Trump’s War in Iran Is Just

How many times will it have to be repeated?There are just wars.From Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas, from Hugo Grotius to Michael Walzer today, there exists a theory of the just war which, in contemporary terms, can be formulated as follows.There must be an imminent threat: in this case, it was not PresidentTrump but President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who said on July 19, 2024, that Iran was a hair’s breadth away — “one or two weeks” — from crossing the nuclear threshold.There must be an impending catastrophe: For forty-seven years, and in recent years with particular insistence, the Iran of the mullahs has repeated that its missile arsenal — and tomorrow its nuclear warheads — was designed to wipe at least one country off the face of the earth. Israel.All other avenues, especially diplomatic ones, must have been exhausted: the American administration did so throughout the weeks preceding Saturday’s strikes, and the mullahs reiterated, as recently as Sunday, that negotiation was not an option for them.And finally, a war is just when the harm it causes — in military terms, its collateral damage — is less than the harm it prevents, meaning the planned destruction of a country, devastating attacks against neighboring states, and, of course, the massacres of Iranian civilians already perpetrated and ready to be repeated.According to all these criteria, Mr. Trump’s war in Iran is just.One may—and this is my case—believe that the president does great harm to American democracy. But one must rejoice in this ruse of reason that seems to make him the instrument of a possible regime change in Iran.The question, of course, is whether Mr. Trump will go all the way and whether there will indeed be a regime change.His statements on this point are contradictory. At times, Mr. Trump speaks openly of overthrowing the regime. He declares his intention to come to the aid of the women and men in revolt who, in January, defied the bullets of the mullahs. He speaks like a Wilsonian opening the door of democracy to a people who — and this is the great difference with Iraq in 2003 — are only too eager to rush through it. He promotes a revolution aimed at striking a fatal blow, no longer at Nazism as Roosevelt did, nor at communism as Reagan did, but at this third form of fascism that is Islamism.And at other times, on the contrary, Mr. Trump says he is ready to compromise with the so-called moderate elements of a collapsing regime. He speaks no longer as a Wilsonian but as a Jacksonian —that other version of American foreign policy whose basic principle is roughly: “I hit and I leave.” He once again applies the variant of this doctrine that he invented in Venezuela and that would shatter the democratic momentum now underway. Mr. Trump works to reassure his MAGA base, which has little interest in defending freedoms in the land of Cyrus the Great. This would be, for all those to whom he promised that help was “on the way” and who today thank him, a cruel disappointment.This war, if Mr. Trump sees it through to the end, may be long and costly in American lives. But history will do him justice. If not, it will not forgive his weakness.There remains the question of law.The law is often brandished by those who remained unmoved by the cold-blooded massacre, over forty-eight hours, of more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians, but who suddenly grow indignant at seeing the law, in the United States and at the UN, “trampled underfoot.”As far as America is concerned, they are mistaken. The rule is clear: The president is entitled to initiate hostilities. He is only required to inform Congress within two days and, if Congress so demands, to withdraw the troops after ninety days — and we are far from that point.As for international law, it is obviously more complex. And it is clear that, logically, the White House should have secured a resolution from the UN Security Council.But was this done in 1999 in Kosovo? In Syria in 2018 during the joint Franco-British strikes? In Afghanistan in 2001? In Mali in 2013 under French president François Hollande? Everyone knew that a veto would have blocked such resolutions each time. And everyone knows today that each intervention had to rely instead on other principles: “imminent threat,” “collective self-defense among allies,” and the “responsibility to protect,” which has been part of international law since 2005.Together, these three principles form a kind of customary international law born of experience, of massacres covered by the UN’s frozen machinery and of genocides that the world failed to prevent.One day, if nations have the courage, they may help repair an organization that all too often tends to protect executioners and leave peoples without recourse. But for now, there is urgency. And it is on their superior legitimacy that one must rely to save the Iranian people. One does not oppose a failed law to live under threat.

Trump’s War in Iran Is Just

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