IT has become almost a cliché to say we are raising the next generation in a more dangerous world than the one in which many of us grew up.
Just last week George Robertson, the former Nato chief and ex-Labour minister, became the latest British establishment voice to warn of the growing threats faced on the international stage.
Research from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program shows that wars surged in 2024, with the highest number of active conflicts since 1946 taking place: 61. This is a bloody trend that appears to have plateaued at a high-water mark in 2025, with wars not decreasing but continuing to rage in Sudan, the Middle East, eastern Europe and elsewhere.
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Just as alarming as the increase in the number of wars being fought is the collapse of the moral restraints with which these wars are waged.
A study by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights covering the summer of 2024 to the end of last year found that international law designed to curtail the worst tendencies of human violence is at breaking point.
More than 100,000 civilians were killed in the 23 conflicts the study surveyed, a figure that could be surpassed if humanity continues to blunder down the path it has set itself upon. And all of this is just in the recent period prior to 2026, which in its first four months saw the president of the United States – the world’s premier military power – launch multiple attacks on foreign nations around the world, and threaten to commit mass strikes on civilian targets and even genocide in Iran.
Alongside this, Israel has copied and pasted its strategy in Gaza to Lebanon; Russia continues nightly to attack civilians in Ukraine; and there is increasing evidence from Sudan that drone technology is proliferating attacks against civilians.
Which leads one to wonder, as the world becomes more violent, are war crimes becoming normalised as a means of military force? And not just by armed non-state actors but also by nation states too.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and political activist who specialises in the laws of armed conflict, said: “Powers that in the past, at least rhetorically, were protecting the current framework … [of] international law are more blatant in undermining the legitimacy of that framework. And that is a big change and a matter of huge concern.”
The United States – the main architect of the post-Second World War international legal order – is, according to Sfard, now undermining it. He pointed to Donald Trump’s suggestion in early 2025 that Gaza be purged of Palestinians, an act the lawyer argues would amount to a crime against humanity.
To this could be added the US’s attack on Iran – contravening Article 2(4) of the UN Charter – or its extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean. But the erosion of international law stems not only from violations but equally from the failure to respond to the violations. Such acceptance of rule breaches can create new norms, Sfard says, pointing to Europe’s failure to push back against violations of international law.
In particular he highlighted positions taken by German chancellor Friedrich Merz, due to his nation’s important historic role in international law, particularly his suggestion that Germany would ignore an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Additionally, just like political discourse, warfare has an Overton Window – meaning the range of policies or ideas acceptable to the mainstream public at any given time – of its own.
Actions or war crimes that occur in one theatre can shift to other combat zones, as once unacceptable military tactics become normalised. This diffusion of practices is common when a single military or state operates in multiple conflicts.
Such is the case as medics are repeatedly attacked, civilians are expelled from large geographic areas, and journalists are assassinated by the Israel Defence Forces in Lebanon – all tactics the Israeli military has used in Gaza in the wake of October 7, 2023.
However, this migration of criminal practice can also move between war zones that are not directly connected, as armed groups observe and learn from each others’ doctrines.
There is little evidence of friendly interactions between the armed forces of the Assad regime and the Israeli military during the Syrian Civil War. Nonetheless, many of the most brutal urban siege warfare tactics first seen in Syria are recognisable in action today in Gaza.
Such is the case with deliberate attacks on medics and interdiction of food supplies in order to pressure the civilian population supported by them into surrender; or in the targeting of journalists such as Marie Colvin in Syria or Anas al-Sharif in Gaza to throttle information coming out of a war zone. Humanity risks descending into a race to the bottom, if warfare is to become both more common and more brutal, presenting the world with a bleak and violent horizon ahead of us – one that is entirely avoidable.
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The blanket impunity and policy of attacks against civilians that appear to be a growing norm in modern warfare stand in stark contrast to the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith in Australia earlier this month.
Roberts-Smith is Australia’s most-decorated living veteran, a Special Air Service recipient of the Victoria Cross who deployed six times to Afghanistan for his country. He is also accused of war crimes involving the murder of five people, unarmed Afghan detainees.
This case serves as a reminder that nations can fight wars and still maintain moral boundaries that should not be crossed.
The sheer brutality of pre-1946 warfare in comparison to the imperfect but still preferable years that followed it adds more weight to this argument.
For his part, Sfard, who has spent the last three decades observing and litigating around the military practices of the Israel Defence Forces, warns against defeatism.
Military practice has the potential to become much darker. The lawyer has seen that himself, noting that the abuses of the Israeli military towards Palestinians surpassed his worst expectations following Hamas’s October 7 attack.
He said: “In Gaza, it all went berserk. It all went completely in a way that I never believed in my wildest nightmares I would witness.”
But, he argues, humanity is not in a new post-international law world yet; rather it is standing on the threshold of one. We are in the middle of a struggle, between a Darwinist future and one moderated by international law, he says.
For the latter option to be realised, Europe, including the UK, which has an important role, needs to step up to the challenge, Sfard says.
The absence of the leadership from the US, at least for the next three years, makes Europe’s voice critical, and crucially it has power to wield if it can find the will, he says.
The alternative is bleak. Sfard said: “After thousands of years of wars, we as a race decided in 1945, no more, we don’t want that any more. And the question of whether we’re going back to that is very disturbing.”
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