The recent strikes on Iran are more than just another geopolitical flare-up; they are the manifestation of a failing international order, where the “mutually binding rules-based order” is being replaced by the pantomime of strongman politics.
This approach is not only dangerous (while some sink incalculable amounts of money and effort into keeping nuclear facilities safe, others just go out and bomb them) it is illegal, illegitimate, hypocritical, immoral, and ultimately, strategically self-defeating.
Illegal
The action was a flagrant breach of foundational international law. The United Nations Charter, in Article 2(4), establishes a near-absolute prohibition on the threat or use of force. The only exception, outlined in Article 51, is the inherent right to self-defence “if an armed attack occurs”—a condition that was demonstrably not met. Any attempt to justify this as a “pre-emptive strike” collapses under legal scrutiny.
Even the historical standard for anticipatory self-defence, the Caroline doctrine, makes this clear. This doctrine was established, with deep irony, not to justify aggression, but to limit it, born from an incident where the United States itself was the victim. In 1837, when British forces crossed into US territory to destroy the steamboat Caroline for supplying Canadian rebels, it was the US Secretary of State Daniel Webster who furiously protested the violation of American sovereignty. In doing so, he set the high bar that for a pre-emptive strike to be legal/justified, the threat must be demonstrably “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.
The recent strikes on Iran fail this stringent, American-authored test unequivocally. According to the US’s own intelligence, the threat was not actively materialising and, with negotiations still underway, there were clearly other avenues than the use of force.
Worse, according to a Times of Israel article, the US carried out a coordinated misinformation campaign, using the negotiations, to make Iran believe a strike was not imminent. The article’s source states that Trump “played the game together with Israel […] It was a whole coordination.”
Illegitimate
This legal vacuum is compounded by a profound lack of democratic mandate, a deficit cultivated over decades. This represents a deliberate turn away from the “rules-based order” that the US helped build. While early actions like the Korean War sought a UN Security Council mandate, since 2003 (Iraq), this has been supplanted by the doctrine of the “coalition of the willing”, where UN authorisation is simply bypassed because the US knows it will not be supported, whether at the UN General Assembly or the Security Council.
Needless to say that the “coalition” no longer needs to be “willing”, leaders like Anthony Albanese are seemingly forced into supporting the unilateral action after the fact. Domestically, there is a parallel decay, with Congress’ constitutional power to declare war being usurped by an executive branch acting unilaterally.
This democratic deficit runs even deeper, extending beyond institutional processes and norms to the will of the people themselves. Recent polling consistently shows that more Americans oppose these unilateral strikes than support them, with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities expressing deep anxiety about being drawn into a wider war.
It is precisely within this void — where true legal and democratic mandate is absent — that the cynical instrumentalisation of an agency like the IAEA became necessary.
The casus belli was manufactured not from a “smoking gun” of evidence, but from the deliberate misinterpretation of the agency’s technical reports. Proponents of war seized on IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi’s statements that Iran's high-level enrichment and reduced inspector access meant the agency was losing its “continuity of knowledge”.
This admission was twisted into a pretext for war: the argument became “because we cannot be 100% certain, we must assume the worst and strike now”. Then, after the strikes were launched, Grossi made clear that this political interpretation was abusive, clarifying that while Iran had the material, there was no evidence of a weapons program and stating that an IAEA report “could hardly be a basis for any military action”. The manipulation was complete: an agency designed to build confidence through verification was used to sow fear and provide political cover for an illegal attack.
Hypocritical
This legal charade is made more glaring by the hypocrisy at its heart.
Israel, which launched this illegal attack, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but has a known but undeclared nuclear arsenal. It has never allowed IAEA inspectors full access; it is currently bombing Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria; it is thought to be committing genocide by most legal experts and its leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, Iran, an NPT signatory that abided by the extensive checks of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, finds itself attacked while negotiations were still ongoing.
Simply put, the numbers show that it is Israel, with its supplies of US weapons that is doing the quasi totality of the killing, bombing and breaching of UN resolutions and international law.
How Australian political leaders and mainstream media manage to spin it any other way beggar’s belief.
Military madness
As experts on fascism could have easily predicted, Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters seem to be more committed to Trump than to the isolationism he ran his campaign on and most of them support these strikes.
Nevertheless, there are deep fault lines in the conservative/MAGA movement. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen have been vocally opposed to these strikes and to the US' subservience to Israeli interests in general.
Further, at least part of the support for these strikes appears to be derived from Trump supporters differentiating these “one-off” strikes with “endless wars” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Yet, this is clearly the same “show of force” logic that has failed to produce anything valuable or sustainable anywhere else in the past that is nonetheless repeated like a mantra.
Even if military force was taken up as an option, every responsible analyst knows, that regime change cannot be done by airstrikes alone, ground forces would be needed. The bottom line is that airstrikes are an effective coercive tool but a useless controlling tool.
Consequently, these strikes have no legal backing and no realistic political goal. That means that the use of the military becomes a goal rather than a tool to achieve desirable ends (not that the use of the tool is itself desirable).
This tracks with the fact that the US and Israel are the most consistently isolated on UN resolution votes, including the right to food (186 in favour, two against, guess who?) Consequently, they rely on the one and only tool they have — airstrikes.
Yet Israel, despite having destroyed more than 92% of housing units and killed 377,000 people, has been unable to take over Gaza, which is 4500 times smaller than Iran, has no missiles, no army and no air force. Similarly, the US’ track record isn’t exactly pointing to successful military interventions either. What makes Israel and the US think they can obtain a “better” outcome in Iran?
Setting nuclear proliferation loose
Undergraduates in International Relations will have been introduced to realpolitik as the school of thought for the adults in the room, those who understand that morality, values and mutually binding processes ultimately amount to wishful thinking. What determines how and why players act is actually raw power.
Realpolitik isn’t exactly “immoral”, it is instead “amoral”; it seeks to understand the world for what it is, not for what we think it should be.
Trump seems to have misunderstood the takeaway from realpolitik: a lack of moral compass is not what allows for good leadership; von Bismarck, the mascot of realpolitik, understood that the use of force should be used wisely — sometimes it is beneficial, sometimes it is not.
The US and Israel and their respective leaders do not seem to grasp this with any depth, their military hegemony, along with their precipitous fall in legitimacy globally is making them act as if they had a hammer and could only see nails — using the tool is the goal. This of course, is likely to precipitate, rather than stem, their fall from grace — on a material, cultural and moral level.
People of the world unite
The conclusion to draw from all of this is not to cheer for an alternative hegemon in Russia or China to take over. To do so would be to simply trade one set of unaccountable power brokers for another.
The real solution is to reassert our own commitment to, but also our forceful demand for, actual democratic representation and processes that this strongman politics so casually discards.
We must ask who truly benefits when international law is ignored and diplomacy is abandoned for the fog of war.
It is not the people. A single glance at the worldwide protests in support of Palestinian self-determination shows that the people overwhelmingly reject armed conflict and genocide. However, the global arms industry lobbies our representatives with stunning efficiency, weaving its web of contracts with our states and making us pay the price.
This, of course, is something that Netanyahu and Israeli leaders in general have grasped extremely well, as Antony Loewenstein’s Palestine Laboratory notes.
AUKUS serves as a stark local example of this dynamic. Billions of Australian dollars will be paid to arms manufacturers and the US military-industrial complex, directly diverting funds that could have been invested in housing, education, healthcare and a cleaner future. In return, Australia receives a questionable capability, delivered decades from now, while being irrevocably tied into geopolitical alliances that run counter to its own security and sovereign interests.
Ultimately, the failure of the current realpolitik reveals the fundamental choice we face: it is not a choice between the West and its rivals. It is between a world governed by democratic accountability and the rule of law, or one dominated by the self-serving interests of a war economy that profits from undermining both.
[This article has been abridged from a longer piece, published on June 27 by Academics for Palestine WA and Gwen Velge.]