Will the Gaza and Iran Wars Destroy the US’s International Standing?

Since the war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, unconditional American support for Israel has steadily worn away the asset Washington guards most jealously abroad: its credibility. That erosion did not pause when administrations changed. If anything, the Trump administration has widened it, pairing a blank check to Israel with a war on Iran that critics across the political spectrum call a disaster.

The broadest form of this charge holds that Washington has rendered its own claim to guard a “rules-based order” incoherent. Writing for the Cato Institute, Patrick Porter argued that Israel’s war on Gaza “has finally ended the myth of an American-led ‘liberal order.'” The piece held that the ICJ’s January 2024 interim ruling, which it read as finding a plausible case of genocide, “should mark the point where talk of a ‘rules-based liberal order’ embodied by America should fail the laughter test,” noting that then-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan invoked human rights while refusing meaningful pressure on Israel.

Writing in Global Policy Journal, analyst Mohsen Solhdoost put it plainly. Israel’s killing of UNRWA staff, its attacks on UNIFIL installations, and its dismissal of ICJ and ICC rulings, he wrote, “have presented significant challenges to the U.S.-led post-Cold War order” and cast doubt on “the U.S.’s capacity to uphold a rules-based international order.” By letting that conduct persist without consequence, he warned, “the U.S. risks further undermining its own credibility and moral authority.”

Nowhere does the pattern show more plainly than at the United Nations Security Council. Washington has reached for its veto more than 45 times to shield Israel, over half of every veto the United States has ever cast, according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In June 2025, the United States stood alone, voting 14 to 1 against a permanent ceasefire demand. UN chief António Guterres had already named the cost. In a February 2024 address in Geneva, he said the Council’s lack of unity on Ukraine and Gaza “has severely – perhaps fatally – undermined its authority,” and he called for “serious reform to its composition and working methods.” He sharpened the point later. Addressing the Council in September 2025, Guterres warned that “UN resolutions continue to be ignored. International humanitarian law violated. Impunity prevails. And our collective credibility is being undermined.”

Scholars have pressed the same case for years. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who wrote The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with Stephen Walt, argued that support driven by a domestic lobby rather than strategy jeopardizes U.S. security and does not serve America’s national interest whatsoever. He has since gone further, telling one interviewer that American backing is “not only morally indefensible” but “strategically disastrous,” and calling the United States complicit in what he labels a genocide.

In a similar vein, Princeton professor emeritus Richard Falk, a former UN Special Rapporteur, argues that Washington has steadily hollowed out the UN by shielding Israel from its legal obligations. The “bipartisan character of Israeli support,” he warned, leaves “little room for meaningful governmental opposition,” producing what amounts to structural impunity.

Career diplomats echo the point. Carne Ross, a former British envoy who resigned over the Iraq War, put it bluntly. “The United States vetoing resolutions at the UN Security Council demanding a ceasefire is having a very profound effect. It sends a very clear message that force and power are right, which does enormous damage to the notion of a world of rules, a world of international law.” He compared Western conduct to Moscow’s: “That the US and the UK have been prepared to defend a country clearly engaged in illegal conduct in its pursuit of a war that puts it on par with Russia clearly undermines its claims to stand for a world of rules.” The same inconsistency, he cautioned, weakens Western leverage over China and Russia.

The friction has reached the system’s own referees. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur whose March 2024 “Anatomy of a Genocide” report found reasonable grounds to believe Israel had crossed the legal threshold for acts of genocide in Gaza, drew sanctions from the Trump administration in July 2025 after she urged the ICC to investigate American and Israeli nationals and companies. Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed the designation under Executive Order 14203, casting her work with the court as an infringement on the sovereignty of two nations that never joined it. Albanese called the move “calculated to weaken my mission.”

For much of the world, the lesson about the United States’ complicity in Israel’s criminal behavior has landed. A broad analysis cited by Middle East Monitor argued that Gaza has “accelerated global shifts in power,” exposed “a glaring double standard,” and made “alternative global alignments” through BRICS, China, and Russia more attractive to states increasingly disillusioned with the excesses of the Judeo-American Empire. Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reported the same grievance, documenting how the Global South accuses America of hypocrisy by contrasting its responses to Gaza and Ukraine.

The experts who study the region reach a similar verdict. A 2024 Brookings survey of more than 750 Middle East scholars found that over three quarters said Biden’s Gaza policy hurt the prospects of peace, U.S. interests, and America’s standing, while fewer than 10 percent said it helped U.S. standing or interests. Most also expected the war to drive new large-scale displacement of Palestinians, an outcome they judged corrosive to any future settlement led by Washington.

Here the Trump administration enters the story. Rather than condition its support for Israel, it widened the blank check and then went to war. In June 2025 the United States joined Israel’s twelve days of fighting against Iran, striking the nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and making President Trump the first American leader to bomb another country’s nuclear program. Guterres called the strikes a “dangerous escalation.” Trump declared a “victory for everybody”, yet his own Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that the attack set Iran’s program back only by months.

The reprieve did not hold. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel opened a far larger war on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and pulling the Gulf, Lebanon, and the Strait of Hormuz into the conflict theater. Months in, this highly unpopular war is carrying heavy costs to the American and world economy with its objectives still unmet.

Ultimately, the United States’ unconditional support for Israel’s punitive campaign in Gaza and its ill-fated, expanding war in Iran have destabilized the Middle East, and more importantly, have severely eroded Washington’s credibility on the world stage. As the United States remains entangled in a self-perpetuating cycle of warfare and economic strain, nations like China are quietly capitalizing on these missteps. To much of the Global South, Beijing now presents a starkly appealing contrast: a stable, pragmatic partner offering initiatives like the Belt and Road, entirely free of the ideological baggage and destructive interventions that have come to define the Judeo-American order.