Justice Is Blind — Except When It Isn't

On selective principles, strategic silence, and what small states stand to lose

On Sunday evening, 01 March 2026, two statements landed in quick succession. Estonia’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, meeting in extraordinary session, voiced support for the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. EU High Representative Kaja Kallas issued a statement on behalf of the Union that condemned Iranian retaliation as “inexcusable” while remaining entirely silent on the legality of the strikes that provoked it. Two statements, one evening, telling the same story by different means.

It is not a comforting story. And for small states that have staked their security on the consistent application of international rules, it is a dangerous one.

The Argument We’re Not Having

The case for quiet acquiescence writes itself. Iran supplied Russia with Shahed-136 drones that have killed Ukrainian civilians and destroyed Ukrainian energy infrastructure through three winters of war. Iran’s ballistic missile programme threatened not just Israel but European capitals within range. Iran’s proxies destabilised a region whose energy chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz — feed directly into European heating bills and industrial output. A degraded Iran is, in concrete and measurable terms, good for Ukraine and good for us.

This argument is honest. It deserves to be made openly, not whispered. The NB8 states — the Nordic-Baltic Eight — have more reason than most to welcome anything that weakens Russia’s supply chain and accelerates the end of the war in Ukraine. “The enemy of our enemy” is a reflex with real strategic content.

But it is not a legal doctrine. And when institutionalised as policy, reflexes become precedents.

What Actually Happened — And What Was Said About It

The factual account that follows is based on publicly available reporting as of 02 March 2026. The legal analysis that flows from it is explicitly contingent: if the material facts are substantially different — if, for instance, a credible imminent threat existed that has not been disclosed — the legal conclusions would require revision. The normative argument, however, stands regardless: the EU’s response neither requested clarification of those facts nor conditioned its silence on them.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched strikes across 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and his senior commanders. The stated objective, in Trump’s own words, was regime change. The operation was launched while US-Iran nuclear talks were actively ongoing — a second round had been scheduled in Geneva. No UN Security Council authorisation was sought or obtained.

Under the UN Charter, the use of force between states is prohibited except in two circumstances: Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII, or self-defence under Article 51 in response to an armed attack. Neither appears to have been satisfied. The anticipatory self-defence doctrine — the Caroline standard, requiring a threat that is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” — is difficult to reconcile with strikes launched while diplomatic negotiations were actively ongoing. A state that is negotiating is not a state acting with the urgency that anticipatory self-defence requires. The legal conclusion, on available facts, is that these were unlawful uses of force.

The EU’s response, published by the High Representative on 01 March, was a study in careful omission. It catalogued Iranian violations at length — nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, proxy warfare, repression of protesters. It called for “maximum restraint and full respect of international law.” It condemned Iranian retaliatory strikes as “inexcusable” violations of sovereignty. It expressed solidarity with “partners in the region that have been attacked or affected.”

What it did not do: name the United States or Israel. Characterise the 28 February strikes as a use of force. Reference the UN Charter prohibition on the use of force in relation to the initiating action. Mention that diplomacy was actively ongoing when the bombs fell.

The institutional significance of this silence deserves emphasis. The High Representative speaks for all 27 member states. Her statement is not a political opinion — it is the EU’s formal legal and political position. By condemning Iranian retaliation as a sovereignty violation while declining to apply the same framework to the initiating strikes, the EU effectively endorsed the legal legitimacy of those strikes. Silence, at that level of institutional authority, is not neutrality. It is acquiescence.

Estonia’s foreign affairs committee, meeting in extraordinary session that same evening, made explicit what Brussels communicated implicitly: it voiced direct support for the operation, becoming one of the few EU member states to do so publicly. The difference between the two statements is one of register, not of substance. One institution endorsed quietly; the other endorsed loudly. Read together, they construct the same narrative: Iran is the aggressor, the strikes are a response, and the rules-based order applies to Tehran but not to Washington or Tel Aviv.

The Russia Problem

Here is the argument that should be keeping NB8 foreign ministers awake.

Since February 2022, the West has built its entire Ukraine support framework on a clear normative proposition: Russia violated international law, and the international community must impose costs and refuse to normalise that violation. We have said this in the UN General Assembly, at the ICC, in every bilateral meeting with Global South partners who were tempted toward neutrality. Russia’s whataboutism — Kosovo, Iraq, Libya — we dismissed as bad-faith deflection. We were largely right.

We are no longer in a position to dismiss it. The United States has now launched a war of regime change, without UNSC authorisation, against a state that posed no imminent military threat, while diplomatic negotiations were ongoing. The legal structure is identical to the charge sheet against Russia. The outcome — our side’s silence, or worse, endorsement — is identical to what we condemned Moscow’s allies for doing in 2022.

Moscow noticed. Beijing noticed. Every non-aligned capital that we spent four years persuading that the rules-based order was worth defending noticed.

The difference, of course, is that we are right about Russia and Ukraine. The asymmetry of moral context is real — Iran spent decades funding proxies, supplying weapons used against European-backed forces, advancing a covert nuclear programme, and massacring its own people. But moral context does not, and cannot, amend the UN Charter. The Charter’s prohibition on force is not a sliding scale calibrated to the target’s behaviour. It is a structural guarantee — and it is the structural guarantee, not the good intentions of powerful states, on which small state security ultimately rests.

The appropriate channel for moral condemnation is law, not force: ICC referrals, targeted sanctions, General Assembly resolutions, the full toolkit of coercive diplomacy short of war. Iran’s conduct warranted all of those, and more. What it did not warrant — legally — was regime change by external military action, however strategically convenient that outcome may be.

What Should Have Been Said

Calling the strikes illegal would have been diplomatically explosive, and with the US as the indispensable guarantor of European security in an ongoing war, it was not a realistic ask. The Security Council route was equally foreclosed — a permanent member cannot be referred to itself, as four years of Russian vetoes have amply demonstrated.

But “not illegal” was not the only alternative to the silence that was chosen. Several positions were available that would have preserved normative coherence without requiring a direct confrontation with Washington:

1. A call for an independent legal assessment — from the UN Secretary-General, the International Court of Justice, or an ad hoc body — would have signalled that the legal question was open and required authoritative resolution, without prejudging the answer.

2. A formal invocation of the duty to conduct independent investigations into civilian casualties under international humanitarian law would have applied a standard the EU already applies elsewhere, consistently.

3. A statement expressing “serious concerns about the legal basis” for the strikes, without characterising them definitively, would have placed a marker without triggering a crisis.

Any of these would have been defensible, consistent, and honest. None required choosing between Washington and the rules-based order — they required only acknowledging that the two had come into tension, and that the tension was worth naming.

Instead, from Brussels: silence dressed as neutrality. From Tallinn: support dressed as strategy.

The Price of Selective Vision

The rules-based international order is not an abstract concept. For every state that shares a border with Russia, it is the practical guarantee that a great power cannot simply decide that its neighbour belongs to it. That guarantee is only as strong as its consistent application.

The statement issued under the High Representative’s name on 01 March is in tension with everything European leadership argued when making the case for Ukraine — that the Charter matters, that sovereignty is indivisible, that the rules apply to everyone. That tension deserves to be named — not as a criticism of any individual, but as an institutional failure that reveals how completely alliance management has displaced normative coherence at the European level.

Justice, it turns out, is blind — but not for all. We remember the international law when Russia bombs Kyiv. We find it harder to locate when the bombers are our friends — or at least the enemies of our friends’ enemies’ friends.

Small states cannot afford that kind of vision. We built our security on the principle that the rules apply to everyone — because we are the ones who need that principle most, and we will be the first to suffer when it fails.

The enemy of our enemy is not always our friend. And the price of confusing the two is one that small states, above all others, can least afford to pay.