A Strike Against the International Legal Order
In a constitutional sense, the United States’ intervention against Iran is on shaky ground.
President Donald Trump's unilateral action in the absence of approval from Congress appears to be in contravention of existing legislation.
Some Democrats have even spoken openly about impeaching the president, but that is unlikely to affect a man who has already demonstrated time and time again that he is more than happy to rule by diktat.
However, the missile strikes against Iran also open up broader questions, such as whether the action is legal under international law.
The United States certainly has the authority to assist its ally Israel, but that aid is predicated on the assumption that Israel's initial attacks were lawful.
That is more of a grey area, although public understanding is not assisted by obfuscation on the part of pro-Israeli lawyers like Natasha Hausdorff and the shadow Attorney General, David Wolfson.
When it comes down to it, the question that lawyers, diplomats and politicians need to answer is a fairly simple one.
In the absence of authorisation by the UN Security Council, a nation may only use Force in cases of self-defence.
Thus the question becomes: did Iran attack Israel to prompt the attack?
The answer is ‘no’, it is in fact Iran who is acting in self-defence.
Some have tried to argue that the Israeli operations are a form of preemptive self-defence.
This alongside anticipatory self-defence is not something that has ever been properly established in international law, although it is justification that the United States has used to initiate military conflict in the past.
Even here, though, an attack must be imminent or there must be a genuine threat materialising.
This was how the United States justified the Iraq invasion in 2003 when it argued that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction.
That casus belli was, however, famously discredited.
If this feels like history repeating itself, then you are not wrong.
The argument that Iran has been developing nuclear capability has been thrown around since the mid-90s as a way to promote Israel as a bulwark between the Western world and dangerous, unstable Arab states.
That threat has never come to pass, and Iran's nuclear threat is probably less pronounced than Iraq's supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were back in 2003.
Iran has generally co-operated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and that body considers there to be no “structured and systematic effort in the direction of a nuclear device”.
Ironically, this view is supported by America’s own National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, who in March testified before Congress stating that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
The more that Western leaders try to defend military action taken against Iran, the flimsier the legal arguments appear.
Israel does not provide a bulwark against hostile states in the Middle East. Instead, it creates problems for her supposed ‘allies’ in the West and drags them into illegal conflicts.
Ultimately, it is the international legal order that suffers, as Israel and the U.S.’s decision to ignore the rules gives greater justification to other major powers like Russian and China to take their own unilateral military action against perceived threats.
This turns geopolitics into a game where those with the most military force have the biggest say and international law is not worth the paper it is written on.
This week on the podcast, the Supreme Court takes another look at its decision in the Shamima Begum case as it considers an appeal by another individual who was deprived of their British citizenship.
Episode link: https://uklawweekly.com/2025-uksc-19/
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