“Justice has given way to force”

In an interview published by Vatican News on 4 March 2026¹, Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State responsible for political and diplomatic affairs, warned that the logic of violence was undermining international law. He made these remarks in the context of the renewed Israeli-US war of aggression against Iran. The peoples of West Asia, he said, had been “plunged into the horror of war, which brutally shatters human lives, brings destruction, and drags entire nations into spirals of violence with uncertain outcomes.”. Cardinal Parolin referred to the Pope, who during the Angelus prayer on 1 March had spoken of a “tragedy of enormous proportions” and the risk of an “irreparable abyss”.
    The Cardinal Secretary of State reiterated his view that “peace and security must be cultivated and pursued through the possibilities offered by diplomacy, especially diplomacy exercised within multilateral bodies, where states have the possibility of resolving conflicts in a bloodless and more just way.” Following the Second World War and its more than 60 million deaths, “the founding fathers, by creating the United Nations, wanted to spare their children the horrors they themselves had experienced. For this reason, in the UN Charter they sought to provide clear guidance on the management of conflicts.”
    The United Nations Charter stipulates that “recourse to force must be considered only as a last and most grave resort, after all the instruments of political and diplomatic dialogue have been used, after carefully assessing the limits of necessity and proportionality, on the basis of rigorous verification and well-founded reasons, and always within the framework of multilateral governance. If states were to be recognised as having a right to ‘preventive war,’ according to their own criteria and without a supranational legal framework, the whole world would risk being set ablaze.
    “This erosion of international law is truly worrying: justice has given way to force […]”.
    The Cardinal is asked why international law and diplomacy are experiencing such a decline today. His answer: “What has been lost is the awareness that the common good truly benefits everyone – that is, that the good for the other is also a good for me, and therefore justice, prosperity, and security are achieved insofar as all can benefit from them.”
    This has a further consequence: “The system of multilateral diplomacy in relations among states is undergoing a profound crisis, inter alia because of the distrust states harbour toward legal constraints that limit their action. Such an attitude represents the other side of the will to power: the desire to act freely, to impose one’s own order on others, while avoiding the dramatic but noble toil of politics, made up of discussions, negotiations, advantages for oneself, and concessions to others.”
    The “whole body of international law built up in areas such as disarmament, development cooperation, respect for fundamental rights, intellectual property, and trade and transit” is being questioned and gradually set aside. There seems to have been a loss of awareness of what Immanuel Kant wrote in 1795: “A violation of right in one part of the world is felt in all parts.” International law is now invoked only according to one’s own convenience.
    Finally, Cardinal Parolin recalled the importance of international humanitarian law. Compliance with it cannot “depend on circumstances or on military and strategic interests”. The Holy See, the Cardinal said, “forcefully reiterates its condemnation of every form of involvement of civilians and civilian structures – such as homes, schools, hospitals, and places of worship – in military operations, and asks that the principle of the inviolability of human dignity and the sacredness of life always be protected.” He had previously emphasised: “There are no first-class and second-class dead, nor people who have more right to live than others simply because they were born on one continent rather than another, or in a particular country.”
    Cardinal Parolin expressed his hope “that the din of weapons will soon cease and that we may return to negotiation”. He added: “We must not empty negotiations of their meaning: it is essential to allow the necessary time for them to reach concrete results, working with patience and determination.” Furthermore, he said, it is necessary “to resist every delegitimisation of international institutions and to promote the strengthening of supranational norms that help States resolve disputes peacefully, through diplomacy and politics”. “This appeal,” Cardinal Parolin concluded, “should shake those who lead nations and all those working in the context of international relations, urging them to multiply their efforts for peace.”

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In his words, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin has expressed what reason and humanity demand – yet this is in danger of becoming obscured today amidst the fog of war and the accompanying spiritual, emotional and moral neglect. That is why the public statements from the Vatican and similar pronouncements from another source are so important.
    By mid-1941, when Hitler’s Germany and its allies had brutally subjugated almost all of Europe, millions of affected people had scarcely any hope left; many were in despair. Four years later, the Third Reich came to an end with its downfall. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not Adolf Hitler, but their brutally violent megalomania, expressed in words and deeds, must accept this comparison. Cardinal Parolin does not name any countries, peoples or those responsible. Anyone capable of reading, however, knows who and what is meant.
    In 1930, foreshadowing what would become reality in Germany three years later and what was already all too evident in the behaviour of fascism throughout Europe in 1930, Bertolt Brecht wrote his famous parable “Measures Against Violence”. Brecht was a staunch communist. But the message of his parable was: open resistance against fascist brute force is futile. It makes no sense to sacrifice oneself against violence. It is more important to survive. However, not to bow down inwardly despite all forced outward conformity – that is possible and sensible.
    Those in power in Iran had to choose a different path. In the Western world, Iran has been demonised since the end of the Shah’s regime in 1978/79. Thus, the country’s current resistance is also being pilloried and distorted in a grotesque manner. There is a brazen disregard for who actually started the war again.
    The Iranians are defending themselves against a war of annihilation waged against them. The reports from the Iranian Red Crescent must be a cause for major alarm. It’s a shame how Western power elites justify the war, refuse to respect the will to resist of large sections of the Iranian people, and how we are once again being inundated with distortions and misrepresentations, with propaganda and “alternative facts”.
    We must therefore draw attention to the independent voices that are attempting to offer a different perspective on Iran and the war. Figures such as former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, former US Army Colonel and Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson, and former US Army Major, intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter – to name just four former insiders of the US system here – deserve our thanks and high esteem.² Many more names could be mentioned. There are also courageous voices in the German-speaking world. One of them is that of Michael Lüders.³
    Given the lies told during past negotiations, it is only logical that Iran no longer trusts any offers of negotiation from the West. And one can only hope that the analyses and predictions of quite a few experts – that the US and Israeli governments have overreached themselves in their megalomania this time – prove to be correct.
    Above all, however, the key issue is that humanity finds ways to ensure that the political ethics expressed in Cardinal Parolin’s words do not remain a utopia, but can be realised step by step. •

¹https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-03/cardinal-parolin-interview-middle-east-iran-us-israel-war.html of 4 March 2026

² see Glenn Diesen’s interviews with Douglas Macgregor of 3 March 2026 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd_uJiRcl0Q), with Lawrence Wilkerson of 5 March 2026 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r8Ie-yNZU& t=28s), with Larry C. Johnson of 6 March 2026 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lligsWoPAx0) and with Scott Ritter of 11 March 2026 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQt351IzD54)

³ see, for example, Lüders, Michael. Angriff auf den Iran. Armageddon im Orient? (Attack on Iran. Armageddon in the Orient?); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHwTxh96W0 of 2 March 2026