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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Selective Sovereignty of Dillard

International Law, Israel, Russia, and the Problem of Geopolitical Double Standards

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: When the Law Depends on the Culprit

One of the most revealing tests of a geopolitical thinker is not whether that thinker condemns violations of international law. It is whether the same legal principles are applied when the identity of the alleged violator changes.

In his writing on Israel and Palestine, Dillard invokes international law to condemn Israeli actions and to challenge the Western governments that support them. Yet when international law is invoked against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, he appears much less willing to accept its authority, instead emphasizing Western responsibility, NATO expansion, Russian security concerns, and the geopolitical context of the war.

This contrast raises a fundamental question: Is international law a universal standard by which states should be judged, or does its authority depend on which geopolitical camp a state belongs to?

The issue is not whether Israel and Russia are identical cases. They plainly are not. Their histories, military operations, stated objectives, and relationships with neighboring populations differ in important respects. Nor does consistency require identical conclusions about every disputed legal question.

The problem arises when the underlying principle changes according to the identity of the state being judged. If international law is decisive when condemning Israel but becomes secondary to historical grievances and strategic explanations when Russia is the defendant, a double standard threatens to undermine the very legal universalism that makes the criticism of Israel compelling.

Dillard's geopolitical analysis therefore deserves scrutiny not simply for its individual conclusions, but for the consistency of the principles connecting them.

1. Dillard's Strongest Principle: No State Above the Law

Dillard's essay “Simplifying the Israel/Palestine Conflict” makes an unequivocal case for legal accountability. He argues that international law provides a way of cutting through competing historical narratives, religious claims, and ideological justifications. His objection to Ken Wilber's suggestion that Israelis and Palestinians need therapy is that psychological interpretation cannot substitute for accountability. The central question is not whether the parties possess understandable grievances, but whether their conduct complies with legal obligations.

There is much to commend in this position. International law is especially important when military power is unequal, because otherwise the stronger party can impose its preferred settlement and then portray the resulting reality as legitimate. A state's historical suffering, religious identity, or security concerns cannot automatically exempt it from legal scrutiny.

Dillard also rightly challenges Western exceptionalism: the idea that Western governments may invoke universal principles against adversaries while exempting themselves or their allies from equivalent scrutiny. His demand that international courts have jurisdiction over all states expresses a genuinely universalist aspiration.

But this principle immediately raises a question for Dillard himself. If legal accountability must constrain Israeli power, why should it not constrain Russian power? If geopolitical context cannot erase Israel's legal obligations, why should Russia's security concerns or the history of NATO expansion substantially diminish the significance of its invasion of Ukraine?

The issue is not whether Dillard is right to criticize Western hypocrisy. He often identifies real problems in Western policy. It is whether his criticism of that hypocrisy leads him toward universal accountability or toward a countervailing bias in favor of states opposed to Western power.

2. Russia: From Legal Accountability to Geopolitical Explanation

Dillard's writing on Ukraine presents a markedly different hierarchy of concerns. In “The Ukraine Crisis: An Opportunity to Wake Up Out of Groupthink,” he argues that Western governments and commentators misunderstand Russia by failing to take its perspective seriously. He attributes substantial responsibility for the crisis to Western policies, including NATO expansion, Western intervention in Ukraine, and the treatment of Russian-speaking populations in the Donbas. He also argues that Russia's invasion, while unjust in the context of international law, has a stronger rationale than various Western military interventions.

Some of these questions are legitimate and important. NATO enlargement, Western military interventions, the history of the post-Soviet settlement, and the failure of diplomacy deserve serious examination. Explaining why Russian leaders perceived Ukraine's geopolitical orientation as threatening is not the same as endorsing their response.

But Dillard's analysis goes beyond explaining Russian motives. In “Why We Are Losing the War with Russia,” he advances a justification for Russia's intervention under Article 51 of the UN Charter, presenting the war as a response to Western aggression and threats to Russian security.

That is a consequential shift. The question is no longer merely whether Western conduct helped create the conditions for war. It is whether those conditions can justify Russia's resort to force.

Under the UN Charter, the prohibition on the use of force is a foundational rule, subject to limited exceptions, including self-defence against an armed attack and action authorized by the Security Council. A state's perception of encirclement, its objections to a neighbor's alliances, or its historical grievances do not by themselves establish a legal right to invade that neighbor.

The distinction matters because a plausible explanation of a war's causes is not, in itself, a legal justification for starting it. Russia's security concerns can be investigated without treating the invasion as a lawful response. Nor does condemning the invasion require endorsing every Western policy toward Russia or Ukraine.

Dillard is therefore on firm ground when he demands that Western narratives be scrutinized. He is on much less secure ground when his alternative narrative appears to relax the legal standard that he applies so forcefully to Israel.

3. The Asymmetry of Moral Judgment

The discrepancy becomes clearer when we compare the moral vocabulary Dillard uses in the two cases.

In his analysis of Israel, Dillard treats appeals to complexity as potentially evasive. Historical grievances, security fears, religious narratives, and competing claims do not remove the need for accountability. He insists that the conflict can be evaluated through international law without allowing its many dimensions to obscure fundamental questions of justice.

In his analysis of Russia, however, complexity becomes a central corrective to what he regards as Western groupthink. The historical record of Western interventions, NATO's expansion, and Russian perceptions of encirclement take on considerable explanatory and justificatory weight. Dillard even argues that the injustice represented by Western policies is vastly greater than that represented by Russia's invasion.

There is a legitimate argument here: judging an isolated act without considering a longer pattern of violence can distort our understanding of international politics. The United States and its allies should not receive moral immunity because they describe their actions as defending democracy, just as Russia should not receive immunity because it describes its actions as defensive.

But this insight must work in both directions. A history of Western wrongdoing does not establish that Russia's conduct is lawful, just as a history of Israeli persecution or insecurity cannot settle the legality of its treatment of Palestinians.

The central inconsistency is therefore not simply that Dillard criticizes Israel more harshly than Russia. Different circumstances can justify different assessments. It is that the contextual explanations he regards as insufficient to excuse Israel acquire much greater justificatory force when the state in question is Russia.

This creates an asymmetry in which the actions of one state are judged primarily by their consequences and legal status, while those of another are judged substantially by the grievances and geopolitical pressures said to have produced them.

That is precisely the kind of selective reasoning Dillard's own critique of Western exceptionalism ought to expose.

4. International Law Is Not a Western Ideology

One possible defence of Dillard is that international law itself is applied selectively. Powerful Western states have invaded countries, conducted military operations of disputed legality, supported abusive allies, and resisted accountability. The United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, remains a major case in debates over the prohibition on the use of force. Western governments have also applied their human-rights principles inconsistently.

These are serious objections to Western moral self-congratulation. But they do not establish that international law is merely a Western instrument.

The UN Charter establishes sovereign equality and prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, subject to the Charter's legal framework and exceptions. Those principles are not reserved for liberal democracies, NATO members, or Western allies. They protect Ukraine against Russia, but they also constrain the United States, Israel, and every other state.

Indeed, international law is particularly valuable to weaker states because it provides a language in which to challenge the arbitrary exercise of power. If the principle of territorial integrity becomes subordinate to the security preferences of great powers, smaller countries are left vulnerable to precisely the coercion that a universal legal order is supposed to restrain.

Dillard's emphasis on Western hypocrisy risks turning a valid criticism into an invalid conclusion. The fact that Washington has violated international law does not mean Moscow should be allowed to violate it. The fact that Israel enjoys diplomatic protection from powerful allies does not mean Russia's geopolitical grievances create a special legal entitlement.

Nor does consistency require us to ignore differences in scale, duration, casualties, historical responsibility, or the nature of particular crimes. Those differences matter when assessing particular acts. But they cannot simply replace the legal question of whether force was lawfully used in the first place.

The relevant distinction is between criticizing the unequal enforcement of law and abandoning the idea that law should apply universally.

5. A Double Standard Hidden Inside Multiperspectivalism?

The discrepancy is especially striking because Dillard frequently presents multiperspectivalism as a corrective to ideological groupthink. He argues that Western observers fail to understand Russia because they refuse to inhabit the Russian perspective. In his account, a genuinely integral analysis must examine the world through the interpretive frameworks of different civilizations rather than simply reproduce Western assumptions.

This is a useful methodological warning. Understanding an adversary's perspective is essential to diplomacy, conflict prevention, and realistic political analysis.

Yet multiperspectivalism can itself become a form of selective identification. If one is especially suspicious of Western power, the perspectives of states resisting that power may receive disproportionate sympathy. The analyst then becomes adept at reconstructing the grievances of one side while treating the other side's claims as self-serving propaganda.

The remedy is not to abandon perspective-taking, but to distinguish three questions that are often conflated.

First, what does an actor believe, and how did those beliefs develop? Second, how much responsibility do other actors bear for creating the conditions in which that actor chose to act? Third, was the action itself lawful and morally defensible?

These questions require different forms of evidence and may yield different answers. Russia can have genuine security concerns, Western governments can have contributed to the deterioration of European security, and Russia can still be responsible for launching an unlawful invasion. Likewise, Israel can face genuine security threats while remaining accountable for its treatment of Palestinians.

An integral analysis should be capable of holding all these propositions together without treating one as a cancellation of the others.

If multiperspectivalism instead becomes a method of redistributing blame away from whichever actor the analyst sympathizes with, it ceases to be a discipline of understanding and becomes an instrument of political apologetics.

6. The Difference Between Condemning Hypocrisy and Excusing Aggression

Dillard's underlying concern about Western hypocrisy deserves to be taken seriously. The international order has never applied its rules consistently, and powerful states often enjoy forms of impunity unavailable to weaker ones. Condemning Russia while overlooking comparable Western conduct is intellectually inadequate.

But the opposite response is equally inadequate: condemning Western violations while minimizing Russian responsibility.

The UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force does not become irrelevant because the state invoking it has violated it elsewhere. Nor does a state's legal obligation disappear because its adversary has committed other violations. International law would be impossible to sustain if every state could answer an accusation by pointing to the previous misconduct of its accuser.

The same distinction applies to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Condemning unlawful Israeli actions does not require minimizing Hamas's crimes, overlooking the rights and security of Israeli civilians, or assuming that every Palestinian political claim is justified. Conversely, condemning Hamas does not absolve Israel of its own legal obligations.

A coherent universalism rejects this logic of reciprocal exemption. It asks what each actor did, what rules apply, what evidence supports the allegations, and what accountability is warranted.

The standard should not be that every side is equally guilty. It should be that no side's guilt or innocence is decided in advance by its geopolitical identity.

Conclusion: The Test of Universalism

Dillard has identified a genuine weakness in Western political discourse: the tendency to present Western power as the defender of universal values while treating international law as an inconvenience when it constrains Western governments or their allies.

His criticism of Israel draws strength from precisely the opposite aspiration: a world in which political power does not exempt states from accountability.

The difficulty is that his writing on Russia appears to compromise that aspiration. Where Israel's conduct is subjected to a strongly legal and moral assessment, Russia's invasion is situated within a broader narrative of Western provocation, strategic encirclement, and civilizational hypocrisy. The latter considerations are relevant to explaining the conflict, but they do not independently establish that Russia's use of force was lawful.

The resulting discrepancy is not resolved by pointing to Western crimes. Nor is it resolved by insisting that Russia and Israel are identical. They are not. What matters is whether the same fundamental legal principles remain applicable when the circumstances change.

Dillard's own demand that international courts exercise jurisdiction over all states offers a standard by which his analysis can be tested. If accountability is universal, Russia must face the same demand for legal justification that Dillard directs at Israel. If historical context matters, it must be considered in both cases without allowing explanation to become exoneration. And if Western hypocrisy is a problem, its correction cannot consist of granting geopolitical rivals a different kind of immunity.

The ultimate question is whether Dillard's opposition to Western exceptionalism leads to a genuinely universal conception of justice or to a reversal of the hierarchy of moral suspicion.

International law cannot function as a universal standard if its authority rises and falls with the identity of the accused. The decisive test of principle is not whether we condemn the conduct of states we oppose. It is whether we are willing to apply the same standards to states whose geopolitical resistance we welcome.

That is where Dillard's geopolitical analysis faces its most important challenge: not in its willingness to criticize the West, but in its willingness to subject Russia to the same uncompromising scrutiny.