The law wasn’t written for this war

The UN Charter was written to prevent war by making the rules simple: states may use force only after an armed attack occurs. But what happens when a regime spends decades building the means to destroy its rival—through proxies, missiles, and nuclear ambition—while carefully avoiding that triggering moment? The confrontation with Iran exposes a profound tension between the logic of international law and the realities of modern strategy.

International law prefers clarity. War, in the legal imagination, begins with a moment: a border crossed, a missile launched, a state attacked. Only then does the machinery of lawful self-defence begin to turn.

The difficulty with the confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran is that nothing about it resembles that tidy legal architecture.

Iran has not launched a full conventional invasion of Israel. Nor has it fired nuclear weapons. Yet for decades it has constructed something else: a lattice of armed proxies, missile forces, and nuclear capability that encircle Israel while openly proclaiming the state’s eventual destruction.

In that sense, the legal question at the heart of the current war is not simply whether the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran were lawful. It is whether the structure of international law is capable of meaningfully addressing the kind of conflict Iran has spent forty years perfecting.

Because the law was not written for this kind of war.

The governing document of modern international law—the United Nations Charter—draws an intentionally strict boundary around the use of force. Article 2(4) prohibits states from using military force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. Only two exceptions exist: authorisation by the UN Security Council, or the inherent right of self-defence recognized in Article 51 which says states may use force in self-defence “if an armed attack occurs.”