The war of Israel and the USA against Iran
divides Western democracies like no other geopolitical event in recent history. The question of whether this war is justified cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. But it is possible to say what would be the worst of all conceivable outcomes: the current status quo.
To sharpen the dilemma: Imagine if we remained inactive for the next few years – and that Iran actually develops an operational nuclear weapon. Would today’s critics still claim that military intervention was categorically wrong? This thought experiment does not prove that war is right – such an extreme scenario is by no means considered likely, even under pessimistic intelligence assessments. But it shows that there is no simple, irrefutable answer to this question, neither for supporters nor for opponents.
Political philosophy offers us two fundamentally different approaches to this question. From a rules-based, Kantian perspective, war is hard to justify. If the USA If they reserve the right to attack preemptively, they open the door for China, Russia and other states to apply the same logic to their own conflicts. The West would no longer have a credible argument against it, because by most standards of international law it is doing exactly what it accuses others of doing in Iran.
Nobody has a good answer to this war
If everyone allows themselves such an exception, there will simply no longer be a rules-based world order. The biggest losers would be the Western democracies themselves, which have significantly shaped this order over the past eight decades and whose rules are far closer to their own values than to those of authoritarian regimes. The result would be a world in even deeper geopolitical conflict – and a higher probability of nuclear catastrophe.
From a utilitarian perspective, however, the war can be justified: by preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon and by the chance of lasting peace in the region. There is also an argument that even the harshest critics cannot ignore: Iran has been supporting armed groups for years
Israel and attack Western interests – through Hezbollah in Lebanon, through Hamas in Gaza, through the Houthis in Yemen and other groups. Anyone who calls for restraint from Israel must explain how the country should defend itself against real, daily threats. At the same time, Israel has also acted militarily in the region, and the history of Western interventions – Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan – calls for caution against the assumption that military force creates long-term stability.
Negotiations once seemed to offer a way out. The Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran more than a decade ago seemed to open up exactly that path: economic and political pressure to get the regime to abandon its nuclear program without undermining the rules-based order. The abrogation of the agreement by the first Trump administration destroyed that possibility. What remains is a bitter realization: whether one believes the war was justified or not, lasting political change in Iran is the only outcome that could retrospectively justify this war.
If regime change fails, the war undermines its own goal. A weakened but surviving regime would have stronger motives than ever to use nuclear weapons to protect itself from future attacks. An end to the war without regime change would increase, not decrease, the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear bomb in the long term. It would be the worst possible outcome. Regime change remains a dangerously vague goal formulation. The experiences in Iraq after 2003, in Libya after 2011 and in Afghanistan show that the replacement of a regime is only the beginning of a long and often destabilizing process. Anyone who proclaims this goal must specifically name who will then shape Iran’s political order, with what legitimacy and with what resources. These answers are still missing.