The U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran (Updated)

Let me say at the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  How close it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisition is imminent has been made for decades now, and yet it has still not happened.  In any event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by such acquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter the war, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest of the region for it to do so.

Yet President Trump has this week indicated that the U.S. is joining the conflict.  He has said that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and that “we know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding… we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”  The “we” implies that the U.S. has already entered the war on Israel’s side.  He has said:

Iran should have signed the “deal” I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!

Taken at face value, this indicates that the U.S. will participate in an attack that will threaten the entire city of Tehran.  And he has called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”  Meanwhile, Israel is indicating that regime change is among the aims of its war with Iran.

There are two criteria of just war theory that the president is violating, at least if we take his words at face value.  First, for a war to be just, it must be fought using only morally legitimate means.  This includes a prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.  To be sure, just war theory allows that there can be cases where harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure can be permissible, but only if (a) this is the foreseen but unintended byproduct of an attack on military targets, and (b) the harm caused to civilians and civilian infrastructure is not out of proportion to the good achieved by destroying those military targets.

It is the standard view among just war theorists that attacks such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Dresden, violated this criterion of just war theory and thus were gravely immoral.  They are manifestly immoral if the intention was to kill and terrorize civilians.  But they were also immoral even if the intention was to damage military targets, because the harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure was massively out of proportion to the good achieved by attacking such military targets.

Now, for President Trump to warn that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran” indicates that the U.S. and Israel intend a bombing campaign that will cause massive destruction to the city as a whole.  It is hard to see how that could be consistent with the just war condition of using only morally legitimate means.  This is true, by the way, even if (as is unlikely) the nearly ten million people of Tehran could in fact be evacuated.  Civilian homes and other property, and not just civilian lives, must, as far as reasonably possible, be respected in a just war.

The call for “unconditional surrender” is also highly problematic.  As the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe said of Allied war demands during World War II in her famous essay “Mr. Truman’s Degree”:

It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil.  The connection between such a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will be obvious.  And in itself the proposal of an unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.

When a country tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle for nothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby putting themselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fight more tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country to similarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

The second criterion of just war theory most relevant to the present crisis is that in order to be just, a military action must not result in evils that are worse than the one being redressed.  Now, as the history of the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shows, regime change in the Middle East is likely to have catastrophic consequences for all concerned.  Both of those conflicts resulted in years of civil war, tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties, and, in the case of Afghanistan, a successor regime hostile to the U.S.  As Sohrab Ahmari argues this week at UnHerd, similar chaos is bound to follow a collapse of the Iranian regime.  Regime change thus seems too radical a war aim.  More limited measures, like those that have for decades now kept Iran’s nuclear weapons program from succeeding, are the most that can be justified.

As they routinely do, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at face value, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinking out loud” rather than as final policy decisions.  But this helps their case not at all.  War is, needless to say, an enterprise of enormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness.  Even speaking about the possibility must be done with great caution.  (Think of the chaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly ten million people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.)  A president who is instead prone to woolly thinking and flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment about them cannot be trusted.  (And as I have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself to have unsound judgment about such things.)

It also should not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new war in the Middle East would be contrary to his own longstanding rhetoric.  For example, in 2019 he said:

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

But then, contradictory and reckless statements are par for the course with Trump.  For example, Trump has portrayed himself as pro-life, but then came out in support of keeping abortion pills available and of federal funding for IVF.  He promised to bring prices down, but has pursued trade policies that are likely to make prices higher.  His DOGE project was predicated on the need to bring federal spending under control, but now he supports a bill that will add another $3 trillion to the national debt.  And so on.  His record is one that can be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonest at worst.  This reinforces the conclusion that his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

I conclude that Trump’s apparent plan to bring the U.S. into Israel’s war with Iran is not justifiable and that he ought to be resisted on this matter (as he ought to be on other matters, such as abortion and IVF).

UPDATE 6/19: UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews John Mearsheimer and Yoram Hazony on the Israel-Iran war.  It’s a superb discussion – sober, intelligent, nuanced and well-informed, precisely the opposite of most discourse about these issues.  Though coming from very different perspectives, Mearsheimer and Hazony agree that it is better for the U.S. to stay out of the conflict.

While some have claimed that only the U.S. can take out the Iranian facility at Fordow, Hazony disagrees.  Moreover, it is uncertain that America’s “bunker buster” bomb really would destroy Fordow.  And even if it did, Fordow could be quickly rebuilt, one expert opining that an attack “might set the program back [only] six months to a year.”

Today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Iran can now within just a couple of weeks produce a nuclear weapon that would “pose an existential threat not just to Israel but to the United States and to the entire world.”  Yet she also announced that President Trump would be taking a couple of weeks to decide what to do.  Needless to say, her first statement is very hard to take seriously in light of her second statement.  Moreover, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had recently stated that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

In short, both the case for U.S. intervention, and the administration’s credibility on the issue, appear to be falling apart.