Even since a cease-fire was announced between the U.S. and Iran, anti-Trump extremists have been accusing President Trump of “war crimes” for his original attack. This is nonsense.
Trump reasonably and understandably believed Iran was close to developing a nuclear arsenal, which the mullahs might have deployed against Israel in the near term, and perhaps eventually against the U.S.
Regardless of whether the potential timing of this threat fits the traditional definition of “imminent” — which is to say, right on the verge of happening — it was real and would have been catastrophic if carried out. Accordingly, both the U.S. and Israel had the right — indeed, the obligation — to regard the threat that Iran would soon develop and deploy a nuclear arsenal as sufficiently dangerous to warrant preventive military action. Had either country waited until this nuclear threat was truly imminent, it might have been too late to stop it.
We can say this from experience. We waited too long with regard to North Korea, and that rogue nation managed to develop a nuclear arsenal under our noses. As a consequence, the Hermit Kingdom has been constantly threatening the world, and we can do nothing about it.
Iran, the world’s top state exporter of terrorism, would pose a far more serious near-term threat than even North Korea.
Even the United Nations, in its 2004 report on “threats, challenges and change,” acknowledged that even a non-imminent threat of nuclear annihilation by a hostile country might justify preventive military action under the right circumstances. As the former foreign minister of Australia, Gareth Evans, who served on the panel, put it, “The classic non-threat imminent situation is early-stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile.”
It was such a justification that Israel used to preemptively destroy both Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear weapons programs before their threats became imminent. An even stronger case can be made regarding Iran’s nuclear arsenal program, since Iran has threatened to use it against Israel — which its leaders have called “a one bomb state” — and might well threaten to use it against other nations as well. Once Iran obtains a nuclear arsenal, it will already be too late for prevention or preemption.
Iran would not hesitate to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, as evidenced by its repeated targeting of Israeli metropolitan centers. But Israel would never retaliate by using nuclear weapons against Tehran, for two reasons: First, Israel never has and will never target an enemy’s large cities with a nuclear holocaust. The late hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose family was killed in the Holocaust, put it well in discussing a scenario involving a nuclear strike by Iraq: “That is not our morality. … The children of Baghdad are not our enemy.”
The same would be true of the current Israeli leadership and the children of Tehran, many of whose parents are strongly opposed to its current regime.
Second, were Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal, a strike against it may also entail the release of enormous amounts of radiation in many parts of Iran.
Israel therefore has no choice but to act preventively instead of reactively. Iran knows that Israel cannot deter its use of nuclear weapons by merely threatening retaliation against Tehran.
Professor Michael Walzer, who generally opposes military actions except as a last resort, put it well. “The Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 is sometimes invoked as an example of a justified preventive attack that was also, in a sense, preemptive,” he wrote in September 2022. “The Iraqi threat was not imminent, but an immediate attack was the only reasonable action against it.”
According to other reasonable scholars, the justification for a preventive or preemptive attack involves more than merely the temporal immediacy of the threat itself; it is a function of the temporal opportunity for carrying out the preventive action, as well as the seriousness and irremediability of a nuclear attack against its civilian population. This view was reflected by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who initially condemned Israel’s attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor but went on to praise it years later.
The same was true of Kevin Adelman, part of the American delegation when the United Nations condemned Israel. He subsequently regarded the Israeli attack as “the most wonderful example of preemption in the modern era. … Thank God Israel did that, looking back at it. The idea of Saddam Hussein being the main Arab leader with nuclear weapons since 1985 is frightful.”
The decision of whether to engage in preventive military action against the impending development of a hostile nuclear arsenal requires a balance of at least three factors. The first is the likelihood that the enemy would soon develop and possibly deploy a nuclear arsenal; the second is the degree of harm that be caused by such deployment; and the third is the reasonable expectation that setting back this threat for a considerable period of time is feasible militarily, or in combination with war-ending diplomacy.
In this case, all three of these criteria have been met, even if the existential threat was not so immediate as to categorize it as “imminent.”
