Just war and imperial prerogative

There is a distinction in just war theory that most people instinctively understand but rarely articulate precisely: the difference between pre-emptive and preventive war. It is the difference between striking an enemy who is about to attack you and striking an enemy who might attack you someday. The first can be justified. The second cannot. It is, morally and legally, aggression.

In his landmark work Just and Unjust Wars (1977), moral philosopher Michael Walzer argues that we can, and must, ask whether any given war is just. His argument rests on two pillars. The first is jus ad bellum: the justice of going to war at all. The second is jus in bello: justice in how the war is fought. They are independent of each other. A just cause can be prosecuted unjustly, and an unjust war can be fought with restraint.

On the question of when war is justified, the answer is unambiguous. War is only legitimate in response to aggression, actual or imminently threatened. Just war theory draws a careful, important line between preventive war and pre-emptive war. A pre-emptive strike is morally permissible when the threat is imminent: when the enemy has already decided to strike, is mobilising, and the moment is upon you.

The paradigm case is Israel in June 1967, where Egyptian forces massed on the border with declared intent to destroy. That is legitimate pre-emption. (A side but related note: Walzer, whose ideas I’m drawing on, is himself a Zionist, which makes its implications for today all the more interesting.)

But preventive war, which involves striking a potential future threat before it has materialised, is a fundamentally different thing. Preventive war rests on speculative fears about what an adversary might do, not on imminent hostile action. It violates the rights of the attacked state. It is, in the framework of international law, straightforwardly an act of aggression. And aggression is the crime from which all other war crimes flow.

Now apply this to the United States and Israel joint operations (Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion) on Iran targeting Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and other cities. Trump announced “major combat operations” with the stated goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme and, more candidly, toppling its government entirely. His words to the Iranian people: “The hour of your freedom is at hand.”

The justification offered was prevention: Iran’s supposed nuclear threat. But here is the problem. The IAEA found no evidence Iran had resumed uranium enrichment. The Defence Intelligence Agency estimated Iran was at least a decade away from intercontinental missile capability.

The Department of Defence itself assessed that last year’s strikes had set the Iranian nuclear programme back by two years. American and European intelligence officials disputed Trump’s claims. In short: the threat was not imminent. It was speculative, politically inflated, and by the administration’s own prior statements, largely already addressed by previous strikes.

There was no Iranian army massing at a border. No declaration of imminent attack. Negotiations were still actively underway. But, there was an American president who said he’d prefer a deal but would also welcome “regime change” and who chose war while the diplomats were still talking.

This attack fails every test for legitimate preemption. It is not Israel in 1967. It is closer to the scenarios that just war theory explicitly condemns: wars launched based on what an adversary could do someday, not what it is doing now. The logic of “they might get a bomb eventually” is not a moral license to bomb civilian cities today. If it were, any powerful state could justify attacking any weaker rival at any moment simply by imagining a future threat. That is an imperial prerogative.

The in bello picture is no better. Within the first hours, an Israeli strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab killed at least 51 people. Whatever the military objective near that school, the deaths of those children, who were noncombatants by every definition, demand justification under the doctrine of double effect. The initial reports suggest no such justification exists.

Finally, consider the humanitarian framing. Trump’s call for Iranians to “take over your government” echoes interventionist logic that just war theory has always treated with suspicion. Humanitarian intervention is permissible in cases of ongoing massacre, but interventions disguised as liberation that are really about great-power interests are something else entirely. When the intervening power explicitly states its goals include regime change, and pursues them by bombing a country’s capital while negotiations are ongoing, it is purely aggression, softened slightly through a humanitarian mask.

The war that began today may have many consequences, some perhaps even welcomed by the Iranian people suffering under their government’s repression. But justice is not measured by outcomes alone. It is measured by whether the act that initiates violence meets the moral burden of justification. This one does not.

The writer is a journalist and researcher. She can be reached on X @aimamk

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.