Accountability Isn't Aggression, It's Deterrence

The international system is confronting a profound moral and strategic crisis.

For decades, the principle of state sovereignty — originally conceived to protect nations from external domination — has been systematically distorted into a shield for criminal regimes, failed states, and authoritarian rulers who brutalize their own populations while exporting instability far beyond their borders.

When sovereignty is invoked to defend tyranny, it ceases to be a pillar of global order and becomes an accomplice to chaos.

Let us speak plainly. A regime that destroys its economy, terrorizes its citizens, fuels mass migration, traffics narcotics, and destabilizes neighboring countries forfeits its claim to legitimacy.

The Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro is not a sovereign democracy; it is a collapsed narco-state. To hide such a regime behind legal formalism is not respect for international law — it is moral abdication.

For this reason, this writer supports decisive American leadership, including firm action against the Venezuelan regime and the arrest and prosecution of Nicolás Maduro in the United States for crimes committed against his people and the wider region.

Accountability isn't aggression.

It's deterrence.

It sends a clear message to other despots that mass repression, corruption, and transnational criminality will not be rewarded with diplomatic immunity.

Some voices in the West continue to argue that military restraint and endless diplomacy preserve peace. Recent history proves the opposite.

From Caracas to Tehran, from Sana'a to Khartoum, passivity has entrenched authoritarian regimes, empowered extremist Islamist networks, and prolonged human suffering.

The cost of inaction has repeatedly exceeded the cost of resolve.

The United States once relied heavily on Europe to manage and stabilize fragile states across its near and extended periphery.

The outcome is now evident.

Europe failed — not only to stabilize these regions, but also to correctly identify the ideological nature of the threats emerging from them.

Political Islamists, extremist militias, and Muslim Brotherhood-inspired movements were often misread as legitimate political actors.

Instead of moderation, this miscalculation produced radicalization, institutional decay, and leaders who openly despise Western democracies while exploiting Western hesitation.

Similarly, the United States relied on Israel as the primary frontline defender against terrorism in the Mideast.

Israel succeeded where larger and militarily stronger states failed — by confronting terrorist organizations directly and decisively.

Yet this success came at a high cost.

The atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, were not the result of excessive Israeli force; they were the consequence of years of global appeasement toward terrorist infrastructures, their ideological sponsors, and the states enabling them.

As President Donald Trump repeatedly argued, peace is not achieved through weakness or wishful thinking, but through strength.

This is not a call for reckless interventionism or perpetual war.

It's a recognition of a fundamental truth of international relations: deterrence works only when adversaries believe that consequences are real, credible, and unavoidable.

Many of today's failed states are not organic nations forged through shared civic identity.

They are artificial constructs — territories assembled through force during World War II or through post-colonial arrangements that ignored ethnic, religious, and cultural realities.

Over time, these states did not evolve into inclusive political systems.

Instead, they became prisons of identity, ruled by coercion rather than consent.

The international community must therefore confront an uncomfortable but unavoidable question: Should we indefinitely preserve borders that generate perpetual violence, repression, and collapse simply because they exist on a map?

Nowhere is this dilemma more evident than in Yemen.

The idea that a unified Yemeni state can function under authoritarian rule intertwined with Islamist doctrine has become detached from reality.

Yemen's population is trapped between the Houthis, extremist factions, and institutional collapse. Even more concerning is the deliberate weakening of the Southern Transitional forces in southern Yemen — particularly through misguided regional calculations.

This erosion has created a strategic vacuum with devastating consequences.

By marginalizing southern forces that have demonstrated local legitimacy and counterterrorism capacity, the door has been opened to a dangerous convergence of interests between the Houthis and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Many of al-Qaida's senior operatives originate from Shabwa and Abyan in southern Yemen, and their resurgence has enabled a strange but operationally effective alignment between Iran-backed Houthis, al-Qaida, and Muslim Brotherhood networks.

This convergence has not only intensified Iranian influence, but has transformed Yemen into a laboratory of hybrid warfare and extremist cooperation. To imagine that such a reality can be resolved through dialogue alone is not realism — it's denial.

Iran presents an even clearer case.

It is a vast nation with extraordinary ethnic, cultural, and regional diversity stretching from north to south and east to west.

Yet this diversity is systematically suppressed by a centralized ideological regime that governs through fear, repression, and external aggression.

The Iranian people are not the problem; the regime is.

Preserving the current structure at all costs serves neither regional stability nor the aspirations of Iranians themselves.

Redrawing borders should never be an act of conquest or domination.

But enabling self-determination, decentralization, or alternative models of governance for populations denied dignity and representation is not destabilization — it's conflict prevention.

A Mideast organized around accountable governance, local legitimacy, and pluralism would be safer for its people and far less threatening to global security.

The world can no longer afford to appease regimes that play both sides — speaking the language of diplomacy while exporting terrorism and ideological subversion.

This behavior is not strategic ambiguity; it's calculated deception, sustained by Western indecision.

Power unused in the face of injustice is not restraint.

It's abdication.

Global leadership demands moral clarity and strategic courage.

It requires distinguishing between governments and regimes, between sovereignty and criminality, between peace and paralysis.

If democracy, human rights, and international security are truly our values, then they must be defended — not merely proclaimed.

The choice before us is stark.

Either we accept a world held hostage by failed states, dictators, and violent ideologies, or we reclaim a global order grounded in deterrence, accountability, and human dignity.

History will not judge us by our intentions, but by our resolve.

Ahmed Charai is publisher of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, TV Abraham, and Radio Abraham. He serves on the boards of several prominent institutions, including the Atlantic Council, the Center for the National Interest, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is also an international councilor and a member of the Advisory Board at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Read more of Ahmed Charai's reports here.