Gaza, the US and China: the future of war and the end of civilisation

Gaza sets a terrifying precedent: the radical reinterpretation of the laws of war is bound to have serious consequences on the destructiveness of future conflicts — including a US-China war

Guest post by Roberto Iannuzzi, originally published in Italian on his Substack.

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I have written on several occasions that the scale of the Gaza tragedy extends far beyond the narrow confines of that tormented strip of land on the Mediterranean coast:

What is happening in Gaza will not remain confined to Gaza, one could say, because it is a symptom of a broader malaise that is eroding Western civilisation.

I further noted that:

The international order the UN has represented since 1945, and the role of guarantor of international law which the United States has long claimed for itself, also lie buried beneath the rubble of Gaza.

Now, an investigation by the American magazine The New Yorker entitled “What’s Legally Allowed in War” — largely overlooked by the media — helps to clarify the dangerous precedent being set by the ongoing massacre in Gaza.

The report, written by Colin Jones, describes how legal experts in the US military are engaging with the Israeli military operation in Gaza, viewing it as a kind of "dress rehearsal" for a possible future conflict with a power like China.

The article opens by describing two visits to the Strip by Geoffrey Corn, law professor at Texas Tech University and former senior legal advisor to the US armed forces on the laws of war, also known as International Humanitarian Law (IHL) or the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC).

To convey the level of destruction he witnessed in Gaza, Corn compared it to Berlin at the end of the Second World War. He was neither the first nor the only one to draw such a comparison.

As early as December 2023, just two months into the conflict, military experts consulted by the Financial Times had likened the destruction in northern Gaza to that of German cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne following Allied bombing campaigns.

The Second World War was the first armed conflict in which advances in military aviation made large-scale bombing of civilians possible. Massacres of defenceless populations were deliberately employed to force the enemy into surrender — often unsuccessfully.

Jones notes that it was only in 1977 that the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibited military actions intentionally targeting civilians. But the Israeli operation in Gaza has laid bare the ineffectiveness of this legal framework.

However, this is not the conclusion reached by American military experts.

In Rafah, on the border between the Palestinian enclave and Egypt, Israeli military officers showed Corn videos which, in their view, demonstrated the presence of Hamas fighters in the area prior to the Israeli offensive.

Despite his comparison to wartime Berlin, Corn concluded in his investigation that the presence of Hamas rendered those locations “military objectives”. As such, the civilians killed in the operation were not intentional targets, but “collateral casualties”.

An “accidental” extermination?

The official death toll in the Strip currently exceeds 52,000 (likely an undercount), while more than 420,000 people have been displaced from a total population of around 2.3 million at the outset of the conflict.

In its military campaign, Israel has indiscriminately bombed homes, schools, hospitals, places of worship, factories, universities, libraries and cultural centres. Israeli bulldozers have flattened and devastated farmland, greenhouses, orchards, and cemeteries. The Israeli armed forces have destroyed water pipes, tanks and wells, and put desalination plants out of use.

As I wrote in a previous article, over the course of 2024

a growing body of reports from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) classified Israel’s actions in the Strip as a “genocide”.

These follow the provisional ruling by the International Court of Justice in January, which deemed the genocide charge brought by South Africa against Israel to be “plausible”. Since then, conditions in Gaza have deteriorated dramatically.

Jewish academics and Holocaust scholars such as Omer Bartov and Raz Segal have openly referred to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza as a “genocide”.

Yet, as noted, not only Corn but also other legal experts within the US military have reached entirely different conclusions, as Jones details in his investigation.

In a report prepared for the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Corn and a group of retired generals concluded that the Israeli military’s application of “risk mitigation measures for civilians” reflected a “good faith effort” to comply with the laws of war. Hamas, they argued, had systematically and deliberately violated these laws.

Interviewed by Jones, Corn said that despite the shocking level of destruction in Gaza — which he himself found disturbing — the accusations against Israel were premature:

“What I can say is that the systems and processes that the IDF implemented are very similar to what we would implement in a similar battle space”.

His assessments and those of the generals who authored the JINSA report are not an anomaly.

As Jones writes in his report, the idea “Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in line with the US military’s understanding of its own legal obligations, has become the general consensus among American military lawyers and their allies in the academy in recent years”.

Preparing for war with China

Confirming this, Jones cites a recent study by Naz Modirzadeh, professor at Harvard Law School and founder of the university’s programme on international law and armed conflict.

Modirzadeh writes that the US government has been evasive when it comes to judging whether Israel has violated the laws of war. This, she argues, is not due to hypocrisy or geopolitical calculation, but rather to “a deeper transformation within the US military and its legal apparatus”.

In recent years, the Department of Defense has increasingly focused on how the US might fight a large-scale war against a peer military rival with comparable technological and combat capabilities.

In such a scenario, referred to in military jargon as a “large-scale combat operation” (LSCO), an extremely violent military conflict would unfold across multiple domains — air, land and sea. Air superiority would no longer be guaranteed, casualties could reach into the hundreds of thousands, and entire cities might be levelled.

“In short”, Modirzadeh writes, the US military has begun “preparing for an all-out war with China”. With such a conflagration in mind, military legal experts are now reinterpreting the laws of war.

“From that vantage”, Jones writes, “Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail”.

A doubly disturbing assertion — first, because Gaza is not a war against a regular army of equal standing, but against a guerrilla force and an unarmed civilian population.

And second, because it casts the Strip as a kind of “laboratory” for testing Western public reactions to what is in fact an operation of mass extermination.

Even more alarming are the future scenarios that such thinking implies.

As Jones notes, since 2018, the US government’s National Defense Strategy has elevated great power competition — with China and Russia at the forefront — to the top of the national security agenda, replacing terrorism.

On the basis of this shift, the vast Pentagon bureaucracy has embarked on a massive reorganisation aimed at redefining the defence budget, training manuals, arms contracts and military strategy, with the Pacific theatre as its primary focus.

A Department of Defense memo, revealed by the Washington Post, confirms this trend by disclosing directives from current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth aimed at preparing the United States for a potential war with China.

In 2024, the US deployed its Typhon missile system — with a range of approximately 2,000 km — in the Philippines, where the US military now has access to at least nine bases. These missiles are capable of striking cities and bases on Chinese territory.

The end of the era of “restraint”

Meanwhile, in 2021, The Military Review published an article by two senior US military legal experts arguing that for the past twenty years, American forces have operated under a doctrine of exceptional restraint.

This was made possible by a unique combination of factors — secure bases, technological superiority, air and naval dominance — which allowed for methodical and “unhurried” elimination of enemy targets. This practice culminated in the use of remotely operated drone strikes.

The authors contend that in order to win a large-scale war, the United States will need to fight under far more permissive rules of engagement.

Not only the conclusions, but the premises of such a claim are deeply troubling.

It is enough to recall the criminal inaccuracy (acknowledged even by US military sources) of drone strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Or the thousands of civilian deaths caused by intense US bombing campaigns to “liberate” ISIS-held cities like Raqqa and Mosul in Syria and Iraq in recent years.

Still, as Jones points out, the Military Review article was followed by a stream of others — articles, official speeches and conferences — all promoting the same argument: that the US military must conduct the next high-intensity conflict under less restrictive rules.

The trend is already clearly visible in the Israeli campaign in Gaza, where the military leadership has broadened the list of permissible targets and drastically relaxed restrictions on civilian casualties.

Jones cites a video from April that illustrates how permissive the Israeli military’s rules of engagement have become. In the clip, a battalion commander briefs his soldiers ahead of a hostage rescue operation in Rafah. “Anyone you encounter is an enemy,” the officer says. “Anyone you see, open fire, neutralise the threat and keep moving”.

US military legal experts are pushing in the same direction: more “lenient” rules to maximise the lethality of the American war machine.

Political directives reinforce this trend. Upon being appointed to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth declared in an official statement that he intended to “revive the warrior ethos” of the US military, focusing on the “lethality” of the armed forces.

“We are American warriors. We will defend our country”, Hegseth stated, as if the United States were bracing for an imminent military invasion.

The arrival of the new Secretary of Defense led to the cancellation of Pentagon programmes aimed at preventing civilian casualties in US military operations.

“Bunker mentality” and democratic backsliding

As Modirzadeh wrote:

Hegseth reduces war to a brutal, inevitable contest of destruction, dismisses legal and ethical constraints as dangerous hindrances to victory, and portrays modern rules of engagement — particularly those emphasizing civilian protection — as naïve concessions to global opinion that weaken US military effectiveness against adversaries who do not abide by such restrictions.

This outlook also reflects a view of international competition as a zero-sum game, where one either dominates or is dominated — a perspective increasingly prevalent within the American establishment in recent years.

The political leadership of a country that, though in decline, remains the world's leading superpower, is increasingly afflicted by a “bunker mentality” eerily similar to Israel’s.

According to this mindset, the US is surrounded by enemies and — as strategist Wess Mitchell has written — must “manage the gaps between [its] finite means and the virtually infinite threats arrayed against it”.

The possibility of coexisting with other international powers in a multipolar world is largely rejected.

Two final considerations arise from all this. As Modirzadeh has noted, the legal reinterpretation of the laws of war is not a purely speculative exercise; it has wide-reaching practical consequences.

Even if one hopes that an open war between the US and China never comes to pass, the transformation this prospect is driving in the US military’s overall approach to warfare — in legal terms, training and strategic planning — is already real.

And it is bound to have concrete effects on the destructiveness of American military action in future conflicts.

This brings us to the growing fragility of democratic oversight over Western governments. One need only look to Europe: the president of the European Commission bypassed the European Parliament to approve the SAFE legislative proposal, which authorises up to €150 billion in loans for the continent’s rearmament.

Given such fragility, and the accompanying decline in civilian oversight of military apparatuses, the shift towards more lethal warfare and reduced concern for collateral damage and civilian casualties becomes even more alarming.

Here, then, is another reason why the catastrophe in Gaza — far from being a remote crisis confined to a region of endemic conflict, as the media would have us believe — is in fact a tragic and dangerous symptom of the civilisational crisis engulfing the West.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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