Israel Strike in Doha, Qatar, Targets Hamas Leaders, Drawing Rare U.S. Rebuke

Writing in a column published September 12, 2025, Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman argues that the post-World War II rules-based order, defined and led by the United States, is being tested by unilateral uses of force. He compares the present moment to Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 description of a “state of nature” without governing institutions, and he describes the current period as a “grand experiment” in moving away from those rules. Froman says the trend extends beyond trade to the use of military force.

He points to three recent examples. Froman writes that Russia launched more than a dozen one-way attack drones, which entered Polish airspace and crashed on Polish soil, and that NATO fighter jets were scrambled to shoot down enemy air assets over alliance airspace for the first time in its history. He says Russia has failed to offer an explanation or apology, and that Belarusian military officials claimed Ukrainian electronic warfare systems caused the drones to veer off course. Froman states that he does not know whether the strike was intentional.

The second example concerns Israel. Froman writes that it was convenient for the United States when Israel degraded Iran’s regional proxy network, including Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, which he says came at “a tremendous and increasing humanitarian toll.” He also refers to Israeli and American strikes on Iran itself, including its nuclear facilities. According to Froman, it was less convenient when Israel launched a unilateral airstrike in Qatar to assassinate Hamas’s political leadership. He notes that Qatar has been a mediator between Israel and Hamas and hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the region.

Froman writes that it is unclear what the United States knew about the strike in advance and when it knew it. He states that the Trump administration’s “rare rebuke of Israel” suggests Washington sees the risks when countries ignore rules or conventions and act unilaterally at others’ expense. Froman frames this as a case where a state’s security aims are weighed against the danger that other states will follow the same path. The lesson he draws is one of restraint in a volatile region, a call to pursue peace where it is possible (Romans 12:18).

Froman also cites the U.S. strike on a boat that President Donald Trump said was transporting drugs “heading to the United States,” which killed all 11 people aboard. He notes reports that the boat had already turned away. Froman writes that the strike treated alleged drug smugglers as combatants rather than targets of law enforcement, and that the United States is not at war with Venezuela and Congress did not authorize such action. In a letter to Congress, Trump argued that the United States was compelled to act in self-defense because thousands of Americans die annually from drug overdoses. Froman responds that self-defense is usually invoked against an imminent threat or actual harm.

Froman warns that if one, two or three countries take unilateral kinetic action, others may feel no guardrails constrain them. He cites the historian Robert Kagan, who has opined that the post-World War II liberal international order, defined by a rules-based system, was not the natural state of world affairs but a fragile construct sustained by deliberate American power.

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