by Andrew Tucker
Last Saturday morning (February 28th, 2026), the US and Israel launched a highly-coordinated, targeted and precise military campaign against the revolutionary regime in Iran led by Ayatollah Khamenei. The campaign is expected to last for weeks. The US states that its primary goal is to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capacities, and to enable the Iranian people to take back control of their country. Israel’s primary stated goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The conflict threatens to evolve into a regional war. Iranian missiles have been rained on several Gulf states, which threaten to respond. European states are developing their positions for the event they may need to become militarily engaged – which seems inevitable as their citizens and military assets in the region are hit or threatened.
The revolutionary regime in Iran has since its inception been built upon the idea that the infidel West should be destroyed. Especially under Ayatollah Khamenei, it has secretly tried to build nuclear bombs. For decades, Western powers have tried every possible approach to prevent the Ayatollahs from obtaining nuclear weapons. President Obama negotiated the JCPOA agreement – that failed to stop the Iranian nuclear program from coming perilously close to precluding a nuclear bomb. More recently, the Trump administration has tried negotiations, in the shadow of threatened use of force. These negotiations also failed dismally to produce anything that looked even remotely like a compromise.
Several commentators have been quick to condemn this campaign as illegal. Others have dismissed such condemnations as unrealistic legalism that fails to recognize the moral dimensions of this conflict and the harsh reality that without the urgent (massive) use of force, the Ayatollahs would not only continue to brutally repress their own people, they would be enabled to fulfil their declared ambition of annihilating the West, starting with Israel and the USA.
So what does the law say? In principle, the use of force against another state is prohibited under international law. The UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” (article 2(4)). Moreover, “all Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered” (article 2(3)).
The exceptions to this general rule are the inherent right of states to self-defence, and actions sanctioned by the Security Council to maintain or restore international peace and security. The right of states to individual or collective self-defence is reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter (note: the right to self-defence is an inherent right – its source is not the UN Charter):
Article 51
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Focusing on Israel for the moment, there are two main arguments in favor of the view that Israel’s current campaign in Iranian sovereign territory complies with international law. First, it can be argued that the strikes constitute a lawful act of self-defense against Iran in response to the unlawful military invasion and ongoing rocket, drone, and missile attacks that Iran and its proxies have launched against Israel over the past years. Arguments can be made that Iran commenced this war (or this phase of the war) when it backed Hamas to invade Israel on 7th October 2023. Others argue that in fact the Ayatollahs’ revolutionary regime has been waging war against the US and Israel since 1979 – directly and through its vast network of proxies and allies throughout the world.
Second, more narrowly, it can be argued that the strikes constitute a lawful exercise of Israel’s inherent right to anticipatory self-defense against the imminent threat that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs posed to Israel. This argument leads to a discussion about the meaning of “imminence”, and about whether or not there was evidence of an “imminent” attack. Israel’s critics argue that such evidence is lacking.
But how relevant is the question whether these strikes are “legal” from a legal/technical point of view?
The whole debate concerning the “legality” of this conflict brings into sharp relief the inherent weakness of the international legal system. As many commentators have pointed out in recent days, international law lacks any enforcement mechanism. The only way to enforce international law is through the use of force. This consensual, non-enforceable system only makes sense as a coherent organizing system if it is universally recognized, enforced and applied. It becomes a farce when the worst violators of international law are free to implement evil activites as they desire, including brutally attacking and undermining Western nations, while those same (primarily Western) actors that value international law are restrained from confronting that evil.
These critics argue that the moral grounds for this campaign are overwhelming: the regime is deeply evil. It not only kills and oppresses its own people, and it was on the verge of being able to fulfil its apoloclyptic aim of using nuclear weapons to trigger a massive conflict with the Western world. What is the value of legal rules that do not allow states to act in the face of such reality?
This tension is reflected in the remarkably different responses in recent days by the German Chancellor Merz (who said effectively that international law is not the sole guiding principle at play to determine how European states should engage with this conflict) and the UK Prime Minister Starmer (who argued that international law prevented the UK from supporting Israel and the US).
Here are some observations, as food for thought:
Jeff Blackett in The Spectator – “International law is not a suicide pact”:
‘To hide behind a narrow, 1945-era reading of the UN Charter while a regime exports terror and murders its own children is not “upholding the rule of law.” It is moral cowardice dressed up as jurisprudence. The [UK] Prime Minister’s recent, dizzying U-turn on the use of British sovereign bases –previously described by Whitehall as a legal impossibility – has let the cat out of the bag. It confirms that what was presented as “inviolable international law” was, in fact, nothing more than political sophistry designed to delay the inevitable’.
If the law is interpreted in a way that always leaves the law-abiding defenceless against the law-breaker, then the law is not just “flawed” – it is worse than useless.
For centuries, British law was held up as the global paragon – a pragmatic , evolving system that balanced order with the messy reality of human affairs. Yet this government seemingly no longer believes in that legacy.
Instead, they treat the UN Charter, and other branches of the international legal apparatus, not as a living contestable framework, but as a suicide pact designed to ensure Western democracies remain politely motionless while their enemies sharpen the blade.
Sir Keir Starmer will continue to face a series of choices: He can continue to play the role of the cautious clerk, clutching a dusty rulebook while the world burns, or he can finally inhabit the role of a statesman and a true upholder of human rights.
This demands more than a reluctant nod; it requires: an explicit acknowledgement that the Iranian regime is an existential evil. Unreserved diplomatic and strategic support for our primary allies. A forceful presentation of this posture as Britain’s only viable path, rather than a series of graceless concessions to incremental pressure.”
– Jeffrey Blackett OBE, Former Judge Advocate General of the British Armed Forces
Haviv Rettig Gur on X:
‘You cannot simultaneously build a strong international law system while also hating the West. International law is a Western idea born of a particular Western historical, cultural and political experience. And because God loves irony, no one exemplifies this fact more than the evil regime whose travails since yesterday have sparked so much legalistic hand-wringing.
Both Khamenei himself and his teacher and predecessor Khomeini consistently and explicitly rejected international law as a tool of “global arrogance” (estekbar-e jahani) — i.e., of powerful secularist, individualistic democracies. Khamenei was even more explicit, routinely declaring legal frameworks like UN conventions as “colonial” traps.
These declarations weren’t marginal to their ideology. They were fundamental planks of the regime’s political theology.
I’ll say this, again, as gently as I can: The fact that international law and international institutions have transformed in practice into a system that more often than not runs defense for the most virulent and explicit enemies of said law might have something to do with their decline as an organizing framework of international affairs.
For example, when UN agencies and international institutions target Israel more than Iran, or more than China, Iran and Russia put together, or more than all the dictatorships and wars in the world combined — they’re doing more harm to the law than to Israel.
Similarly, it matters that so many of international law’s loudest spokespeople had nothing to say about Khamenei’s crimes just six weeks ago, but swung into action only when Khamenei’s long reign of terror was finally brought to an end.
That’s not law. It’s the opposite of law.
International law can be saved, but only if its scholars and practitioners grow up and shed the instinctive anti-Westernism and racist paternalism of the present-day academy. When international law is no longer seen by its own practitioners primarily as an instrument for containing, weakening and delegitimizing the West, but becomes genuinely about actual law, it will once again have a claim on us.
If you fail to see in Khamenei the bitter foe of international law that he was, if in the midst of your legitimate critique of a war you can’t summon at least a little joy that this avowed enemy of your purported moral system is dead and gone, then you haven’t actually been fighting for international law.’
