Has Donald Trump launched an "illegal" war? Do Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion violate "international law"?
Democrats in the US, along with their allies in the media, seem particularly invested in law-based arguments. For the past three-plus weeks, Trump's critics have alleged that he violated the War Powers Act by initiating hostilities without approval from Congress, which is not at all true. Opponents insist that "imminence" is the standard for addressing threats to the US and its interests, but that standard does not exist in law or practice. Finally, everyone who wants to apply "international law" to Trump has spent the last several decades refusing to apply it to Iran.
Professor Gerald Steinberg predicted this reaction three weeks ago in the Telegraph. Steinberg, the president and founder of NGO Monitor and an emeritus at the Bar Ilan University in Jerusalem, dismantled those arguments in his essay by exposing the hypocrisy of attempting to defend the world's worst state sponsor of terrorism by invoking "international law."
Professor Steinberg starts off with the absurd deceit that a state of war did not exist before February 28:
A blatant example is Roth’s recent essay in the Guardian, arguing that joint American-Israeli strikes against the Tehran regime constitute an illegal “act of aggression” and “no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine”. In facile terms, he effectively claims that, according to the law of armed conflict, the use of force is illegitimate unless it responds to an attack that has already occurred, is obvious and visible to all (so not, presumably, through proxies or thinly disguised attackers), and acknowledged by the United Nations Security Council.
It is a simple theory. It is also dangerously removed from the real world. Roth condemns the joint US-Israeli attack against Iran’s top leadership and military assets as though the decision was taken totally out of the blue, and not a necessary response to aggression. To make this case, he conveniently omits the central fact that, for decades, the Islamic Republic has been waging a violent war against the United States (the Big Satan), Israel (the Little Satan), and many of its Arab neighbours.
The regime’s fingerprints are on the missile arsenals targeting Israeli cities, on proxy terror militias embedded across Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and on terror plots stretching from Buenos Aires to Burgas. When an adversary arms, funds, and directs forces committed to the destruction of a neighbouring state – and increasingly to the intimidation of the West – this is not peace. It is war by other means.
The moral and legal question is therefore not whether force is undesirable. It is whether, in the real world, states have the right – indeed the obligation – to defend their citizens against a fanatical regime built on hate that clearly proclaims its intentions to wipe out its opponents and builds rockets and centrifuges for making nuclear weapons for doing this.
Indeed, the Iranian regime has waged war against both the US and Israel for 47 years. It started with an explicit cassus belli in the kidnapping and detention of American diplomatic personnel for 444 days, starting in November 1979, and continued through each decade since, mainly through its proxy army Hezbollah in the 1980s and 1990s, and then directly by the IRGC and its proxy militias in Iraq in succeeding decades. Other than the strike on Qassem Soleimani in late 2019 and a brief naval war in the 1980s, the US has chosen to ignore Iran's provocations ... including the brief capture of US Navy personnel in the Persian Gulf in January 2016.
Under any understanding of "international law," Iran committed a series of acts of war against the US. Furthermore, as Professor Steinerg reminds us in our interview below, Iran signed onto the international non-proliferation treaty and received direct benefits in nuclear technology as a result. Instead of complying, Iran used that technology to develop nuclear weapons – and came close enough to it to make itself a clear and present danger to the US and our allies and interests.
Where are all of the international law prosecutors for that issue? Professor Steinberg and I ask that question, and he largely answers it in our conversation below. He joined me from Jerusalem, where he also listened for potential missile-warning sirens that could have interrupted our discussion, but in the event did not take place. Even more than in his essay, Professor Steinberg emphasized the mythology of "international law" and its origins in utopian-Left non-governmental organizations and activists. Unlike actual law, the standards of "international law" are applied subjectively and almost always to one side: the West and Israel. Even Barack Obama's Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), itself existed as a contradiction to the concept/myth of "international law."
Watch it all, and be sure to wait for the end, where Professor Steinberg talks about the war's impact on Israelis. While the missile attacks have been unnerving, he reports that the country has a shared optimism that we may finally put an end to the clear, present, and imminent danger the Iranian regime poses to Israel, the US, and the world.
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Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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