Power, and the False Gospel of Universalism -From Nuremberg to Radhabinod Pal and Trump
Modern Western democracies like to present themselves as societies governed by law rather than force. One principle, in particular, is treated as sacred: that no one may be judged or punished under a criminal law that did not exist at the time the act was committed. This rule, known as nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege, is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the rule of law and is today codified in international instruments such as Article 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
Yet the modern international legal order was born in a moment that openly strained, and arguably violated, this very principle, according to one Indian judge.
The Nuremberg Trials, often celebrated as the moral foundation of international criminal justice, were legally controversial from their inception. As Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, the tribunal prosecuted individuals for crimes such as “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” that had not been clearly defined as individual criminal offences under positive international law at the time they were committed. Supporters justified this by appealing to moral necessity and emerging norms, while critics warned that retroactive justice undermined the very idea of legality.
This critique was articulated with exceptional force by Radhabinod Pal, the Indian jurist who served as a judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The Tokyo trails can be veiwed as a paralell process to Nuremberg, but as an aftermath for the war in the east. Pal’s dissenting opinion, which ran to more than 1,200 pages, rejected the legal foundations of the tribunal outright. His argument was not that the accused were morally innocent, but that morality could not substitute for law without destroying the rule of law itself.
Pal insisted that aggressive war, however catastrophic, was not an individual criminal offence under international law when Japan acted. Treaties such as the Kellogg–Briand Pact renounced war as an instrument of policy, but they did not establish personal criminal liability. To apply criminal punishment retroactively, Pal argued, was to abandon the most basic safeguard against arbitrary power. His reasoning is carefully examined in the Strathclyde Student Law Review, which describes his dissent as a serious legal challenge to the legitimacy of the postwar tribunals rather than a mere political protest.
Pal’s perspective was shaped by more than abstract legal theory. As an Indian jurist living under British imperial rule, he understood that international law had long operated asymmetrically. European powers had waged colonial wars, suppressed uprisings, and caused mass civilian death without ever subjecting themselves to international criminal judgment. Yet when non-Western powers were defeated in a global war, new universal crimes were declared and enforced exclusively against them.
This, Pal argued, revealed a deeper danger: that international law was becoming an instrument of victor’s justice. The defeated were judged by standards defined after the fact, while the victorious exempted themselves entirely. This concern has since become a central theme in legal scholarship, and it is now widely acknowledged that the Nuremberg system raised serious questions about retroactivity and selective enforcement, as discussed in Norman K. Swazo, “For the Sake of Justice Due”: Debating Law and Morality in Justice Radhabinod Pal’s Dissent in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal on war crimes and international law.
Pal warned that once law is detached from prior legality and repurposed as a moral weapon, it ceases to restrain power. Instead, it legitimizes it. That warning did not lose relevance with the end of the Second World War. It merely changed vocabulary.
In the decades that followed, the language of “crimes against humanity” gradually gave way to the language of “human rights” and “democracy.” Military interventions, sanctions regimes, and regime-change operations were increasingly justified not in terms of national interest, but as moral obligations to enforce universal values. This shift is well documented even in mainstream policy circles. A long-standing critique in Foreign Affairs has noted that international law and human-rights norms are often applied selectively, reinforcing power hierarchies rather than constraining them
It is against this backdrop that the presidency of Donald Trump must be understood. Trump did not invent the use of democracy as a justification for power. He inherited a system in which moral language had already become a tool of coercion, routinely employed to legitimize intervention, sanctions, and political pressure abroad. What distinguished Trump was not that he abandoned this system, but that he spoke more openly about interest and power, dispensing with much of the moral rhetoric that had previously cloaked Western interventionism. In doing so, he exposed—perhaps unintentionally—the extent to which appeals to universal values had come to function less as genuine legal principles than as instruments of strategic persuasion.
This shift did not alter the underlying structure of international power, but it did alter its presentation. By treating interests as interests rather than disguising them as moral imperatives, Trump unsettled a long-standing habit of legitimation in Western foreign policy. For critics, this appeared as cynicism or irresponsibility; for others, it revealed a degree of honesty absent from earlier formulations. From the perspective articulated by Pal, however, the significance lies less in Trump’s temperament than in what his bluntness made visible: the persistent fusion of moral language and coercive authority. When legitimacy depends not on prior legality or reciprocal restraint, but on the unilateral assertion of values by the powerful, the problem is not the absence of moral rhetoric, but the ease with which it can be deployed—or discarded—at will.
From Pal’s perspective, this openness would not have been the real danger. The danger lay elsewhere: in the belief that powerful states may judge others by moral standards they do not apply to themselves. Democracy, when weaponized in this way, ceases to be a form of self-government and becomes a conditional status granted or revoked by external authority. Even establishment institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations acknowledge that democracy promotion has long functioned as a strategic tool of foreign policy rather than a neutral legal principle.
A conservative reading of Pal’s legacy leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. Law cannot be sustained by moral fervor alone. It requires symmetry, restraint, and prior consent. When legality is sacrificed to righteousness, legitimacy erodes. International law becomes distrusted, democracy promotion is perceived as hypocrisy, and institutions lose authority. This dynamic is now visible far beyond the West, where skepticism toward “rules-based order” is widespread.
Pal did not reject morality. He rejected moral empire. He understood that without sovereignty, law becomes hierarchy, and without legal restraint, power inevitably disguises itself as virtue. His dissent remains a warning not against justice, but against the belief that justice can be imposed retroactively by the strong upon the weak.
That warning, written in the shadow of world war, speaks directly to the present moment. When law becomes a language of power rather than its restraint, civilization does not advance. It merely finds new words for break down.
