Ben Shapiro: “There is no such thing as international law. It is nonsense.”
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From the January 5, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now, there are some people who have asked the legal question, what is the legal basis for this? So let's be clear. When people say there is a violation of international law, no one cares. There is no such thing as international law. It is nonsense.
It is nonsense because there is no enforcement mechanism. You know what international law really is? The law of the jungle. The reality is that the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. That is the law of international relations. There is no alternative to it.
All attempts to establish some alternative to it have failed, which is why self-defense is necessary and why a strong military is necessary for powerful Western states and why a stronger America in the world is better for the world.
I saw a hilarious post by somebody who said, well, now that we've done this, what's to stop China from morally attempting to take Taiwan? I wasn't aware that China was bound by our moral strictures. If they were, I don't think that they would be China, actually. I don't think that Russia is waiting around for our opinions. They're just doing what they want, and the thing that stops them is us, not our moral suasion.
On a moral level, by the way, taking out a communist dictator who has impoverished his people and destroyed his country is, in fact, morally superior to taking out, say, a democratic leader in another country who is not doing any of those things. Some bizarre moral relativism that is set in on both the horseshoe left and the isolationist right is pretty astonishing to watch.