The Hostage Theory: Why Tehran's Critique of Selective International Law Resonates

A senior Iranian official accuses Washington of turning international justice into a political instrument. The claim deserves scrutiny — not because Tehran has clean hands, but because the structural critique is older than the Islamic Republic and wider than its authors.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanamena6-minute read17 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On 17 May 2026, a senior Iranian legal official told the Arabic-language service of Al Alam that the United States has converted international justice into a political instrument. The accusation, delivered in blunt terms, held that American human rights advocacy serves as a cudgel against adversaries while providing cover for allies. International law, under this framework, functions only when Washington deems it convenient. The statement was unremarkable in its substance — similar charges have been levelled at great powers for as long as great powers have existed — but its specificity warrants attention. Not because Tehran speaks truth, but because the structural logic it invokes is shared by a much broader constituency than the Islamic Republic's diplomatic corps.

The claim deserves a hearing and a challenge in equal measure. Washington does maintain a bifurcated approach to international legal obligations. The International Criminal Court has spent two decades investigating African conflicts while major-power nationals remain largely untouched. UN Security Council resolutions bearing on Israeli settlement activity go unimplemented while those targeting Iran execute with mechanical precision. Arms transfers to states under international scrutiny proceed without meaningful conditionality. These are documented patterns, not propaganda artefacts. At the same time, the proposition that Washington has "weaponised" human rights language admits the corollary: that human rights norms retain enough normative force to be weaponised. A standard nobody respects cannot be exploited.

The Architecture of Selective Enforcement

The complaint from Tehran belongs to a tradition older than the Islamic Republic. Non-Western states have argued since the League of Nations era that international legal frameworks encode the preferences of the powers that constructed them. That construction is not random. The dollar-based financial architecture, the institutional geography of Bretton Woods, the veto architecture of the Security Council — these are not neutral instruments. They reflect a distribution of power and a set of assumptions about whose security interests require systemic protection. When that distribution shifts — as it has been doing since the 2008 financial crisis, since the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, since the yuan's gradual internationalisation — the legitimacy claims built into the system come under pressure from new directions.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the predictable consequence of a rules-based order that was designed by a coalition of states that no longer commands the same share of global output, trade, or population. The system has genuine virtues — dispute resolution mechanisms, humanitarian law, arms control treaties — that serve interests beyond those of its architects. But it also contains structural biases that its architects encoded and that their successors, including current American administrations, have continued to exploit. The Gharibabadi formulation is hyperbolic, but the structural observation underneath it is not novel.

The sharper question is whether selective enforcement hollows out the norm or merely demonstrates that norms have always been selectively enforced. International law has never operated as a true leveller. Nuremberg prosecuted the losers. The Tokyo tribunal excised the Emperor. Post-colonial states were handed sovereignty in 1960 and simultaneously subjected to structural adjustment in 1980. The instrument has always been partial. What has changed is the willingness of previously peripheral actors to name the partiality in public, in multilateral forums, using the language of the system itself.

The Israeli Exception as Synecdoche

The Iranian statement's most pointed sentence targeted the intersection of American human rights advocacy and American support for Israel. Human rights, it said, are respected in the American dictionary only as long as they do not relate to the Israeli entity. This is a claim about exception — a specific carve-out that reveals the general logic.

The carve-out is real. American diplomatic cables, once a source of inadvertent candour, showed consistent prioritisation of Israeli security concerns over human rights conditionality in bilateral aid frameworks. The veto at the Security Council, deployed dozens of times on matters related to Israeli actions in the occupied territories, is a matter of record. These are not Iranian inventions; they are documented in US government sources and in UN archives. The question is what they demonstrate. The Iranian framing treats them as proof that American human rights advocacy is entirely fraudulent — a fig leaf for geostrategic preference. A more careful reading holds that advocacy is genuine in its domestic application and selective in its foreign policy deployment, which is another way of saying that great powers have always separated the legal order applicable within their borders from the power politics that govern their external behaviour.

This distinction is uncomfortable precisely because it undermines the coherence of the "rules-based international order" as a positive project. If the order's primary architect applies its norms selectively, it functions less as a legal framework than as a set of constraints on adversaries and a set of options for allies. That is the critique Tehran is making, and it is not a critique that is easy to rebut on the evidence.

The Multipolar Challenge

What makes the current moment different from earlier cycles of anti-Western legal criticism is the institutional infrastructure now available to articulate alternatives. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation's legal dialogues, the BRICS expansion to include major emerging economies, China's investment treaty network, the Gulf Cooperation Council's own dispute resolution mechanisms — these represent the early architecture of a parallel or supplementary system. None of them is complete. All of them are under construction. But they give non-Western states somewhere to point when the Western-designed system fails them, which reduces the cost of public critique.

This is the structural context in which Tehran's statement landed. It is not an isolated diplomatic outburst. It is part of a pattern of legal-institutional contestation that has accelerated since the 2022 Ukraine war reshuffled alliances and since the Gaza conflict of 2023-24 concentrated minds across the Global South on the question of whether Western human rights frameworks constitute a genuine universalism or a sophisticated particularism. The answer, this publication suggests, is closer to the latter — not because the values themselves are fraudulent, but because their institutional expression has consistently reflected the security priorities of a narrow coalition.

The stakes are concrete. A rules-based order that functions only for some states, some of the time, is not a rules-based order. It is a system of managed hegemony. Managed hegemony can persist for long periods — the Pax Romana lasted four centuries — but it requires a sustained willingness by the hegemon to absorb the costs of the system, and a sustained acceptance by the managed that the arrangement serves their interests at least minimally. Both conditions are under pressure. American domestic politics has tightened the constraints on international engagement. Meanwhile, the managed states — across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia — are building or joining alternative arrangements that reduce their exposure.

The Gharibabadi statement, stripped of its polemical surface, is a notice that this dynamic has entered the public diplomatic record. The notice is not illegitimate. Whether the alternatives on offer are better, or merely different, remains an open question — one that will be answered not by the rhetoric of Iranian officials or American counterparts, but by the institutional performance of whatever order eventually emerges from the current contest.

This piece reflects the view that selective enforcement of international legal norms is a structural problem, not a temporary aberration, and that the critique of that selectivity — however self-interested its source — deserves analytical engagement rather than dismissal.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/alalamarabic/214856
https://t.me/alalamarabic/214855
https://t.me/alalamarabic/214854