A War Accountability Compact Could Force Presidents to Prove “Necessity” — and Protect Civilians Within 72 Hours

At 3 a.m., when the sirens cut through sleep, the question is never geopolitical. It is practical: how far is the stairwell, will the generator keep the ventilator running, is there water for the morning. Somewhere else, under warm lights and polished wood, a leader explains that the escalation is “unavoidable.” And so the oldest civic accusation returns, newly sharpened by each cratered apartment block: Why have you started this war, Mr. President?

We do not need the missing byline or date of the New York Times Opinion piece to recognize the dilemma its headline dramatizes. Modern war is too easy to begin, too profitable to prolong, and too survivable for the people who authorize it. The harm concentrates on civilians, conscripts, and neighboring host communities, while the incentives—political rally-round-the-flag surges, arms contracts, the strategic convenience of proxy warfare—often run in the opposite direction of peace. Responsibility, meanwhile, diffuses across “coalitions,” “advisers,” “intelligence,” and “partners,” until no one is quite accountable for the child pulled from rubble.

The world is living with that diffusion. UN agencies have warned that global displacement has climbed beyond 100 million; civilian tolls in several active theaters have risen sharply even when front lines appear frozen. Domestic publics, far from the battlefield, pay through inflation shocks, cyber retaliation, and the quiet erosion of democratic oversight. And yet, we still treat the decision to wage war as a uniquely exempt act—an emergency that suspends transparency rather than triggering it.

What would it look like to build, with the same seriousness we devote to military logistics, a logistics of restraint?

The human story we keep trying not to see

Civilians don’t experience war as a “campaign.” They experience it as supply chains snapping. Insulin doesn’t arrive. Fuel runs out and hospitals dim into triage by phone flashlight. Schools become shelters; shelters become targets; and then the shelters empty into roads where checkpoints decide who remains a person and who becomes a number.

Soldiers and conscripts—often young men with little say in the causes they are told to embody—carry injuries that outlast any cease-fire: amputations, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD that will shape families for decades. Neighboring states and border towns shoulder the geopolitical “externalities”: sudden refugee inflows, social polarization, overstrained clinics, and a politics that hardens into resentment. Even countries not directly involved feel the tremors as shipping routes are threatened and energy prices spike.

In that fog, leaders benefit from ambiguity. If objectives are undefined, there is no clear failure. If casualty counts are disputed, there is no moral reckoning. If proxy support is euphemized as “assistance,” accountability can be avoided while escalation continues.

That is the core defect the headline points at: the question “Why?” arrives after the rubble, when it should have been demanded before the first strike.

A workable idea: make war an accountability event, not a messaging event

The best proposals on the table share one insight: war decisions must be forced into daylight early, with verifiable claims and automatic consequences. Call it a War Accountability Compact, or a Global War Accountability Pact; the label matters less than the machinery.

The Compact would do three things that today’s system does not reliably do. First, it would impose an immediate, rule-bound “necessity dossier” requirement on any government that initiates cross-border force, substantially expands a campaign, or materially escalates a proxy war through major arms transfers or intelligence support. Second, it would create a standing independent verification mechanism—multinational, professionally staffed, and technologically capable—so “trust me” stops being a sufficient brief. Third, it would tie civilian protection to automatic enforcement: not optional condemnation, but pre-agreed penalties that trigger when access corridors are blocked or protected sites are hit.

This is not a plea for naïve global harmony. It is a bet on incentives, proof, and speed.

And there is a precedent hiding in plain sight: scientific collaboration. Rivals can and do share data under strict protocols when the institution is designed for rigor. In 2014, CMS and LHCb combined analyses to measure rare decays like (B^0_s\to\mu^+\mu^-), pulling a faint signal from a sea of noise by agreeing on common standards and cross-checks. In January 2026, networks spanning LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and IceCube continued the painstaking search for joint gravitational-wave and high-energy neutrino sources—coordinating instruments, timestamps, and validation across borders. If humanity can build trusted verification systems for the universe, it can build them for claims that justify killing on Earth.

How it could unfold in real time—starting in the first 72 hours

Picture the next crisis that threatens to metastasize: a border incident, a naval clash, a proxy strike that tempts a larger retaliation. Under the Compact, the initiating government would have 72 hours to publish a narrowly defined necessity dossier: the legal basis, the concrete objectives, the expected scope, and—most importantly—the conditions for termination. Not an essay, not a speech. A document that can be tested.

Simultaneously, an independent verification panel—drawn from neutral states, humanitarian law experts, and technical investigators—would be granted guaranteed access to the kinds of evidence that already exist: commercial satellite imagery, authenticated open-source footage, weapons remnants documentation, communications metadata where lawful, and on-the-ground reporting when feasible. The task would not be to “adjudicate history” instantly. It would be to prevent the most common escalation tactic in politics: keeping aims vague enough that war becomes self-perpetuating.

Then the civilian-protection machinery would move faster than it usually does. Within the first 30 days, the Compact would require standardized humanitarian access corridors with auditable metrics: fuel deliveries, hospital supply chains, water infrastructure repairs, and safe passage windows tracked publicly. If corridors are blocked or protected sites are repeatedly struck, enforcement would not wait for a tortured Security Council bargain. Penalties would snap in automatically: targeted asset freezes and travel bans on named officials and military procurement intermediaries, restrictions on luxury capital flows that elites actually feel, and procurement limits on defense-linked entities.

There is a reason automaticity matters. Outrage is loud in week one and exhausted by month six. Rules endure.

At 90 days, a second decision point would arrive, designed to make “temporary” wars harder to normalize. Legislatures would be required to renew authorization for campaigns exceeding defined thresholds, using verified civilian-harm assessments and publicly stated benchmarks. Democracies would regain something that has quietly eroded: the right to know what is being done in their name, with their money, and at what human cost.

What success could look like by 2028—and why it’s plausible

If this sounds ambitious, consider how modest the first-order goal is: not instant peace, but fewer civilians dead from preventable causes and fewer leaders able to hide behind ambiguity.

By year one, the informational landscape would change. Wars would be harder to sell as open-ended “operations” with shifting rationales. Proxy escalations would be harder to disguise when major arms transfers and intelligence support trigger transparency obligations. Civilian harm would be tracked as civic data, not as a footnote.

By year two, the humanitarian impact could be bluntly measurable. When corridors, fuel, and medical logistics are enforced early, deaths from dehydration, untreated wounds, and disease outbreaks drop. Displacement doesn’t vanish, but famine and epidemic stop being the default second act.

By year three—by 2028—the deepest shift would be political. War initiation would become an accountability event. Leaders could still argue necessity. But they would have to argue it with verifiable claims, defined objectives, and an exit ramp that the public can recognize.

Sovereignty objections are inevitable, and they deserve a serious answer: the Compact would not pretend to abolish self-defense, nor would it “veto” an immediate response to an invasion. Its purpose is to slow and clarify escalations that expand beyond urgent defense—especially the kind that become forever wars—while making civilian protection enforceable rather than aspirational.

The question becomes a tool—if we build the institution to back it

“Why have you started this war?” is not only a rebuke. It is a design prompt. If we mean the question, we must build systems that demand an answer early, verify the claims, and punish the evasions.

Citizens can insist—before the next crisis—that their governments pre-commit to transparency triggers, legislative renewal votes, and independent verification funding. Newsrooms can treat necessity dossiers and civilian-harm audits as front-page civic documents, not niche investigations. Allies can condition military support on corridor compliance and published termination criteria, so partnership does not become a blank check.

War thrives in ambiguity. Restraint thrives in structure. The world does not need another solemn speech about peace. It needs a compact that makes starting a war harder than extending a cease-fire—and ensures that any president, anywhere, is forced to answer the most basic human demand before the first night of sirens: prove you must do this, show how it ends, and protect the people who never got a vote.