent with no normative force.
Hamas refuses to discuss disarmament or the second phase negotiations as long as Israel fails to honor what was agreed in the first phase. Israel is authorizing new settlements in the occupied West Bank — in flagrant violation of International Humanitarian Law and of successive Security Council resolutions — while maintaining military operations in Lebanon, arguing that these fall outside the scope of the bilateral ceasefire with Iran. The UN Special Envoy has put forward a proposal in Cairo based on five principles: reciprocity, sequencing, verification, reintegration, and temporal flexibility. As of the time of writing, the proposal was still awaiting a formal response.
What this situation reveals is not a passing anomaly but a structural pathology running through the history of relations among States: the tendency to invoke International Law as an argument when it serves immediate interests and to treat it as an obstacle when it does not. This ambivalence is not only intellectually dishonest; it is strategically ruinous.
International Law is not a tool of convenience that States can use selectively without consequences for the security architecture that protects us all. It is a system of interdependent obligations whose credibility rests precisely on its universality and on the consistency of its application.
The selective erosion of that credibility does not affect only the specific case in which it occurs; it contaminates the principle that underpins the entire order. And when confidence in that principle dissolves, what emerges in its place is not greater sovereign freedom. What emerges is a return to the logic that the post war order was expressly constructed to overcome — a logic in which force becomes the sole arbiter of disputes among States.
Thucydides, the founder of critical historiography and one of the foundational references in thinking about relations between States, captured this reality with particular sobriety: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. It is, without doubt, one possible description of international order; but it is also the description of a system devoid of effective diplomacy, normative reference, and, ultimately, enduring peace.
With regard to Iran, the issue of the nuclear threshold and the logic of deterrence remains the most sensitive and potentially destabilizing dimension of the conflict. According to data presented in the context of the recent negotiations, Tehran has a significant stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent — enough, according to various technical estimates, to substantially shorten the time needed to produce a nuclear weapons capability. In addition, a significant part of its enrichment infrastructure, including deeply hardened facilities, appears to have withstood the 2025–2026 hostilities in conditions the regime still considers operational.
This fact introduces a particularly serious strategic element. Rather than weakening the regime’s deterrence logic, the damage suffered during the conflict may, paradoxically, reinforce within the Iranian leadership the conviction that a threshold nuclear capability is the most reliable guarantee of State survival. It is a troubling conclusion, but not devoid of strategic rationality: in the perception of many decision makers, possessing — or almost possessing — such a capability changes the adversary’s calculus and raises the cost of any direct military intervention.
If this reading becomes entrenched in Tehran, the crisis could move into a significantly more dangerous phase, marked by narrower margins of error, greater propensity for preventive action, and an increased risk of regional escalation. In such circumstances, crisis management would no longer rely primarily on political containment, but increasingly on strategic calculations made under intense pressure and with very little room for constructive ambiguity.
The only serious way to halt this spiral lies in rebuilding a multilateral legal framework — credible and verifiable — that combines transparent limits on Iran’s nuclear program with politically sustainable security guarantees. This is not normative idealism; it is strategic pragmatism. The JCPOA, despite its limitations, demonstrated that it is possible to reach an equilibrium between non proliferation, international verification, and recognition of sovereign interests. Its unilateral abandonment demonstrated with equal clarity the strategic cost of weakening legal commitments when they cease to be politically convenient.
In Lebanon, we are witnessing one of the starkest expressions of the gap between formal sovereignty and effective sovereignty in the contemporary Middle East. The Lebanese State remains fully recognized internationally, yet its material authority is increasingly constrained by military dynamics beyond its control. Hostilities continue on its territory despite the ceasefire, with Israel justifying ongoing operations against Hezbollah on the basis of immediate security imperatives. The human and institutional consequences are profound: high numbers of casualties, large scale population displacement, and the deepening of a fragility that predates the current conflict but which this crisis has exposed with particular harshness.
Legally, the framework is less ambiguous than is often suggested. A State’s territorial sovereignty cannot be violated without a Security Council mandate or a clear basis in the right of self defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The tendency to interpret this provision expansively to legitimize sustained military operations on the sovereign territory of third States creates a precedent whose gravity extends far beyond the Lebanese case. If normalized, such a practice would endanger not only Lebanon’s territorial integrity but the entire collective security architecture built since 1945.
It is also necessary to acknowledge a reality that the history of military interventions has repeatedly confirmed: political military actors deeply rooted in the social fabric do not disappear as a mere consequence of external military pressure. Hezbollah, regardless of the political judgment it inspires, is not only an armed structure; it is also embedded in significant segments of Lebanese political and social life. Seeking its elimination by exclusively military means is to confuse tactical degradation with a strategic solution. As a rule, such approaches do not extinguish the phenomenon they seek to contain; they transform it, disperse it, and at times radicalize it.
For this reason, any serious approach to the Lebanese dossier must rely less on the ongoing erosion of State sovereignty and more on its political, institutional, and legal reinforcement. There will be no sustainable stabilization as long as Lebanese territory remains simultaneously a stage for proxy confrontations and a space of incomplete authority. Restoring a minimum order in Lebanon requires, first of all, that sovereignty cease to be a diplomatic fiction and once again become an operative principle of regional order.
No serious reading of the current moment can ignore the impact this crisis is already having on the architecture of Western alliances and on the political cost of strategic unilateralism. The conflict has proven politically controversial in Europe, economically disruptive in Asia, and diplomatically burdensome across much of the Global South. More than a succession of military episodes, what has become visible is a deeper tension: the gap between the requirements of strategic coordination among allies and the persistence of decisions driven by immediate imperatives, with limited consultation and insufficiently shared legitimacy.
The perception that decisions with far reaching international consequences have been taken without robust consultation with allies — particularly within NATO — has generated a strategic unease that public declarations of solidarity hardly conceal. Alliances can survive tactical disagreements; what weakens them is the gradual accumulation of doubts regarding predictability, reciprocity, and the degree of political consideration that underpins decision making. Trust among allies rarely collapses in moments of open rupture alone; more often, it erodes silently through unresolved reservations that pile up over time.
In this context, Pakistan’s emergence as an indispensable mediator is a diplomatic development of significant importance that should not be underestimated. By repositioning a regional actor traditionally seen as peripheral at the center of a crisis management process with global implications, this evolution suggests a subtle but meaningful redistribution of diplomatic centrality. In parallel, China has sought to capitalize on perceptions of U.S. strategic unpredictability to present itself as a responsible power and defender of the multilateral order.
The historical irony is hard to miss: the United States, one of the main architects of the rules based international order that emerged from Bretton Woods in 1944 and San Francisco in 1945, is today perceived by a significant part of the international community as willing to relativize that same order whenever immediate national interests so dictate. This is an asset of credibility that is eroding gradually, almost imperceptibly, but whose effects are likely to be felt precisely when strategic cohesion is most needed.
Everything suggests that, in the short and medium term, the region is unlikely to move either toward genuine reconciliation or toward full scale war, but rather toward the continuation of a persistent, calibrated form of intermediate confrontation — what, in strategic terms, can be described as a “war between wars.” This pattern rests on cyber operations, actions carried out by non state actors, limited strikes, and plausibly deniable initiatives that allow each party to maintain pressure on the other while avoiding, at least in the immediate term, the political and military costs of open war. Israel and Iran, though for different reasons, have strong incentives to preserve this mode of confrontation. Domestic political dynamics on both sides reinforce this impulse, significantly narrowing the space for more ambitious diplomatic initiatives.
The central problem is that this pattern, often presented as an alternative to all out war, is in no sense a form of peace. It amounts instead to the management of hostility by indirect means, in which containment depends less on a shared order than on the contingent prudence of the actors involved. Prudence, however, is an inherently unstable foundation for regional security. It may delay rupture, but it does not eliminate the conditions that make rupture likely. On the contrary, it can institutionalize low intensity confrontation, rendering it politically sustainable and strategically repeatable.
Overcoming this pattern would therefore require a reversal of priorities: diplomacy must once again prevail over coercion, and International Law must be reaffirmed not as a mere rhetorical reference but as an effective operational constraint. Not out of idealism or moral naivety, but because historical experience consistently shows that no security system based exclusively on balances of power has produced lasting stability. From the Peace of Westphalia to the Concert of Europe, and from there to the United Nations Charter, the most stable periods in international order have shared the same structuring principle: the restraint of power becomes sustainable only when it is translated into norms.
The alternative is familiar and anything but theoretical. It is a return to the logic described by Thucydides, in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That possibility remains embedded in history and available in the present. But the fact that it is historically recognizable does not make it politically acceptable. A responsible State may, of necessity, operate in a world of power relations; it should not resign itself to treating that world as the ultimate foundation of order. When it does, it ceases to manage peace and confines itself to administering the interval between one crisis and the next.
For small and vulnerable States, geographically distant from the epicenter of the conflict yet deeply exposed to its economic and strategic reverberations, the crisis in the Middle East is not a remote episode in international politics. It is a reality with concrete, immediate effects, capable of generating volatility in energy prices, disruptions in supply chains, inflationary pressures, and tighter constraints on diplomatic maneuvering. In such circumstances, geographic distance offers little protection when economic interdependence turns regional crises into systemic shocks.
It is precisely for this reason that countries such as Timor Leste have a direct interest — not only in political or humanitarian terms but also in strictly strategic terms — in the primacy of International Law and in the preservation of a functioning multilateral order. Smaller States are, by definition, the most dependent on a system in which rules moderate the exercise of power and legal legitimacy provides some degree of protection against asymmetries of force. When the international order drifts away from that principle, it is the most vulnerable who first bear the costs of instability and the last to possess the means to counter it.
Strategic resilience for these States, therefore, cannot be understood simply as a matter of sound economic management or administrative prudence. It requires diversified partnerships, strengthened food and energy security, investment in more robust supply chains, and deeper engagement with multilateral institutions. But it also demands a deeper conviction: that the active defense of International Law is not the rhetoric of the weak, but the rational expression of their sovereign dignity. For small States, legal norms are not an abstract luxury of the international order; they are one of the last concrete guarantees that vulnerability does not become irrelevance.
Above all, this is a moment that calls for lucidity, a sense of responsibility, and fidelity to the principles that should guide international coexistence. The nuclear file remains unresolved; Gaza is mired in a painful stalemate; Lebanon faces new forms of fragility; the risks of asymmetric retaliation persist; and the cohesion of international alliances shows strains that cannot be ignored. Against this backdrop, it would be a mistake to confuse the temporary suspension of violence with the construction of genuine peace. Peace is not born of the mere exhaustion of the parties, nor of the tactical convenience of postponing confrontation. It requires political will, diplomatic courage, and, above all, respect for a common legal framework.
It is precisely here that International Law must reassert its centrality. Not as a rhetorical ornament, nor as a selective reference invoked only when it aligns with immediate interests, but as the indispensable foundation of a more just, predictable, and humane international order. Whenever norms yield to force, everyone loses — and above all those who are most vulnerable, who have the fewest means to defend themselves in a system left to the arbitrariness of power. The international community, therefore, has a duty to understand that stability is not guaranteed by military restraint alone, but also by the patient reconstruction of trust, legitimacy, and commitment to shared rules.
The current ceasefire may well hold in the short term, and that is not a trivial achievement. Any truce that saves lives deserves to be met with hope. But for hope to be serious, it cannot dispense with truth. And the truth is that no pause will prove durable unless it is accompanied by solutions that are politically credible, legally sustainable, and morally responsible. The central lesson of this moment is perhaps the following: peace cannot be improvised; it must be built. And it is built only when power accepts limits, when diplomacy regains its primacy, and when law is once again understood as the first guarantee of human dignity and of coexistence among peoples.
* Personal opinion, not attributable to the institutions the author represents.
