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In late 2020, Gen Mark Milley – then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff – urged Donald Trump not to attack Iran and to ignore pressure from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was pushing hard for military action. Mr Trump backed down after the general warned that attacking Iran would start a war, with the risk of US officials being “tried as war criminals in The Hague”.
Five years on, Israel’s prime minister has the fight with Tehran that he has spent decades preparing for, bolstered by Mr Trump’s claims that international law no longer applies. After all, why worry about red lines when The Hague’s already got a warrant out for you and your allies pretend not to notice? It helps when the US treats the international criminal court like a rogue actor. Mr Trump has even gone after the court’s judges and prosecutor for daring to scrutinise “our close ally” Israel over Gaza. Legal norms? Apparently, those are for enemies, not friends.
As the UN charter is typically interpreted, the use of force is allowed against an actual or imminent attack in self-defence – but it must be necessary and proportionate. With Mr Netanyahu’s expanding aims – regime change, strikes on energy infrastructure and bombing residential areas – the action no longer even pretends to be self-defence. In response, Iran has launched 10 waves of ballistic missiles, killing Israeli civilians and targeting its oil and gas facilities.
Israel justifies its actions by saying Tehran is preparing to build a nuclear bomb. If true, Israel knows more than both the US and the UN’s nuclear watchdog. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s finding of a safeguards breach has political weight, but no legal bite. Yet Israel – still the region’s only nuclear power, undeclared and outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – is bombing Iran to stop it from doing what it never admitted to doing itself.
Mr Netanyahu lacks the bunker-busting bombs and bombers needed to seriously damage Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites. So the strategy may be to hit hard enough to force Iran into submission – or to provoke a backlash big enough to drag Mr Trump in. Either way, it’s a strategy that relies less on deterrence than on provocation.
Israel’s impunity sets a dangerous precedent, where the strong act as they please and the weak suffer the consequences – convention and law be damned. But Mr Netanyahu may have felt his options were narrowing. Troublingly for him, Iran had signalled unprecedented concessions during talks with Mr Trump. Whether from weakness or calculation, that opening was real. The prospect of an Iran-US nuclear deal that permitted Tehran limited uranium enrichment under strict monitoring may have been too much for Mr Netanyahu.
Ever the opportunist, the Israeli prime minister seized the moment. Tehran’s ally Hezbollah was neutralised, Iran’s air defences crippled and Iran’s partner Bashar al-Assad had fled Syria – opening a “corridor” for airstrikes. With US coordination secured, Israel’s military struck. The bonus for Mr Netanyahu was that he received a political domestic boost just as his coalition threatened to unravel.
If the fighting escalates, things could spiral out of control, perhaps with civil war in Iran or a global economic shock. Better to trade words than missiles, thinks Tehran. If the US and Iran pursue realistic goals, a verifiable non-proliferation deal is within reach. As ever, jaw‑jaw is better than war-war.
