In 2003, governments at least felt compelled to argue the legality of war. In 2026, a possible strike on Iran proceeds without even the pretence of legal justification.

How far has international law fallen in 23 years?

In the lead up to the 2003 war against Iraq, George W Bush framed the conflict as “ preemptive” action in response to the imminent threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). No such weapons existed. There was nothing to preempt.

Many legal scholars argued at the time that the conflict was in fact a “preventive war” - countering a threat that may or may not emerge in the future, which is illegal under international law.

Putting to one side the legal debates which ensued between supporters and opponents of that war, the focus of both sides was to establish the legality or illegality of the action proposed against Iraq before it commenced. This was widely seen as an obligatory moral and legal prerequisite to a strike, and the division of legal opinion was one of the reasons why the UN Security Council did not agree to pass a resolution authorising the attack.

After months of opinion management in the west which grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the attack proceeded without UN backing in March 2003. The majority of international lawyers today consider it to have been an illegal war.

Remarkably, in 2026 there has been no public debate about the legality of a war against Iran. Furthermore, the need to establish or even discuss the legality of a strike has not arisen within the Trump Administration.

There is neither a casus belli nor has any serious effort been made to sell an attack on Iran to the US public as there was in 2002-3, resulting in opinion polls which suggest overwhelming opposition. Donald Trump is threatening to attack Iran because Tehran will not agree to the terms of an arbitrary disarmament plan that Washington seeks to impose upon it.

This comes after the first Trump Administration unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA – an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear programs in exchange for sanctions relief) in 2018 which had been negotiated between Tehran and the Obama Administration three years earlier.

This time there is no talk of “preemptive” action against an imminent threat or even “preventive war” given that, according to the president, the US “totally obliterated” Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium in June last year. No-one is seriously suggesting that Iran has nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or that it in any way represents a threat to the security of the US.

As we saw last year, Iran’s conventional ballistic missiles, specifically its hypersonic weapons, can hit Israel by successfully evading its anti-ballistic missile defences. Under relentless pressure from the Netanyahu Government, Trump is expanding the notion of “US security” to include protecting Israel, not from a future nuclear threat, but from an existing conventional one.

If this can only be done by regime change in Tehran, which he stopped short of attempting in Venezuela and would find much more difficult to achieve in Iran because of the absence of alternative leaders, then so be it.

The Iranian leadership would correctly see a widespread attack as an existential threat and have no incentive to act with restraint as it did in the 12 day war with Israel last June. Memories of the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup which deposed the democratically-elected Mohammad Mosaddegh because he sought to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, replacing him with the brutal and corrupt Shah, are still vivid amongst Iran’s older citizens.

As is the support Washington provided to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, the regular assassination of Iranian scientists, and the crippling economic sanctions which, with the incitement of Mossad and CIA agents on the ground, have recently induced waves of anti-government riots across the country.

Whatever the outcome of the conflict, further regional instability and growing anti-western sentiment are bound to ensue. Even Iran’s Sunni antagonists in the Persian Gulf have tried to dissuade Trump from actions that will only create uncertainty and unpredictable downstream effects across the Middle East. For those who instigate them, wars always have unintended consequences and usually go awry.

As with Israel’s merciless slaughter in Gaza and subsequent attacks on the United Nations and International Criminal Court, in 2026 the protections afforded by international law have all but vaporised. Dropping bombs on other countries, killing journalists, medics and aid workers, threatening nations with annihilation, imposing embargoes on their economies, starving their populations, “cleansing” people based on their ethnicity so their land can be stolen, committing acts of genocide and kidnapping their heads of government, are now disconnected from international jurisprudence.

The ‘rules-based international order’ is nothing more than orders by the powerful that the weak obey their rules.

In its case for attacking Iran, the Trump Administration is not even pretending to seek legal cover for its actions. This may appear to validate realist approaches to international relations where military power is privileged above everything else. However, the most terrifying consequence is a species which is much more vulnerable and insecure today than it has been for decades.