WEINER: The rules on the use of force are pretty clear and pretty simple. States aren’t allowed to use force unless they have suffered an armed attack. Now, I think many international lawyers, and I would put myself in this category, would say you can use force if you face a threat of an imminent attack. The problem for the Israeli and Trump administration position in this case is that I don’t think there’s any credible evidence that Iran presented a threat of imminent attack against Israel or the United States. I think Iran did pose, and has for decades posed, a threat to the region. The question, though, is, should states be allowed to use force whenever they perceive another state posing some vague or undefined threat to it?

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WEINER: Well, it’s not too enthusiastic about it, Ayesha. The most fundamental rule is that it’s permissible to target military objectives, but it’s forbidden to target civilians or civilian objects. And this is what is known as the principle of distinction. And for the president to say that we’re going to intentionally target desalinization plants or all of Iran’s energy infrastructure is quite clearly a threat to hit targets that should not be the subject of military operations under the law of armed conflict.

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WEINER: There’s no international police force to enforce the law. The rules of international law are rules that the United States voluntarily agreed to because we thought it was in our interest for those to be the rules.

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WEINER: The key is reciprocity, right? If I don’t target your civilian objects, you won’t target my civilian objects. And we decided that that’s a better world than when people have the right to target one another’s civilian objects. When I was a lawyer in the State Department – and I was an international lawyer, you know, working for the government for 11 years – what I would try to remind my clients, when they wanted to do something that maybe would not be consistent with international law, is to remind them we agreed to these rules because we thought they were in our interests. And if we violate them, that’s a signal to everybody else that they can violate them, too. So not only when I go to my friend’s house am I going to tear up their house, but when they go to their friend’s house, they’re going to tear up that house.

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WEINER: You know, you’re right. The United States’ track record here is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I think what is maybe different about the Trump administration is when we invaded Panama, when we invaded Grenada, when we used force against Iraq in 2003, we advanced legal justifications. I think on balance, they were, for each of those cases, losing arguments. But we tried to justify our conduct within the framework of international law. And President Trump, in the interview with The New York Times that you played a clip from, said, I don’t need international law. That, to me, seems to be very different if we are concerned about the systemic impact of U.S. actions on this international society that we live in.