It is hard to imagine any other U.S. president responding with such contempt for the law of war. In November 2019, Trump was preparing to offer clemency to Mathew Golsteyn, Clint Lorance, and Eddie Gallagher. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley recalled the chilling response he received when urging Trump to reconsider. After telling him, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime,” Trump reportedly demurred: “You guys … are all just killers. What’s the difference?”Footnote ¹ The words were telling. Trump saw U.S. servicemembers as agents of death, as “killing machines.” For him, the Geneva Conventions were mere formalities, not to be taken seriously, and not to be shown public deference.

Chapters 1–5 explained how Trump has shattered a consensus, solidified after the signing of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, that Western leaders would at least pay lip service to international humanitarian law (IHL). But as the impunity agenda escalates, what lessons can be drawn from Trump’s experience, and his return to power? This final chapter closes with several forward-looking discussions. Section 6.1 highlights practical takeaways from the book for IHL policymakers and practitioners. Section 6.2 explores what, if anything, can be done to curb the impunity agenda at its source. Sections 6.3 and 6.4 examine the future of Trump’s impunity agenda, both in America and globally, including in major conflicts involving Russia and Israel. Section 6.4 poses questions for further research.

6.1 Practical Takeaways

For policymakers and practitioners, several practical takeaways from the book stand out. Most notably, for stewards of the Geneva Conventions, the Trump case underscores the imperative of not taking for granted public deference to IHL as a “first duty” of signatory nations. Historically, most of the focus on the Geneva Conventions has been on ensuring point-by-point, legalistic compliance with technical provisions. However, Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions formally demands that party states first “undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.”Footnote ² This requires two-sided reciprocity: nations must publicly uphold IHL to qualify for its safeguards by demonstrating broad deference to its principles and values.Footnote ³

This first duty is even more demanding than it appears. In 2016, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a new “Commentaries” on the Geneva Conventions for the first time in over sixty years, clarifying that party states have both a “positive” and a “negative” duty to uphold IHL.Footnote ⁴ Under the conventional, negative duty, “High Contracting Parties may neither encourage, nor aid or assist in violations of the Conventions by Parties to a conflict.” Under the positive duty, however, they must go beyond this requirement to “do everything reasonably in their power to prevent and bring such violations to an end.” This positive duty can again be construed as a responsibility to proactively ensure that third parties and other nations visibly respect IHL.

These obligations matter because, for centuries, armed fighters have committed atrocities on the battlefield, often with the tacit or explicit support of political leaders. By viewing the recent past, an era defined by a professed commitment to the Geneva Conventions, as the exception, experts can more appropriately weigh the risk of open challenges to IHL in the West. The failure of even party states to outwardly defer to the Geneva Conventions may give fodder for skeptics to question the integrity of their protocols. The public may lose confidence in the institution, especially given an inability to prevent many atrocities. A “domino effect” may also result in leaders of party states refusing to pay public respect to IHL when others do the same. This, in turn, could aid in delegitimizing IHL.

The Trump case not only underlines the limits of U.S. hegemony in fostering public respect for the law of war abroad. It also raises a question of how much other nations will follow suit when America’s leader expressly champions illicit acts in combat. Given its superpower status and military dominance, a key source of America’s “soft power” has traditionally been setting normative precedents regarding outward respect for the Geneva Conventions.Footnote ⁵ By failing to live up to its own ethical standards, however, the U.S. will be unable to admonish other countries that fail to honor the Geneva Conventions. Unless other nations step into this role, it again heightens the risks that other leaders will also “revise deviancy downward,” and ultimately, overtly reject IHL.

Shifting next to Western militaries, this book highlights the importance of taking concrete steps to preempt public challenges to the law of war. This includes efforts to inoculate troops against ideological subcultures where unofficial norms inspired by political actors can degrade the military’s official ethos. Under Trump, respect for IHL was jeopardized not just via policies but also verbally to a rare degree. Trump showed how political messaging could contravene rules and norms that servicemembers learn in basic training. This may inform what types of counter-messaging can blunt its negative effects. Commanders, trainers, and legal officers within Western militaries could leverage lessons to improve curricula, operations manuals, and field exercises related to IHL.

As part of this training, Western militaries need to instill in troops, in apolitical terms, that upholding the law of war is not just an ethical imperative but a strategic one. Discounting the value of IHL or committing war crimes can jeopardize long-term tactical objectives, especially in contexts with high levels of interaction with local populations. As political scientist Janina Dill has observed, “Figuring out how to fight wars without the long-term alienation of the civilian population is the critical strategic task…. (whispered: it’s also a legal requirement & moral imperative.)”Footnote ⁶ Ethical lapses in conflict put a target on the backs of Western combatants, even in peacekeeping missions, and also make affected populaces more likely to align with rebel groups or terrorist organizations.

In the U.S. military, Trump’s presidency also exposed worrying levels of right-wing extremism among current and ex-servicemembers who devalue IHL. Military leaders insist that they have a “no tolerance” policy for extremism, and that existing regulations already bar memberships in hate groups.Footnote ⁷ However, as evidenced by January 6, enforcement remains inadequate. Needed is more systematic screening of recruits and training of commanders about how to identify and deal with threats. The balance, however, comes in distinguishing between radical behavior and simply right-leaning opinions. The perception that militaries are targeting Republicans or Trump voters will not only provoke backlash and hurt recruitment effortsFootnote ⁸ but also weaken military readiness.

For judges, prosecutors, and other legal actors within Western militaries, the Trump case further calls attention to the limits of their authority. Ultimately, a commander-in-chief can overrule lower-ranking officials in prosecutions and sentences. This raises the stakes of getting as close to “right” as possible elements of jurisprudence that subordinates do control. Flaws in the court system increase the likelihood that future leaders, legitimately or not, grant military clemencies. This could make such interventions seem more routine, and thus justifiable. In the U.S., achieving just outcomes may require conceding that some proposals for military justice reform, such as the requirement for unanimous verdicts,Footnote ⁹ have merit or that judicial procedures could be made better or more transparent.

Next, for civilian governments in the West, the Trump case offers reason to rethink how existing democratic guardrails fail to guarantee public commitments to IHL. In the U.S., much of the attention on Trump’s rule-breaking has centered on institutions such as Congress, elections, or the free press.Footnote ¹⁰ Experts have observed the hazards of Trump’s military leadership,Footnote ¹¹ especially for civil-military relations,Footnote ¹² but without a paradigm for how it fits into a larger political agenda. However, Trump relied on many of the same tactics and allies to disrupt both domestic checks on his power and the law of war. This calls attention to an emergent, but often overlooked, threat: how open attacks on IHL and those on national institutions can go hand in hand.

The failures of democratic guardrails to impede the impunity agenda heighten the responsibility of civic leaders, when possible, to strengthen cultural respect for the law of war. For elected officials, the institutionalization of efforts to minimize civilian harm and strengthen the military justice system should be paramount. While such initiatives may not always prevent leaders from flagrantly violating the law of war, they may reduce collateral damage. Task forces and “blue ribbon” commissions can get these initiatives underway. However, “bureaucratizing” reforms, through the creation of permanent, inter-agency administrative and staffing positions, may be more effective.Footnote ¹³ Advice and input from military experts can secure buy-in and forge bipartisan consensus.

In the U.S., notable developments have occurred on this front, even if it is unclear whether some can survive four more years of Trump. One is the 2023 creation of the DoD’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE), which emerged from the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan approved by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2022. The Center’s aim is to serve as “the hub and facilitator of Department-wide analysis, learning, and strategic approaches” that “institutionalize[s] good practices for civilian harm mitigation and response during operations.”Footnote ¹⁴ As part of the initiative, the CP CoE supports operational command, crafts policy doctrine, and facilitates research. Following Trump’s inauguration, however, the administration put in place potential plans to “disestablish” the office.Footnote ¹⁵

Structural reform also took root during the Biden administration in how criminal charges are brought within the military. Traditionally, senior military commanders have held nearly total discretion over charging crimes in their units, with little oversight. The result had been acute disparities in charge rates that have fueled suspicions of selective prosecutions.Footnote ¹⁶ In 2022, Congress used the National Defense Authorization Act to transfer prosecutions for numerous crimes away from commanders and to military lawyers who report to civilian service secretaries.Footnote ¹⁷ In 2023, Joe Biden signed a largely bipartisan executive order amending the UCMJ to assign decision-making in serious offenses, including murder, to specialized, independent military prosecutors.Footnote ¹⁸

Although not applying to U.S. combatants, Congress in 2022 also passed the Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act, which aims to promote accountability for global violations of IHL.Footnote ¹⁹ Under the prior War Crimes Act of 1996, U.S. authorities had been restricted from prosecuting alleged war criminals unless either the victim or offender was an American national. With the reform, the only requirement for bringing charges is that the suspect be arrested on U.S. soil. While the bill was introduced in response to Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, it extends to any foreign combatant accused of war crimes visiting or residing in the U.S. Advocates say that the law reflects America’s commitment to ensuring that the country does not become a safe haven for war criminals.

Finally, for humanitarian organizations seeking to advance IHL and security sector reform, this book highlights that large-scale programming cannot be enacted divorced from political context. Despite outsized investments into initiatives to bolster IHL promotion,Footnote ²⁰ much is unknown about how macro-level political variables interact with meso-level leadership to foster, or undermine, humanitarian goals. Practitioners typically concentrate on instilling combat ethics at the unit or subunit level. Yet the Trump experience reveals how leaders, alongside other state and nonstate actors, can openly subvert law of war principles. Programmatic efforts to uphold IHL may fail when influential figures, to whom combatants have a political affinity, dismiss its basic precepts.

These insights can encourage global human rights organizations, such as the ICRC or Geneva Call, to recognize vulnerabilities caused by state leadership that impinge on military ethics programs. An impediment, however, is the paucity of knowledge about how the effects of training initiatives are conditioned by politics. When organizations like the ICRC partner with armed groups to help instill norms of restraints, evaluations are critical to assess efficacy and identify “best practices.” However, internal and external politics, budget constraints, and fears of exposing poor performance may disincentivize scrutiny. This underlines the importance of donors and contributing governments insisting on the establishment of long-term, independent monitoring of IHL programs.

These challenges highlight the need for humanitarian organizations to apply appropriate social science methods to test pro-IHL initiatives. While surveys and randomized controlled trials are indispensable tools, researchers cannot always manipulate political dynamics that affect military cultures surrounding IHL. This makes it essential to integrate innovative empirical techniques, such as exploiting natural and quasi-natural experiments, to explore a wider set of questions and to improve causal identification.Footnote ²¹ In-depth qualitative case studies may also help to illuminate causal chains from how a leader’s behavior shapes the attitudes of combatants toward IHL. Collaborating with academics, think tanks, and freelance scholars can enhance evaluation quality.

6.2 Can Anything Stop Impunity at the Source?

Besides addressing its downstream consequences, can the impunity agenda be stopped at its source? Later, several possible remedies are examined. These include “nonbinding” methods that lack enforcement power but could tilt public opinion away from impunity or make the calculus of overtly straining IHL less appealing. They also include “binding” methods that could legally constrain executives or hold them accountable for wrongdoing. The main challenge, however, lies in execution. In light of both Trump’s return to power and international obstacles to change, the prospects for short- to medium-term reform appear bleak. U.S. presidents are highly likely to retain considerable discretion, both formal and informal, in whether to defer to the law of war.

6.3 The End of IHL?

When Trump first took over as commander-in-chief in 2017, many experts predicted that his most controversial pledges to openly challenge the law of war would be stifled. The logic was that governing was different than campaigning, and that attacking IHL would fade into the backdrop. While some of Trump’s promises turned out to be hollow, others clearly did not. What Trump did prove was that it was not impossible for an American executive to put the Geneva Conventions in the crosshairs. He also proved it was not disqualifying of a second term. Whether Trump’s excesses marked the start of a new trend, or were simply the byproduct of an anomalous presidency, remains unclear. What seems inevitable is that the political dividends paid to the impunity coalition will not be lost on other leaders.

Skeptics may doubt the transformative impact of Trump’s ongoing record on IHL. Their case is that Trump’s war crime clemencies, despite being widely condemned, were still isolated events. Moreover, despite his bellicose language, absent from Trump’s resume are some of the most reckless military misadventures that marred his predecessors. Before Trump, every American president since Jimmy Carter had embroiled the U.S. in a new foreign war.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Trump’s Pentagon, at least so far, has not been marked by a full-scale return to torture or stained by acts of prisoner abuse. There has been no broad, official pullback from within the military in fulfilling combat ethics. Trump has crowed about carrying a big stick and taking a cocked-and-loaded gun to the Geneva Conventions. But his words have frequently ended in bluffs.

Certain observers still see Trump as operating within conventional parameters of international law, albeit with a marked aversion to the global, laws-based system. For example, political scientists Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry have claimed that Trump is simply one component of “an ongoing and necessary, if sometimes ugly, equilibration of the arrangements underlying the institutions of the liberal world order.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet even as prior U.S. leaders may have gone further in obvious noncompliance, Trump’s undermining of the existential need for IHL has culminated in an important set of “firsts.” Trump is the first U.S. commander-in-chief to openly attack the value of the Geneva Conventions. He is also the first to offer a stark, opposing vision of how the rule of law should apply, if at all, to military justice.

These firsts diverge fundamentally from past American leaders who flouted the laws of war, but always in private or with rationalizations. Trump favors overturning IHL to reforming it from within. He disregards not only specific legal statutes, but the very concept of IHL as a dispensable anachronism. This is why many experts see Trump as a much more radical saboteur of international law. For instance, barrister Stefan Talmon has dubbed Trump a “gravedigger of international law” and accused him of ushering in a new era of “international law nihilism.”Footnote ¹²¹ Law professor Oona Hathaway has claimed that “the Trump administration … waged an assault on international law unparalleled in the post-war era”Footnote ¹²² and that IHL now faces an “existential challenge.”Footnote ¹²³

While an intellectual defense of Trump on IHL might emphasize the layers of restrictions the U.S. has placed on combatants that exceed those required by the Geneva Convention, such arguments are rarely made with nuance. Instead, the administration’s tendency has been to attack the foundations of IHL. Pete Hegseth, for instance, summed up the Trump view of IHL as follows: “what an America-first national security policy is not going to do … is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.”Footnote ¹²⁴ If Trump was trying to send a signal about his approach toward IHL in a second term, his pick of Hegseth could not have made a more emphatic declaration.

If Trump does represent a new prototype of Western leader averse to paying outward deference to the Geneva Conventions, this still does not mean that respect for IHL is careening toward inevitable, or even likely, collapse. Public deference to the law of war may be less sturdy than supposed. But it is not anchored in shifting sand. Democratic leaders, including in America, have historically paid lip service to IHL not because of the law’s overriding enforcement power, but because of perceived constraints that other executives, unlike Trump, may still be hesitant to challenge. In most Western countries, respect for IHL remains intact. Yet even if high costs of deviation promote public deference to the Geneva Conventions, Trump proves that this status quo is not absolute, even in the West.

Trump’s second election offers reason to think that public respect for IHL is tenuous. This is true within America. It looks even truer in conflict zones abroad. Nowhere has this been more visible than with Israel and Russia in their respective wars against Hamas and Ukraine. While the wars themselves are enormously different, and neither involves Western democracies, clear parallels to Trump’s impunity agenda can be seen in each. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin have made statements inimical to IHL. Like Trump, they have also relied on state and media actors to press their agenda, with military support. The cases are particularly relevant given America’s close alliance with Israel and Trump’s past rapport with Putin.

With Israel, debates continue to rage over whether the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have perpetrated war crimes as part of retaliating against Hamas following the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.Footnote ¹²⁵ Despite disagreements over casualty numbers, estimated death tolls in the tens of thousands in Gaza have intensified accusations of genocide.Footnote ¹²⁶ The ICC has alleged crimes against Netanyahu including “starvation of civilians,” “willfully causing great suffering,” “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population,” and “other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity.”Footnote ¹²⁷ One UN spokesperson cited Israel’s “impunity.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet regardless of opinions on Israel’s compliance with the law, it is undeniable that many of the nation’s leaders have publicly diminished the significance of IHL.

As leader, Netanyahu has made several explicit statements calling into question military norms of restraint. Reportedly, he told Joe Biden that alleged disproportionate bombings in Gaza were justified because the U.S. “carpet-bombed Germany” and “dropped the atom bomb” during World War II where “[a] lot of civilians died.”Footnote ¹²⁹ In a now-deleted comment on X, Netanyahu claimed that Israel’s fight was against “the children of darkness” who followed “the law of the jungle.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In a TV address referencing Palestine, Netanyahu alluded to the “Amalekites,” a group in the Bible whom God commanded to be annihilated, including women, children, and infants. According to a journalist, “Amalek is a code word … for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.”Footnote ¹³¹

Inside government, public statements by several Israeli officials have shown even greater disregard for IHL. For example, Israeli President Isaac Herzog suggested that the Palestinian people could be militarily targeted because “[i]t’s an entire nation out there that is responsible [for terrorism],” including “civilians.”Footnote ¹³² More explicit was Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, who pronounced that “‘every school, every mosque, every second house’ in Gaza is a legitimate target for the Israeli military.”Footnote ¹³³ Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu further advocated detonating a nuclear bomb in Gaza because “no uninvolved” civilians lived there.Footnote ¹³⁴ Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said that Israel had no option except to foment a “Gaza Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Outside of government, Israeli leadership has relied on the media to bolster public favorability for its conduct. For example, a writer for a left-leaning British newspaper claimed that “[t]he far right infiltration of Israel’s media is blinding the public to the truth about Gaza.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Another journalist accused Israeli news outlets of serving as a “propaganda arm” that is “completely ignoring Palestinian casualties.”Footnote ¹³⁷ As part of its information campaign, Israel passed legislation enabling it to shutter any global media network that it deemed biased against the war effort. Authorities banned the Al Jazeera network from operating inside the countryFootnote ¹³⁸ and seized video equipment from the Associated Press.Footnote ¹³⁹ Experts have also raised concerns about Israeli media self-censorship in light of government crackdowns.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Inside Israel’s military, language directly contrary to IHL has spread among high-ranking officials. For example, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari avowed that Israel’s primary military focus was on inflicting “what causes maximum damage” in Gaza.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant disparaged Palestinians as a “beastly people” while bragging about executing “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” where there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel.” He added that “[w]e are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”Footnote ¹⁴² The words prompted a rebuke from the UN’s top human rights officer, who affirmed that “sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival [are] … prohibited under international humanitarian law.”Footnote ¹⁴³

On the battlefield, IDF combatants have sparked international outrage for gloating about exploits against noncombatants. This includes using TikTok and other social media platforms to broadcast the destruction of civilian sites in Gaza. A New York Times analysis, for instance, found evidence of more than fifty videos of the IDF using “bulldozers, excavators and explosives to destroy what appear to be houses, schools and other civilian buildings.” In one video, an IDF reservist overlaid clips of a destroyed Gaza house while playing a parody of the popular Israeli tune “This Was My Home.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ A Wall Street Journal report discovered social media posts revealing “stripped and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners and troops inside homes in Gaza boasting about looting property.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

As evidence of the overtness with which IHL has been challenged in Israel, one group of well-known Israeli lawmakers, scientists, and scholars penned an open, eleven-page letter in January 2024 lamenting what they called “the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge” that had become rife among public and military officials, media figures, and others. The letter stated that “[f]or the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes … against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse.” It further raised concerns about the potential military impact, noting that “[n]ormalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers conduct themselves.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Trump, according to one analysis, has mostly responded to the Gaza conflict by “not publicly call[ing] for Israel to show restraint or try to limit civilian casualties.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ One of Trump’s key GOP allies, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said on Fox News that Israel should “level” Gaza.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Notable is that Trump worked with Netanyahu in 2020 as part of an attempt to sanction the ICC. While the effort was largely aimed at forestalling prosecutions against U.S. forces, the ICC’s scrutiny of Israel also played a role.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Echoing Trumpian language, Netanyahu called the court “obsessed with carrying out a witch-hunt against Israel and the United States.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Later, he urged the Biden White House to maintain sanctions on the ICC following a judgment that its jurisdiction included occupied Palestinian land.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The Trump–Netanyahu relationship shows how foreign policy interactions can advance the impunity agenda across borders. For example, in the 2024 U.S. election, the broad consensus was that Netanyahu clearly preferred Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, with one expert noting, “If Netanyahu were able to vote, he would have gladly cast it for Trump … because he believes a Trump administration would be far more deferential toward Israel.”Footnote ¹⁵² According to polling, Netanyahu’s military aggression in Gaza arguably made it more difficult for Harris to win over Arab-American and pro-Palestinian voters, a key demographic in swing states like Michigan. Simultaneously, Trump’s win made it more probable that Netanyahu could carry out military actions with limited regard for IHL.

Trump’s rhetoric concerning the war in Gaza only hardened after his 2024 election, strengthening the perception that he was willing to give a “green light” to Netanyahu’s military plans. In a tweet before his inauguration and in advance of the cease-fire brokered in January 2025, Trump demanded that unless Hamas released Israeli prisoners, there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East.” Trump further declared that “[t]hose responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”Footnote ¹⁵³ One expert noted that “Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election could not have come at a better time for … Netanyahu” as the Israeli leader pursued a Middle Eastern realignment that included a decisive Israeli victory and the stymieing of Iran’s proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Shortly after entering office, Trump again provoked widespread denunciation in February 2025 after he declared from the White House that the U.S. might “take over” Gaza and “own it,” turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Trump’s comments led UN Secretary-General António Guterres to warn against “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ They also led some to accuse Trump of sounding “more like a real estate developer than an American president.”Footnote ^156, Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The remarks came on the heels of earlier comments by Trump that Gaza was essentially a “demolition site” and that the U.S. may have to “clean out the whole thing” while resettling Palestinians.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The threat, if carried out, would almost certainly violate international law prohibiting the forced transfer of populations.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Apart from Israel, Russian leadership has also been condemned for openly disregarding IHL. Specifically, Putin has been accused of committing numerous war crimes, including genocide, as part of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In March 2023, the ICC charged Putin with the IHL violation of abducting and deporting Ukrainian children.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Reports have documented Russian strikes on civilian centers, including hospitals, schools, and playgrounds.Footnote ¹⁶² As one analyst observed, “[Russia] is not … waging war according to the laws of war and the Geneva Convention…. We are revisiting the rules we thought were a given.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Another expert insisted that Putin’s war crimes “are part and parcel of what Russia is trying to achieve in Ukraine … they are a feature, not a bug.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Putin has consistently used rhetoric against Ukraine that overtly dismisses global laws guaranteeing national sovereignty. As a rationale for Russia’s invasion, he explicitly attacked the idea of Ukrainian nationhood and self-determination.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Putin has also pushed zealously for what he labels “denazification” in Ukraine, which, as one journalist notes, implies “the elimination of people” and is used as a “justification for endless war and cleansing.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In undercutting the principle of proportionality, Putin declared that if any nations tried to stop Russia from occupying Ukraine, they would trigger “consequences that you have never faced in your history.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ According to one journalist, Russia’s messaging on Ukraine has turned “fully genocidal.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Inside government, prominent Russian officials have intensified such rhetoric. A 2024 article for Just Security published a comprehensive collection of “eliminationist rhetoric against Ukraine”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ featuring numerous inflammatory quotes by Russian state leaders. Among them, Putin ally and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitri Medvedev disparaged “pseudo-Ukrainian rabid mongrels with Russian surnames, choking on their toxic saliva.” Boris Chernyshov, a state Duma member, said that Russia’s war in Ukraine was “an expression of our hatred, our holy hatred” and called for Ukrainians to “freeze and rot.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlyov advocated “re-installing” the brains of Ukrainians, asserting that “a maximum of 5% are incurable” and should be “destroyed.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Outside of government, Russian state media has played a significant role in justifying violence against civilians. A UN Human Rights Council official observed that “rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide.”Footnote ¹⁷² For example, Pavel Gubarev, a public figure, said on Russian television, “We will kill as many … [Ukrainians] as we have to. We will kill 1 million or 5 million, we can exterminate all of you.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Anton Krasovskyi, former broadcasting director of Russia’s RT network, declared that the proper response to Russia’s opponents is to “[s]hove them right into those huts and burn them up … [because Ukraine] is not supposed to exist at all.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ RT host Vladimir Solovyov compared Russia’s war in Ukraine to the “deworming” of a cat.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Within the Russian Armed Forces, high-ranking leaders have also used genocidal language targeted at Ukrainian civilians. For instance, Apti Alaudinov, a commander of the Akhmat Special Forces, demanded that Russia “purge … itself of this filth [Ukrainians] that permeates our society.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Vasily Fatigarov, a retired officer in Russia’s military, called Ukraine a “cancerous tumor” that needs to be “purif[ied] … very precisely, very severely, … [to] ensure that that fascist infection doesn’t grow anywhere else.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ One Russian soldier said that his orders from the top were to “[k]ill everyone,” and that “[i]t does not matter whether they’re civilians or not.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Ukrainian civilians have reportedly been told that they could be victimized by bioweapons.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

On the conflict’s front lines, graphic content depicting war crimes, including executions and acts of sexual violence, has become common among pro-Russian groups.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In a particularly grisly case of rewarding such behavior, Putin granted an honorary military title to a unit implicated in a massacre resulting in mass civilian graves.Footnote ¹⁸¹ One analysis reported that the Ukraine war has so inured the Russian population to barbarity that “methods of torture once only spoken about in witness testimonials are now being promoted online by the perpetrators … for bragging rights.”Footnote ¹⁸² Another account described “no attempt [by Russia] to hide a desire to target ordinary people.”Footnote ¹⁸³ One scholar remarked that Russian authorities are now “almost advertising genocide” by the military.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

According to some analysis, Russia’s overt assaults on IHL in Ukraine had their precursors in the Trump years. For example, in late 2019, coinciding closely with Trump handing down his war crime clemencies, Putin made Russia the first country to formally revoke its commitment to Additional Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions, aimed at protecting noncombatants.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Legal scholar David M. Crane referred to the edict as part of a broader “movement away from a global approach to the rule of law” that, in a tie-in to Trump, had become apparent in the “Age of the Strongman.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Later in 2023, Putin followed this act by de-ratifying the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which makes it illegal to participate in nuclear weapons explosions and testing.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Critics have accused Trump of emboldening Putin to commit atrocities. This included for failing to condemn Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilians, for calling Putin a “genius” and “savvy” for his incursion into Eastern Europe,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ and even for saying that he might “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In refusing to expressly condemn Putin, Trump remarked, “If you say [Putin]’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make … [the war in Ukraine] stopped.” He further lamented, “If he’s going to be a war criminal, people are going to grab him and execute him.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Later, Putin defended Trump against his own alleged criminality in an act described by one journalist as “Trump get[ting] a sympathetic shout-out from his favorite war criminal.”Footnote ¹⁹¹

Like with Netanyahu, Trump’s rapport with Putin arguably contributed to Trump’s 2024 election win, while simultaneously fueling the impunity agenda in Russia. Despite Putin jokingly expressing a preference for Kamala Harris,Footnote ¹⁹² the conventional wisdom held that Trump’s agenda for Russia’s war better served Putin’s interest. As one writer put it, “the biggest attraction for the Kremlin when it comes to Trump, of course, is his stance on Ukraine.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Polling showed that Trump’s promise to end the war “in one day” and his running mate JD Vance’s sharp criticism of aid to Kiev appealed to war-weary American voters.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ At the same time, it signaled to the Kremlin that Ukrainian land concessions and limited accountability for Putin would be the price to pay for any cease-fire.

In the cases of Netanyahu and Putin, the narrative is not merely one of the impunity agenda gaining traction in ways that parallel Trump. Instead, they demonstrate how this agenda can penetrate even more deeply in settings where formal and informal pushback against IHL violations is minimal. As established earlier, the U.S. should be a hard case in which to overtly challenge IHL because it has established guardrails and norms that protect against such behavior. Those constraints, however, are mostly weaker or absent elsewhere, allowing “strongman”-type leaders to make statements and to take military actions that openly flout the law of war. Where leaders want to enact an impunity agenda, clearing the path by removing executive constraints may be a first step for Trump imitators.

Nowhere are executive constraints more limited than in many fledgling nondemocracies. Beyond the Gaza and Ukraine wars, an important case comes from the civil conflict in Myanmar, where, according to political scientist Brian Klaas, Trump gave military leaders “fresh rhetorical ammunition” to carry out a coup in 2021, just weeks after he first left office.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ After the siege, UN experts reported on a “dramatic increase in war crimes and crimes against humanity” that grew “increasingly frequent and brazen.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ In describing the junta’s violent overthrow, one writer observed “parallels” with Trump that were “striking.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn later said that there was “no reason” a Myanmar-style coup should not happen in the U.S.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

As these examples portend, Trump’s open disregard of IHL could have far-reaching consequences beyond the U.S., and even the West. Historian Anne Applebaum, for example, has observed that, in the aftermath of Trump’s first term, “We are heading into an era when there is no order, rules-based or otherwise, at all,” adding that “like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order – the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict – we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The dystopian notion of the U.S. entering a world of no rules-based order at all may be too strong. Yet what seems evident is that Trump has severely hampered global efforts to advance respect for IHL.

The Trump case reinforces the importance of individual leadership in shaping both national and global cultures around IHL. Although nation-states can be held accountable for violating the law of war, the Nuremberg trials emphasized an enduring lesson: “Crimes against international law are committed by men, not abstract entities … [I]ndividuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ These men (and women) include combatants expected to abide by international regimes that restrain the use of force. However, they also include leaders who maintain responsibilities to protect laws both ad bellum (laws governing the right to go to war) and in bello (laws governing conduct in war).

To be clear, there is no evidence that Trump has, implicitly or explicitly, endorsed the actual execution of grievous war crimes such as civilian targeting, rape, or torture. However, his incendiary remarks about the value of IHL, his insistence that rules of war be remade or expunged, and his handpicking of advisers who have not been shy about their desire to roll back the protections of the Geneva Conventions could erode respect for the law of war. Moreover, Trump’s turning a blind eye to war crimes by U.S. combatants, and downplaying their significance, increases the chance that a new precedent is being set – that following the law of war is voluntary. More war crime clemencies by Trump during his second term would only increase these concerns.

Almost certainly, Trump’s overt challenges to IHL have the potential to inspire more reneging from international law, both in Washington and globally. A grim reality is that even before Trump, the U.S. was already trending toward the adoption of policies that placed fewer restrictions on the use of military force – similar policies of which had been adopted by several of its allies and foes alike. Consider U.S. policies since 9/11 that have broadened the definitions of self-defense, as well as enabled fewer restrictions on strikes against “dual-use” targets, which serve both civilian and military purposes. The impunity agenda’s successes only make it more likely that future leaders will push for loosened interpretations of the law of war, without the need to publicly justify them.

Meanwhile, the normalization of an anti-IHL agenda in the US risks further hobbling efforts at both domestic and global accountability for alleged war crimes. Legal expert Michael N. Schmitt, for example, has warned of “attention deficit disorder” and “outrage fatigue” regarding the law of armed conflict, leading to desensitization to its breaches.Footnote ²⁰¹ Similarly, the head of the ICRC has talked about the “increasing elasticity” in how militaries apply IHL, reducing the likelihood of prosecuting violations.Footnote ²⁰² Some of these challenges may be attributable not just to doctrinaire debates over the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions – what is and is not permissible in combat – but how IHL as a general concept is treated and respected by leaders.

Such problems are only likely to intensify as technological advancements and more complex forms of combat, including cyberwarfare, become standard practice.Footnote ²⁰³ In areas where there is even less legal precedent and more ambiguity in how IHL applies, new norms may reflect the priorities of leaders. The U.S. government has declared that cyber operations can constitute an illegal use of force, comparable to dropping a bomb or carrying out a drone strike, though the determination is ultimately “effects-based.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ An open question is how states carry out their own modern fighting tactics in the context of IHL, such as potentially deadly computer network attacks and government-sponsored hacks. The second Trump White House may be the first U.S. administration to tackle these questions on a broad scale.

Related is how the Trump administration is likely to approach AI-enabled warfare. American software firm Palantir, for example, has been at the forefront in using algorithms, powered by satellite and sensor data, to increase battlefield lethality. This work involves executing so-called “kill chains” to automate the process of finding and eliminating adversaries. However, major questions loom over the protocols encoded into these algorithms, such as when controls shift from AI to humans and how civilian casualties are assessed. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has acknowledged that “one thing … that’s not quite understood is that there’s an ethics to AI in the military,” and that, for now, “you can’t just have … the algorithm decide when to engage … [and] what distance from a hospital or a school can a target be taken.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ Such questions will be left up to Trump’s DoD.

Also unclear is how far Washington will go in trying to prevent IHL violations from being carried out with American dollars and weaponry.Footnote ²⁰⁶ While U.S. domestic law prohibits military and intelligence support that could be deployed to breach IHL, critics argue that some U.S. aid has done exactly that. In 2024, for example, Amnesty International accused the U.S. of “complicity” in alleged Israeli war crimes.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Another report found that U.S. officials in Israel “have gone to great lengths to preserve continued access to US weapons for the units responsible for … alleged violations,” fostering what it called a “sense of impunity.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ Compared to the Biden White House, the Trump team, marked by an indifference to IHL, may place even less emphasis on ensuring accountability for U.S. aid.

Ultimately, Trump’s “America First” agenda accords with a broader, inward-looking approach to the law of war. Its neo-sovereigntist critique – which views international law, including IHL, as robbing countries of their own abilities to govern – rejects counter-party rules as a basis for foreign policy.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In its place, Trump’s agenda supports “go-it-alone” pursuits where countries become solo arbiters of the law. Such belligerent isolationism could lead to the gratuitous discounting of IHL because it fails to recognize the centrality of binding constraints. This includes constitutional checks regarding when and how the president wields force abroad. Law professor Tess Bridgeman, for example, has stated that Trump will be remembered for his “expansive – and sometimes lawless – claims of authority to take military action.”Footnote ²¹⁰

At stake, therefore, may not just be America’s posture toward IHL specifically, international law generally, or even the particular foreign policies of a president or sequence of presidents. In the worst case, it may be respect for the transnational, Kantian order.Footnote ²¹¹ The hard-earned victories achieved by diplomats, world leaders, and military attachés that resulted in the signing of the Geneva Conventions did not spontaneously emerge. Instead, they were the product of labor to curb centuries of unspeakable tragedies in war. America has played a central role in this project, even if it has been imperfect in complying. Conceivably, in the long run, Trump’s overt denigration of IHL could prove destabilizing. Dents to IHL may not lead to its wholesale fracturing. However, the risk is that more cracks will.

The fact that some of these overt challenges to the norms of restraint could spill over into the U.S. military’s use domestically only deepens the stakes. January 6 showed the damage that could be wrought by a sizable military population with a leader’s prodding. A concerning prospect is a U.S. president formally summoning the military against American civilians. Trump has threatened that, if given the chance again, he is “not waiting” to deploy the military to quell turbulences at home.Footnote ²¹² He has also talked ominously of purging the “enemy from within.”Footnote ²¹³ While the picture of “tanks rolling down Main Street,”Footnote ²¹⁴ as suggested by one writer, remains highly unlikely, even its suggestion could erode expectations for what constitutes an appropriate use of force by the U.S. military.

Adding to this scenario is Pete Hegseth, the man tapped by Trump to lead the Defense Department. Hegseth has issued his own call to arms for MAGA supporters, urging them to prepare for violence domestically: “If you don’t own a gun, buy one. Train to use it. Then buy more.” The reason, Hegseth says, is the inevitability of “some form of civil war.”Footnote ²¹⁵ Although much of his attention has been on loosening U.S. rules of engagement in war,Footnote ²¹⁶ Hegseth has also been preoccupied by a cadre of liberal radicals at home that he says have infiltrated its institutions. To confront this threat, Hegseth has declared, America must “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents.”Footnote ²¹⁷ Hegseth has also kept open the possibility of using the military to shoot U.S. civilians.Footnote ²¹⁸

6.4 Why Trump 2.0 Could Be Worse for IHL

Against this backdrop, there are several reasons to believe that a second Trump term could prove even more detrimental to IHL than the first. One, which bears emphasizing, is Trump’s decision to put Pete Hegseth at the helm of the Pentagon, the figure central to every consequential decision that Trump has made regarding the U.S. military justice system. By selecting the former Fox News anchor to reestablish what he calls a “warrior culture” at the DoD,Footnote ²¹⁹ elevating him to sixth in line to the presidency, Trump offers little equivocation about his intent for more impunity.Footnote ²²⁰ While some of Hegeth’s controversial views on IHL faced scrutiny during his Senate confirmation hearing, Trump almost certainly chose him because of, not despite, his overtly hostile stance to the laws of war.

On this point, Hegseth could be well-poised to advance his aim of reducing the role of international law in constraining U.S. military conduct. Hegseth has been criticized as the least-credentialed modern Defense Secretary, having never led a large organization despite being tasked to oversee 1.3 million active-duty servicemembers and a budget of $849 billion.Footnote ²²¹ However, Hegseth brings several personal attributes uniquely suited to advancing the impunity agenda. His media-savvy persona, honed at Fox News, on which he continues to appear, is chief among them. Hegseth’s celebrity among conservative rank-and-file servicemembers and deep connections with organizations that have lobbied for jailed U.S. servicemembers position him to reshape the military’s ethos of accountability.

Another likely contributor to military impunity during Trump’s second term is the composition of his administration beyond Pete Hegseth. During his first term, Trump filled high-level military and nonmilitary posts with longstanding public servants. By contrast, the main criterion on which Trump has chosen his second-term picks is loyalty.Footnote ²²² Military leaders who were previously moderating influences on Trump, such as Mark Esper, Jim Mattis, and Mark Milley, are gone and may be replaced with loyalists. If so, advocates of the impunity movement will no longer need to fight from the outside against the “Washington insiders.” They will be the insiders. Trump’s trust in figures under Hegseth is likely to grant them considerable latitude in both crafting and executing IHL-related policy.

Trump has already made several aggressive moves on this front. Shortly after re-entering office, as part of a purge of six senior Pentagon officials, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. “C.Q.” Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing him with a lesser-known retired three-star officer, Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine. Pete Hegseth had previously criticized Brown, who is black, for being preoccupied with DEI and “woke” initiatives, saying “Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it.”Footnote ²²³ Alongside Brown, Trump also fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of operations of the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and three high-ranking military lawyers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. One expert described the purge as “praetorianism, pure and simple.”Footnote ²²⁴

Perhaps even more than Brown’s termination, the firings of the three top military lawyers – judge advocate generals (JAGs) – provide the clearest indication of how Hegseth intends to approach the law of war as Secretary of Defense. One report, for example, said that the firings represented “an opening salvo in [Hegseth’s] push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.”Footnote ²²⁵ There was no evidence that the JAG terminations reflected a specific confrontation with Hegseth. However, Hegseth in his book War on Warriors had mocked military attorneys as “jagoffs,”Footnote ²²⁶ and many experts have commented that Hegseth’s goal is to lessen the role of lawyers in constraining battlefield conduct.

Along these lines, Trump has also made efforts to lessen oversight at the Pentagon, which could provide room for rolling back norms of restraint. After taking office in 2025, Trump terminated the contracts of more than a dozen independent inspectors general, including at DoD.Footnote ²²⁷ The terminations were targeted at government “watchdogs” charged with minimizing waste and abuse. Trump refused to provide the Senate with the required thirty-day notice of the firings, leading to questions about their legality. More importantly, however, the firings were decried for sharply departing from executive norms, as inspectors general typically stay in place during presidential transitions.Footnote ²²⁸ The moves could be a harbinger of Trump’s broader intent to sideline independent accountability agents in the military, including over IHL.

In tandem with these actions, Trump has made clear that internal dissent will not be tolerated at the DoD. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of forty-nine former national security agents related to their alleged “misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign.”Footnote ²²⁹ One expert called the moves “the most politically saturated security action since the [J. Robert] Oppenheimer case in the 1950s.”Footnote ²³⁰ Pete Hegseth also ordered an inspector general probe into Ret. Gen. Mark Milley’s tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which critics condemned as political retribution.Footnote ²³¹ While not relating specifically to IHL, the actions could prove a warning for U.S. military personnel inclined to oppose Trump’s stance on the law of war.

Another factor militating against IHL in the Trump 2.0 presidency stems from the actions of Trump’s predecessor. Even more than his preemptive pardons of Gen. Mark Milley and members of the January 6 House committee,Footnote ²³² Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, for tax evasion and gun charges sparked bipartisan criticism.Footnote ²³³ Some experts suggest that Biden’s pardon could establish a precedent for Trump to exploit, which might include more crime clemencies. Political scientist Sean J. Westwood has warned, “Democratic erosion is an iterative game. Biden just gave Trump an excuse to further abuse presidential pardons.”Footnote ²³⁴ According to one columnist, “Biden … by his nepotistic act adds to the pile of rancid pardons…, including Trump’s first-term grants to … war criminals.”Footnote ²³⁵

Trump’s pardon spree for January 6 rioters is the clearest example of his readiness to deliver on a campaign pledge to aid those with military backgrounds who had violently broken the law. Altogether, Trump granted clemencies for more than 200 current or ex-U.S. servicemembers, including 21 members of the Oath Keepers and 27 members of the Proud Boys.Footnote ²³⁶ While Republicans largely defended the moves, Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland pilloried the decisions by asking whether the Capitol rioters were “being released as a reserve army of political foot soldiers to act on behalf of MAGA and Donald Trump.”Footnote ²³⁷ Under Trump, the DoD has also not foreclosed the possibility that active-duty and National Guard servicemembers granted pardons could continue their military careers.Footnote ²³⁸

A further concern for IHL in Trump’s second administration is that the strategy for the impunity coalition has already been written. Given a full term behind him, Trump has a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of power within the Pentagon and the military – not only how to navigate them but also how to remove checks on his agenda. As one expert notes, “Trump has certainly learned from his first term in office and is stepping into this second term with an eye toward removing every guardrail that stood in the way of his lawless impulses before.”Footnote ²³⁹ After his first inauguration, more than two years elapsed before Trump issued a war crime pardon. This time, Trump could start the process earlier, meaning more opportunities for clemencies and other acts that openly flout IHL.

Also heightening the likelihood of Trump openly defying IHL is the perceived strength of his electoral mandate, which could embolden him to further advance the impunity agenda. Although debatable, political scientist Francis Fukuyama referred to Trump’s 2024 win as a “blowout victory,”Footnote ²⁴⁰ while one former adviser for Bill Clinton said that “[t]he 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.”Footnote ²⁴¹ Unlike in 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, his sweep of every swing state in 2024 means that Trump will likely interpret the victory as a sign that America is four-square behind the impunity agenda. As noted earlier, most relevant for the functioning of the Pentagon is that 65 percent of U.S. veterans supported Trump over Kamala Harris, according to 2024 exit polls.Footnote ²⁴²

Beyond the mandate itself, Trump 2.0 has already demonstrated a bold governance style, which could play into Trump’s plans for the military.Footnote ²⁴³ By shattering norms at a breakneck speed and inundating the media with relentless policy proposals, the odds are greater that any isolated transgressions, including overt challenges to IHL, go unnoticed or unchallenged. Consider that, in his first several weeks in office, Trump signed more than fifty executive orders and floated radical proposals, including ending birthright citizenship, seizing Greenland, making Canada the fifty-first state, retaking the Panama Canal, enacting tariffs on a scale not seen since the 1930s, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, and carrying out the largest migrant deportation in history.

The constant chaos appears to be a feature, not a bug of Trump 2.0. Any semblance of the Trump “resistance” may be unable to keep pace, creating political cover for Trump to push controversial agendas like overtly challenging IHL. As former Trump strategist Steve Bannon put it, Trump’s goal is to “Attack! Attack! Attack! Keep driving it. Flood the zone. Overwhelm ‘em.”Footnote ²⁴⁴ Trump’s former White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, echoed this idea, saying that Trump 2.0 is pursuing “a naked power grab” intended to “flood the zone with as much unconstitutional activity as possible, with the hope that they get away with some or all of it.”Footnote ²⁴⁵ Against this political backdrop, Trump’s open challenges to the law of war may receive less pushback, bolstering incentives to press forward.

Finally, and maybe most important, Trump’s second term could be more harmful for IHL because Trump has nothing to lose politically. Although Trump has mused about amending the Constitution to serve more than eight years, he is unconstrained by future elections due to term limits. As one writer put it, Trump’s second administration might best be described with a simple phrase: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”Footnote ²⁴⁶ A Trump White House unburdened by elections could pursue war crime clemencies regardless of whether they are politically beneficial, potentially opening a wider set of war crime cases that could prove controversial even in the eyes of some conservative voters. Additionally, without the added pressure of courting public opinion, Trump could use the bully pulpit and commander-in-chief powers to more radically attack IHL with few repercussions.

Although the future of military impunity in the U.S. post-Trump is uncertain, Trump’s 2024 staging of the most significant comeback in modern American politics underscores his persistent appeal with the GOP base. While much of Trump’s success owes to domestic issues like inflation and immigration, his approach to foreign policy and the military also deserves credit. Central to this agenda is an unabashed disregard for IHL. Looking ahead to 2028 or beyond, a question is whether Trump’s Republican heir will continue his direct challenges to IHL, or escalate them. The degree to which America drifts from the once-unassailable consensus that IHL should be given public deference may hinge on how much Trump disregards this principle during his last four years in office.

Within the U.S., the idea that support for publicly challenging IHL could actually increase in a future devoid of Trump is consistent with him being both a symptom and a cause of the impunity agenda. To the extent that Trump has gone beyond any modern U.S. president in overtly rejecting the validity of IHL, he has tapped into preexisting demands from the conservative electorate and openness to the agenda from the military community. If support for the impunity agenda has gained a self-perpetuating momentum, it may no longer require Trump. Future presidents willing to carry Trump’s mantle, with help from allies in the media and on Capitol Hill, could become more extreme, given clear backing from right-leaning voters with flimsier commitments to the laws of war.

6.5 Where to Go from Here

This book raises a number of questions for future research. Among the most pressing is how the Trump case generalizes to other Western democracies. Put differently, do “means, motives, and opportunity” typically exist for overtly challenging IHL, waiting for leaders to exploit? Or are they relatively rare conditions? When it comes to means, the essential element of the impunity agenda has been Trump’s partnership with Fox News and Republican Congress members. Yet it is unclear whether analogous enablers can be found in most Western democracies or whether the political landscape Trump inherited, marked by a twenty-four-hour right-wing news cycle and polarization on Capitol Hill, is distinct. It is also unclear whether other Western leaders hold the same kinds of authority as U.S. presidents to attack IHL.

In the U.S., seminal work on the “two faces” of the presidency suggests that executives wield more power over foreign policy and the military than domestic policy.Footnote ²⁴⁷ However, given the robustness of “checks and balances” in America’s federal system, one could argue that Trump’s overt challenges to IHL were unlikely to stem from idiosyncratic weaknesses of executive constraints. Fundamentally, this may underscore how authority over civilian and military concerns determines whether leaders are poised to attack IHL. In the U.S., one salient, if not unique, tension is the competing, enumerated responsibilities of the president: first, to ensure the faithful execution of laws; and second, to preside over the military as commander-in-chief.Footnote ²⁴⁸

This dual role places U.S. presidents in a position where enforcing the laws can inherently conflict with combat-level management of troops, both of which may be influenced by politics. While this tension may be irresolvable in the U.S., where Article 2 powers of the president are firmly delimited in the Constitution, it provides a point of comparison for thinking about whether leaders are able to strain IHL in different settings (e.g., in Western democracies that meaningfully divide the roles of heads of government and state, or where executives have differing responsibilities over military justice). It is plausible that more diffuse executive powers could reduce, if not eliminate, the capacity of democratic leaders to directly challenge IHL.

In terms of motive, it is equally unclear whether the Trump era has been a particularly propitious moment to score political points by openly attacking the law of war, or whether Trump is simply the first U.S. president willing to take such a chance. One possibility is that Trump has been singularly prescient in activating the Republican base through brazenly attacking IHL, even as he is less concerned by its ethics or the risks of alienating moderate voters. In terms of opportunity, it is also a question whether all militaries are prone to deep-seated, ideological subcultures that can be persuaded to abandon norms of restraint. The extent and pervasiveness of these subcultures could vary across settings, making some militaries more susceptible to activation than others.

Future studies in these areas could analyze historical cases. An example might be to contrast support for the U.S. troops granted clemency by Trump with that for William Calley, Jr., who, as noted earlier, was implicated in the 1968 “My Lai” massacre in Vietnam. After Calley’s court-martial and sentencing, Democratic Sen. Adlai Stevenson reportedly had his mailbox filled with letters from Americans registering 200 to 1 in his defense. A poll also showed that approximately two-thirds of citizens viewed Calley as a “scapegoat,” and one local VFW post fundraised on his behalf.Footnote ²⁴⁹ His story shows the groundswell of support that has previously existed for a convicted American war criminal, but without an ironclad effort by a president to herald his case.

Researchers could also analyze responses to war crime controversies outside the U.S. One approach might compare how leaders in non-Western contexts have explicitly undermined IHL, such as above with Israel and Russia. Another might probe how other advanced democracies have grappled with war crime cases differently than Trump. Consider Australia. Shortly after Trump lost his election in 2020, the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force published the “Brereton Report,” a 500-plus page document detailing the alleged killings of thirty-nine noncombatants in Afghanistan at the hands of its special forces from 2005 to 2016.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Unlike the impunity agenda in the U.S., however, there were no widespread efforts by Australian politicians to exonerate the implicated ADF servicemembers.

Concerning the U.S. case, one priority for research is to unpack further the Trump-Fox News “feedback loop.”Footnote ²⁵¹ A central part of the impunity movement’s success is that Fox News does not just defend the impunity agenda. It also helps to create it. This shift, from partisan media as a sponsor of government activities to its progenitor, is worthy of more inquiry. Although analyses have identified elements of this change in other areas,Footnote ²⁵² most remain observational. For example, a recent journalistic study coded more than a year’s worth of transcripts from “Fox and Friends” to document how Fox News cultivated two audiences: the American public and Trump himself.Footnote ²⁵³ These dynamics are consistent with the impunity movement. Trump takes cues from Fox News, and vice versa.

A related question is the extent to which Trump’s other main ally in openly challenging IHL, congressional Republicans, initiated or has simply perpetuated the impunity agenda. One interpretation is that GOP lawmakers were already pursuing a nascent impunity agenda pre-2016, and Trump proved useful for leading on these policies. In this way, Trump ramped up an existing trend. However, another reading is that, after Trump proved his willingness to attack the validity of IHL, Republican allies forced him to go further. Trump may have even become subordinate to the impunity movement that he created, giving him less room to maneuver if he wanted to retain support on Capitol Hill. Under this scenario, Trump instigated the impunity agenda, and GOP lawmakers accelerated it.

A final question regards the long-term impacts of the impunity agenda on the actual behavior of U.S. servicemembers in battle. Even if combatant attitudes toward IHL have become laxer under Trump, understanding whether this translates into more crimes in war requires on-the-ground conflict data. Capturing IHL violations and measuring effect sizes both pre- and post-Trump would be instructive. Skeptics have questioned whether negative effects materialize. Eddie Gallagher even sarcastically asked critics to “preach to me again the dangers of moral hazards,” referring to the apparent incentive his clemency could have in inducing combatants to disregard IHL.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Yet many experts have argued that excusing the bad behavior by U.S. troops degrades order and discipline.Footnote ²⁵⁵

In the end, Trump will, for good reason, be remembered for his blistering attacks on domestic institutions, such as Congress, the free press, and the U.S. electoral system. Yet as this book has shown, he also has another, ongoing legacy of impunity: one tied to the military. Trump has not only redefined norms for undermining IHL. He has discarded even the pretense of valuing the law of war. That legacy is a critical part of the Trump era and will define his final four years in office. This book calls for revisiting the consensus that, once established, public respect for IHL is self-sustaining. The seeds for openly challenging IHL may be embedded in Western democracies. If overt affronts to the law of war can materialize in the U.S., which has long supported the Geneva Conventions, they could plausibly happen in other regimes.