America’s Conflict in Iran Is Not a Just War
Let me begin with what no reasonable person denies. Ayatollah Khamenei led a brutal regime whose crimes include the recent massacre of tens of thousands of protesters. It is hard not to sympathize with Iranians who cheered his death. And just war doctrine certainly affirms that liberating a country from such tyranny can, in principle, be a legitimate war aim. It is also perfectly reasonable to seek to prevent such a regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But that these considerations are not by themselves sufficient to justify going to war should be obvious enough from the example of the Iraq war, which is now widely acknowledged to have been a disastrous mistake. Saddam Hussein’s fall was also cheered, but its sequel was not a happy one for the Iraqi people, who suffered between 100,000 and 200,000 civilian casualties (or even more, according to some estimates). Saddam’s regime was interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but they turned out not to have any. The war also cost the U.S. dearly in blood and treasure. Anger over its failure was one of the major factors behind the rise of Donald Trump, who promised not to lead the country into another such war.
Yet he has now done precisely that. And unlike the Iraq war, Trump’s Iran war is being fought without a clear plan or congressional approval. For these and other reasons, it plainly does not meet the conditions for a morally acceptable war, as set out by traditional just war doctrine.
A Just Cause?
Many who have commented on the war on social media appear to think that as long as some aim for which a war is fought is in itself a good aim—such as deposing tyrants or preventing them from getting hold of weapons of mass destruction—then the war has met the just-cause condition of just war doctrine.
That is not the case. This is merely a necessary condition for having a just cause for war, not a sufficient condition. The aim must be a good one not merely in the abstract, but given all of the relevant concrete circumstances. For example, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated” (2309).
Hence, suppose that, in removing an oppressive government that killed tens of thousands of protesters, U.S. military action were to plunge Iran into anarchy or civil war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths (which, again, is what happened in Iraq after Saddam was deposed). It would be quite absurd to pretend that the Iranian people would, in such a scenario, have been liberated. Then there is the consideration that our own interests must be factored in. A father who helped another family at the expense of his own would not be considered charitable, but irresponsible. So, too, with a president who goes to war to aid another country but hurts American interests in the process.
Thus, in order for a war of liberation to be just, it is not enough merely to have the aim of removing a tyrant. There must also be a concrete and realistic plan for avoiding an outcome that leaves the people being liberated, and the U.S. itself, even worse off. Does the Trump administration have such a plan? Not only has it not claimed to have one, but the evidence that it does not have one is overwhelming. The strongest indication of this is that the administration and other high-ranking Republican leaders have not even given a clear and consistent explanation of exactly what the aim of the war is. And you can hardly have a plan when you don’t know what you are planning for.
When announcing the war, President Trump addressed the Iranian people and said: “The hour of your freedom is at hand … When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” That implies that among the aims of the war is to liberate the people of Iran from their oppressive government and replace it with a democracy. But as to how that would happen, the president was vague, fancifully suggesting that perhaps the Iranian security forces would simply “surrender to the people.” Senator Lindsey Graham has said that the president has no specific plan for a new regime, and that “it’s not his job” to come up with one.
On the other hand, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has since asserted that “this is not a so-called regime-change war.” Trump himself later said that “what we did in Venezuela, I think, is … the perfect scenario.” But in the case of Venezuela, while Nicolas Maduro was removed, his regime remains in place and the country’s people are, so far, no freer. The president has also said that he does not care whether Iran becomes a democracy or instead remains under control of religious authorities. Indeed, he has indicated that the administration considered simply handing power over to someone else in the existing Iranian government, but that the candidates under consideration were inadvertently killed in the initial attack.
As to when the aims of the war (whatever they are) will have been achieved, the administration has been no less unclear According to one report, very soon after beginning the war, the president was already proposing a ceasefire, which Iran rejected. Yet a few days later, he suddenly insisted that he would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from Iran. At one point, the president claimed that the war would last only “four weeks, or less.” But it has been reported that the Pentagon actually expects it to go “at least 100 days but likely through September.” And Trump later said that in fact there are “no time limits” on how long it could go.
Then there are the inconsistent claims about the status of Iran’s nuclear threat. Days before the start of the war, administration envoy Steve Witkoff asserted that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material.” Yet only eight months ago, the White House insisted that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated—and suggestions otherwise are fake news.” Senator Ted Cruz has acknowledged that he is aware of no evidence that Iran is anywhere close to having a nuclear weapon. Nor did the president make any claim like Witkoff’s when he addressed the reasons for the war the day it began. But then, a few days later, Trump suddenly alleged that “if we didn’t hit within two weeks they would have had a nuclear weapon”—a claim for which he gave no evidence, and which contradicts not only what Cruz and other members of Congress have said, but also the acknowledgment of Trump’s own Secretary of State that Iran is “not enriching [uranium] right now.” In any event, even if Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon, the Defense Intelligence Agency has reported that the country is years away from possessing missiles that could reach the U.S. The bottom line is that there is no evidence that Iran poses a nuclear threat to us.
Administration officials have also made inconsistent claims about what triggered the war. After the war began, administration sources alleged that Iran had been preparing to strike U.S. military targets, so that America’s attack was a defensive measure meant to preempt Iran’s aggression. Yet Pentagon officials soon denied that there was any sign that Iran was about to attack. Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Iran actually was preparing to attack American military targets, if Israel first attacked Iran. Because Israel was indeed about to attack Iran, he explained, the U.S. decided to attack as well, in order to preempt Iran’s counterattack.
Somehow this was supposed to show that America was acting in self-defense—though how it is self-defense to attack a country for preparing to retaliate if they are attacked first, Rubio did not explain. Nor did he explain why the U.S. did not simply tell Israel to stand down rather than dragging the U.S. into its conflict with Iran. In any event, Rubio abandoned this convoluted rationalization a day later, denying that he had said it (despite being filmed saying it) and admitting that, in fact, the U.S. was already planning to attack Iran anyway, whatever Israel did.
So, while the president spoke vaguely of “imminent threats from the Iranian regime” when announcing the war, the administration has been unable to establish that any such threat existed. It is clear that the attack on Iran was not in fact a “preemptive war” in the sense of a military action taken in order to head off an imminent attack. Rather, it is a “preventive war,” in the sense of a military action carried out against a country that does not pose an imminent threat but could do so in the future.
But while preemptive war can be justifiable in light of the just war criteria developed in the natural law tradition, preventive war cannot be. Like a person, a country can justifiably be harmed only for what it has in fact done or is actively preparing to do, not for what it merely might do. If what a country might do provided a sufficient casus belli, then any country could justify war against any merely potential enemy. (For example, by this loose standard, Iran could justify attacking the U.S. or Israel!) Moreover, as I have discussed elsewhere, even thinkers who have tried to defend preventive war have argued that it is justifiable only when a potential enemy threatens the very existence of a country. But Iran poses no existential threat to the United States.
The administration and other high-ranking Republican officials have not even been able to get their story straight about whether the country is in fact now at war. While some of them frankly acknowledge that the attack amounts to war, others absurdly insist that it is something else: “combat operations,” “a conflict,” “a significant military operation,” “strategic strikes,” “a very specific, clear mission,” but somehow nevertheless “not war.” This manifest sophistry, together with the contradictions already noted, casts grave doubt on the government’s credibility and competence vis-à-vis the war.
There are yet other problems. Before the war, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the U.S. lacks a large enough stockpile of the weapons needed for a prolonged war with Iran, and the administration is now scrambling to get companies to increase the manufacture of munitions. Republicans like Lindsey Graham have tried to sell the war to the American people by claiming it would require “no boots on the ground,” but now Trump and Hegseth are saying that ground troops may be needed after all. It has been reported that there is “panic” inside the White House over the effect the war is having on gasoline prices, even though this outcome was hardly unforeseeable. And it seems the administration did not even think to replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before launching a war that was sure to disrupt the oil supply. President Trump has admitted that there is a danger that we could see a resurgence of terrorist attacks within the U.S. itself. The war has also thrown the entire Persian Gulf region into chaos, threatening the global economy and enraging allies who were not consulted but have suffered attacks from Iran because of our actions.
Manifestly, the administration has not thought through this war or made a clear and honest case for it to the American people. The war cannot be justified on grounds of U.S. self-defense; it is far from clear that securing the freedom of the Iranian people really is among the true aims of the war, and even if it is, there appears to be no concrete plan for actually achieving this or for avoiding anarchy and civil war that would leave the Iranian people even worse off. In several ways (such as the potential loss of many American lives and serious damage to our economy and alliances), the war is gravely contrary to American interests. Hence, when we consider all the relevant factors, there is no just cause for war.
Lawful Authority
If that weren’t bad enough, the war also manifestly violates the lawful authority condition of just war doctrine. Some appear to think that as long as a war is fought by a government rather than a private individual, then this condition has been met. That is not the case. As the great scholastic just war theorist Francisco Suárez argued, in order to be just, a war must be authorized by the specific public authority in the state that possesses the power to declare war. In the American context, that is Congress, not the president. The president can act prior to congressional approval only in a case where an imminent threat needs immediately to be repelled. As we have just seen, that is not what is going on in the present case.
The wisdom of our Constitution with respect to this particular issue should be obvious. Few enterprises are as momentous as war—especially a war like the one the U.S. has now entered into, which could put at risk the lives of thousands of American servicemen, hundreds of thousands of Iranian civilians, the U.S. and world economies, and America’s prestige and alliances. It would be extremely irrational to leave the decision to initiate such a war to the discretion of one man, especially a man as notoriously erratic as Donald Trump. It is the sort of enterprise that should instead be entered into only after collective deliberation, and it is manifestly exactly the kind of enterprise the Constitution means to put in the hands of Congress rather than the president.
The Catholic just war tradition supports this condition. Summarizing the teaching on this matter of late Scholastic authorities such as Suárez, Francisco de Vitoria, and St. Alphonsus Liguori, the Catholic scholar of natural law John Eppstein states in The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations: “War may not be waged on the personal authority of the sovereign, but only after the advice of wise and impartial men has been sought, and after the claims of the opposing side have been carefully weighed.” The eminent Catholic natural law theorist Heinrich Rommen, in The State in Catholic Thought, thus argued for “a constitutional provision that the most concentrated competence of sovereignty—the declaration of war—be exercised by plebiscite or at least by resolution of the representatives of the people.”
As we rush headlong into a war that has clearly not been well thought out and that risks extremely grave consequences for the U.S. and the world, the folly of Congress’s failure to reclaim its war powers from the president is manifest. The judgment of history will not be kind to them. The judgment of their Maker should worry them even more.