United Nations Charter

The United Nations Charter is the legal and political framework through which Noam Chomsky contrasts collective security and lawful self-defense with retaliation and unilateral force. In his account, it supplies both a practical route for addressing terrorist crimes—evidence, arrest, prosecution, and international cooperation—and a standard by which the conduct of powerful states can be judged. Its central tension is that the rules are invoked as universal, yet powerful states may resist their application when those rules also expose their own actions to scrutiny.

The Charter’s limits on force

Chomsky presents the postwar Charter as a break with the older logic of answering aggression in kind. After centuries of European violence had brought the continent close to self-destruction, nations adopted a different pact: in principle, force was excluded except in self-defense against an armed attack, until the Security Council acted to defend international peace and security. The Charter’s rejection of reprisals is particularly important to his argument. Treating retaliation as a legitimate rule would reproduce the cycle of violence that the postwar settlement was meant to constrain, with potentially catastrophic consequences in a world possessing weapons of mass destruction.

He applies that standard to the response to the September 11 attacks. In his reading, the United States could not invoke Article 51’s self-defense justification because it was not under armed attack in the sense required by that article. That legal position depends on a universalist premise: the fundamental principles of international law must apply to the United States as well as to states it opposes. The Charter is therefore not merely a restraint on adversaries; it is a test of whether the same legal language governs allies and powerful states.

Nicaragua as a precedent for legal recourse

The Nicaragua case gives Chomsky a concrete example of what he considers a lawful response to international violence. During the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua, causing tens of thousands of deaths and devastating a small country already burdened by economic warfare. Nicaragua did not answer by bombing Washington. It brought its case to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favor, ordered the United States to stop its actions, and directed it to pay substantial reparations.

The ruling did not end the conflict. The United States rejected the court’s decision and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then turned to the Security Council, where a resolution calling on states to respect international law was proposed, and to the General Assembly, which adopted a similar resolution by a majority. The United States vetoed the Security Council measure and, with Israel, voted against the General Assembly resolutions for two consecutive years; El Salvador joined them on one occasion. For Chomsky, this sequence makes the Charter’s promise and its vulnerability visible at once: international institutions offer a non-retaliatory avenue for a weaker state, but their decisions do not by themselves compel a powerful state to comply. He argues that a sufficiently powerful Nicaragua might also have sought a special criminal tribunal, another institutional response rather than a military reprisal.

Evidence, prosecution, and collective security

In discussing how to prevent further terrorist attacks, Chomsky argues for treating crimes as crimes, regardless of their scale. He points to the response to the Oklahoma City bombing: once the perpetrators were found to be associated with far-right militia circles inside the United States, authorities sought, tried, and convicted the guilty rather than calling for the bombing of Montana or Idaho. The comparison makes a practical point about the Charter’s approach: identify those responsible, establish evidence, and pursue legal accountability instead of punishing a population or territory.

He applies the same principle internationally. Governments in the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, were willing to cooperate against the networks attacking them, but insisted on evidence identifying those involved and on action within at least a minimal framework of international law. Chomsky describes Egypt’s position as complicated: it had played a major role in organizing radical Islamist forces that included bin Laden’s network, had suffered Sadat’s assassination, and remained a principal target. Egypt was prepared to crush the network, he says, provided evidence was supplied and action proceeded under the United Nations Charter and the Security Council.

Chomsky likewise argues that international legal institutions would probably have endorsed efforts to arrest and try bin Laden and his associates, including the use of force, if their guilt could be demonstrated. He says that almost the entire world had called on the United States to provide evidence of bin Laden’s involvement and that proof would have helped secure international backing for a major operation under United Nations auspices. Diplomatic means might also have been available: the Taliban had indicated, in various ways, that such avenues could be explored. The proposals were rejected, Chomsky says, in favor of force. The Charter’s framework thus appears in his account not as a refusal to act, but as a method for connecting action to proof, jurisdiction, and international authorization.

Universal principles and political disagreement

The Charter also appears in the 1987 General Assembly resolution on international terrorism. Adopted by 153 votes to two, with Honduras abstaining, the resolution condemned terrorism and called on all nations to act against it. Its disputed passage protected the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence of peoples deprived of those rights by force, including peoples under colonial or racist regimes and foreign occupation; it also affirmed their right to struggle to regain those rights and to seek and accept support, consistently with the Charter and other principles of international law.

Chomsky emphasizes that the United States and Israel opposed this provision. He links that disagreement to the United States’ treatment of the African National Congress as a terrorist organization while not placing apartheid South Africa in the same category as Cuba and other states Washington regarded as terrorist. In his analysis, the argument over the resolution was not simply whether terrorism should be condemned, but whether resistance to domination could be recognized within the same international framework. He contends that efforts to produce a comprehensive convention against terrorism were obstructed because the United States and its allies would not accept language resembling the disputed passage, even if a definition otherwise followed official American legal and military formulations. Agreement, in his account, depended on recasting the concept so that the violence of powerful states and their clients would be exempt.

The Charter tested by power

Chomsky uses the Charter to distinguish international legality from the political descriptions attached to the use of force. He argues that calling an action a war against terrorism is propaganda unless it actually targets terrorism, and that applying official definitions consistently would implicate powerful states and their clients. The Charter’s relevance in this argument lies partly in its capacity to expose that asymmetry: legal principles cannot function as universal standards if the identity of the actor determines whether conduct is condemned or excused.

He also sets the Charter’s collective-security model against the strategic consequences he attributes to the post-September 11 campaign. He says that the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, extending its reach toward the region’s resources and complementing a network aimed at the Persian Gulf, whose safest previous base had been Diego Garcia. He interprets the new deployment as facilitating intervention and consolidating global military dominance, rather than as a consequence demanded by collective legal action.

The same contrast informs his reading of the bombing of Serbia. Chomsky recalls that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton described its purpose in terms of ensuring NATO’s credibility, meaning the credibility of the United States and its principal arms client. He suggests, without claiming access to confidential documents, that the Afghanistan bombings may likewise have been intended to warn the world about the consequences of defying American rules. Against that logic of demonstration and deterrence, the Charter represents a different basis for international action: evidence, legal accountability, and collective security rather than force used to establish credibility. Its force in Chomsky’s argument is ultimately normative as well as procedural—the principles matter only if they bind the powerful as well as everyone else.