Not All Aggression is Equal: Why Force for Regime Change is the Graver Breach

[Davit Khachatryan is an international law expert and lecturer specializing in public international law, alternative dispute resolution, investment law, international humanitarian law, and security]

The prohibition on the use of force is international law’s foundational rule. But not every violation of that rule is the same. When force is used not merely to coerce a state but to dismantle and replace its government, something qualitatively different, and more dangerous, has occurred. International law has always struggled to say so clearly. It should start.

The prohibition on the use of force codified in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is routinely described as the cornerstone of the postwar international order. Yet treating it as a monolithic rule obscures a critical internal distinction: aggression used to achieve discrete military or political objectives, and aggression used to overthrow and reconstitute a foreign government. These are not merely different in degree. They are different in kind, different in their Charter violations, different in their systemic consequences, and different in the threat they pose to the architecture of global peace and security.

The Baseline

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force:

“against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The framing is tripartite, and all three limbs matter.

Most attention has so far focused on the first two: territorial integrity and political independence. The third limb, the catch-all reference to the Purposes of the UN, connects the prohibition on force directly to Article 1 of the Charter, which identifies those Purposes: maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among states based on the principle of equal rights and self-determination, and achieving international cooperation in solving international problems.

Aggression in its more familiar forms, cross-border strikes, military incursions, and naval blockades, implicates the first limb primarily. Territorial integrity is violated; peace and security are threatened. But the political independence of the target state is not necessarily in question.

Aggression for regime change is different. It is designed, as a primary object, to destroy political independence, namely to replace the government of the target state with one more amenable to the aggressor’s preferences. This strikes at all three limbs of Article 2(4) simultaneously. It attacks territorial integrity (forces enter), political independence (the government is removed), and the Purposes of the UN (self-determination is negated, international peace is destabilized in ways that outlast the military phase). The violation is not wider only geometrically. It is wider legally.

Aggression and Its Hierarchy

The 1974 UN General Assembly Resolution 3314, the authoritative definition of aggression for purposes of Chapter VII, lists categories of acts that qualify. Article 5(2) of that resolution states: “A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.” But it does not distinguish between forms of aggression based on intent or objective.

The Rome Statute, which incorporates the crime of aggression into the ICC’s jurisdiction following the Kampala amendments, defines an act of aggression as one that “by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter.” This qualification is designed precisely to exclude minor or technical violations from the crime’s reach. What it implicitly acknowledges is that not all force is equal: magnitude and gravity are legally relevant.

Regime-change aggression satisfies the gravity threshold more readily and more completely than ordinary uses of force, for several interconnected reasons. First, Article 2(4) does not itself rank violations of the prohibition on force; any unlawful threat or use of force is a breach, and the Charter creates no formal hierarchy among them. Second, Resolution 3314 lists qualifying acts of aggression without differentiating their gravity by reference to the aggressor’s political objective. The argument here operates at a different level: not that the black-letter texts establish a hierarchy, but that the Rome Statute’s gravity and character criteria already require the kind of qualitative differentiation that regime-change aggression most clearly satisfies.

Scale,Duration, and Consequences

Displacing a government requires sustained military operations. It can hardly be accomplished by a limited military operation. The physical violence is therefore larger, more prolonged, and more destructive than the force used in most other categories of aggression.

Regime change instrumentalizes the civilian population; it targets governance structures, administrative continuity, and state institutions, not merely military objectives. This often blurs the line between legitimate military targeting and attacks on the means by which a population governs itself, raising independent concerns under international humanitarian law.

Governments dismantled and replaced by occupation or proxy installation are not easily reconstituted. The target state’s political system may be permanently altered. Its internal legal order is disrupted. Its population was deprived of the leadership it would otherwise have had, for better or worse, under the principle of self-determination.

The Charter Principles at Stake

When a state uses force for regime change, it produces a cascade of violations, and tracing that cascade is the point.

Start with sovereign equality under Article 2(1). Regime change is its antithesis. It treats the target state not as an equal member of the international community but as an object of another state’s policy preferences, its political form something to be adjusted from the outside by force. Move to Article 2(4) itself, whose political independence limb exists precisely for this situation. The whole point of regime-change aggression is to end the existing government’s authority; it is difficult to imagine a more direct violation of that specific prohibition. Then add Article 2(7), which shields matters of domestic jurisdiction from external intervention. A state’s form of government, its political system, and the identity of its governing authorities are the core of what domestic jurisdiction means.

Article 1(2) identifies equal rights and self-determination of peoples as a foundational Purpose of the Organization, and that Purpose is directly negated when an external power installs or removes governments by force. Self-determination encompasses the ongoing right of a people to determine their own political destiny without coercive external interference. Finally, Article 33’s obligation to pursue peaceful settlement of disputes is not incidental: regime change forecloses negotiation by presuming that the solution to a political disagreement is the elimination of the other side’s government rather than engagement with it.

The Systemic Resonance Problem

The legal analysis above captures the normative severity. But there is a second dimension that existing doctrine inadequately addresses: the systemic resonance of regime-change aggression on global peace and security.

International order is built on the expectation that states, whatever their differences, will remain interlocutors. Diplomacy, negotiation, and international legal process all presuppose the continuity of sovereign governments as subjects of international relations. If sovereignty can be negated when the great powers find it convenient, the prohibition on force loses its deterrent function. If political independence is conditional on the approval of more powerful neighbors or distant hegemons, sovereign equality is fiction.

The signal sent by successful regime-change aggression, that force can be used not only to coerce states but to eliminate governments, is categorically more destabilizing than the signal sent by ordinary aggression, which can be repelled, compensated, or condemned while leaving the basic structure of the interstate system intact.

Furthermore, once it is accepted that certain governments are so objectionable, because they are authoritarian, and because they threaten their neighbors. After all, they are hostile to a particular power’s interests, so that their forcible removal is permissible or at least tolerable; the exception swallows the rule. The principle of political independence becomes indistinguishable from a principle of political conditionality: you have sovereignty so long as I approve of your government.

The Self-Determination Dimension

Self-determination is enshrined in Articles 1(2) and 55 of the Charter, elaborated in the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration, and recognized as a peremptory norm (jus cogens) by significant scholarly authority. Its content, in the internal dimension relevant here, encompasses the right of peoples to choose their own political system and their own government without coercive external interference.

Regime change by force negates this right entirely. The people of the target state are deprived, by military violence, of the government they have, whatever their views on that government, and presented instead with whatever arrangement the aggressor installs or enables.

However, some scholars argue that the self-determination analysis shifts where the targeted government is itself suppressing its people’s political rights. If sovereignty is conditional on representative governance, as the final paragraph of principle V of the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration suggests, then a government that systematically denies self-determination to its own population may have forfeited the protections that would otherwise shield it from external action. On this reading, forcible regime change directed at a sufficiently repressive government does not negate self-determination but restores it.

The argument, however, conflates two distinct questions. The first is whether a government respects the self-determination of its people. The second is whether external military force is a lawful mechanism for remedying that failure. The Charter system assigns the latter function to collective institutions, principally the Security Council acting under Chapter VII, and explicitly denies it to individual states acting unilaterally. The self-determination right belongs to the people of the target state, not to the state choosing to intervene on their behalf; no unilateral actor can invoke self-determination simultaneously as the right being protected and as the legal basis for the force used to protect it. The appropriate response to a government’s internal suppression of self-determination runs through the institutions the Charter created for precisely that purpose, not through the unilateral military calculations of more powerful states.

If self-determination is a peremptory norm, then forcible regime change, as its systematic negation, constitutes a violation of jus cogens. The consequences are significant: under the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, all states have obligations in response to serious breaches of peremptory norms, including obligations not to recognize the resulting situation and not to render aid or assistance in its maintenance.

Libya, Venezuela, Iran

Three episodes from recent decades illustrate both the analytical distinction and the systemic damage that flows from collapsing it.

Libya (2011) 

Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized member states to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack by Libyan government forces. The authorization was explicit: a no-fly zone, civilian protection. It did not authorize regime change. What followed was, by any honest account, regime change. NATO air power was employed not to protect civilians in Benghazi but to provide decisive military support for armed opposition forces seeking to overthrow the Gaddafi government, a government that, whatever its character, remained the internationally recognized governing authority of Libya. When Gaddafi was captured and killed, and the government was dismantled, the Security Council mandate had long since been exceeded.

The Libya case demonstrates that regime-change aggression can be disguised, legally laundered, as humanitarian intervention when the authorization is broad enough, and the will to observe its limits is absent. The Council authorized a force for civilian protection; the force was used for political reconstitution. Second, the aftermath illustrates the irreversibility point with brutal clarity. A decade and a half later, Libya remains fractured, contested by rival authorities, and a source of regional instability that has spilled into Mali, Niger, Chad, and beyond. No cease-fire could restore the status quo ante because the status quo ante, a functioning state, however repugnant, no longer existed. Third, the Libya precedent poisoned the well for future Security Council action. Russia and China drew the explicit lesson from Libya when they blocked Council resolutions on Syria: a civilian protection mandate would be used for regime change. The systemic resonance was immediate and durable.

Venezuela (2019-2026)

The Venezuela situation traces the full arc of regime-change aggression, from coercive pressure to its logical conclusion. Beginning in 2019, the United States recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s “interim president,” imposed sweeping sanctions designed to collapse the Maduro government’s finances, and made explicit that “all options are on the table,” the standard diplomatic formula for military threat within the meaning of Article 2(4)’s prohibition on threats of force. Senior U.S. officials, including the National Security Advisor, openly invoked the Monroe Doctrine. For years, this campaign operated below the threshold of direct armed force, combining economic strangulation, parallel government recognition, and explicit threat.

In January 2026, the campaign reached its endpoint: Nicolás Maduro was forcibly taken into U.S. custody. Whatever one thinks of Maduro’s government, the forcible removal of a sitting head of state by a foreign power is not a law enforcement operation. It is the physical consummation of regime-change aggression, the political independence of Venezuela extinguished not by a vote, not by a popular uprising, but by the unilateral application of force against its governing authority.

Venezuela illustrates that regime-change aggression does not require conventional military deployment to implicate Article 2(4)’s political independence limb; years of economic coercion and threat sufficed to sustain the campaign. It demonstrates the incremental logic of normalization: what began as sanctions became recognition of a parallel government, became an explicit military threat, became physical abduction of a head of state, each step rendered more tolerable by the last. And the Maduro abduction is, in the most literal sense possible, force directed against the political independence of a UN member state. That it was packaged as a criminal apprehension does not change its legal character. The Charter does not permit forcible regime change by other names.

Iran (2026)

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, under the operational names Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, is the most explicit and consequential instance of regime-change aggression in recent memory, and the one that most directly vindicates the analytical framework developed here.

The stated justification for the strikes was Iran’s nuclear program. The actual target set told a different story. The opening salvos killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and struck substantial portions of Iran’s senior political and military leadership. Subsequent Israeli strikes were timed and targeted to prevent the Assembly of Experts, Iran’s constitutionally designated body for selecting a new supreme leader, from convening. President Trump stated publicly that he wanted to be involved in determining who would lead Iran, calling the prospect of Mojtaba Khamenei succeeding his father “unacceptable.” In the hours after the strikes began, Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government.”

Iran’s government has survived the strikes; a provisional leadership council assumed authority, and the Assembly of Experts subsequently appointed a new supreme leader. But the force was manifestly directed at the Islamic Republic’s capacity to govern, to maintain leadership continuity, and to exercise political authority, not merely at its nuclear or military capabilities. Strikes designed to kill a head of state, prevent constitutional succession, and prompt popular overthrow are not nuclear counterproliferation.

Operation Epic Fury implicates all three limbs of Article 2(4). It negates self-determination through force designed to reconstitute Iran’s governing structure against the will expressed through its own constitutional processes. It has already produced systemic resonance of the first order: states across the Global South have updated their assessments of what the prohibition on force is actually worth when great powers determine that a government is sufficiently objectionable. And it did so in the context of ongoing nuclear negotiations; talks were underway in Oman as late as February 6, making it also a case of force deployed where Article 33’s peaceful settlement obligation plainly applied.

Regime-change aggression is a live and recurring feature of contemporary international relations, pursued by powerful states with varying instruments, direct military force with an exceeded mandate, parallel recognition, economic coercion, and explicit threat, and ongoing armed conflict with a declared leadership-decapitation objective.

Toward a Doctrinal Clarification

The argument here is not that regime-change aggression is always unlawful while other forms are sometimes lawful. All uses of force not authorized by the Security Council and not falling within the narrow right of self-defense are unlawful. The argument is that regime-change aggression is more unlawful, that it violates more Charter norms, engages peremptory law, produces graver systemic consequences, and warrants a distinctive legal response.

Three doctrinal clarifications would advance this:

First, international lawyers and institutions should be explicit that force directed at the political independence of a state, as distinct from force directed at its territory, constitutes the paradigm violation of Article 2(4)’s political independence limb and engages a separate and aggravated legal analysis.

Second, the jus cogens dimension of self-determination should be systematically integrated into the analysis of forcible regime change. When force is used to deprive a people of their political order, the applicable legal framework includes not only the jus ad bellum rules on force but also the peremptory norm of self-determination, with the legal consequences that norm carries.

Third, the systemic resonance of regime-change aggression, its capacity to destabilize the foundational conditions of interstate order, should be recognized as a factor that makes such acts categorically more threatening to international peace and security within the meaning of Chapter VII, regardless of the Security Council’s practical capacity to act.

None of this is radical. It is doctrinal development from existing text, existing norms, and existing principles. The Charter already contains all the resources needed to recognize that when a state destroys another government by force, it has done something worse than what it does when it bombs a military installation. International law should say so, clearly, systematically, and without apology.