Sixty years ago, the United States and Great Britain spearheaded efforts to create a new world order based on international rules. Today these same two nations are leading the charge to abandon many of the global safeguards they once fought to establish. Crisp, impassioned, and hard-hitting, Lawless World is an exposé and an indictment of a catastrophic realignment of the laws that govern international affairs, the book that broke the stories on the “Downing Street memo” and the “White House meeting memo.” It is also a vivid and human account of the reckless way America has reneged on its very founding documents—and a call for us to recognize the role we should be playing to reassert the rule of law, and with it a stable, secure world.

“In this expert and judicious study, Philippe Sands portrays a frightening image of ‘America unbound,’ self-exempted from the delicate fabric of international law on which human survival rests.” —Noam Chomsky

“A penetrating and detailed account of the extent to which those who claim to be spreading global values have ridden roughshod over them.” —The Observer (London)

“Lawless World goes to the very heart of the nature of the international order and its  future.” —The Guardian (London)