Let me sayat the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranianregime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  Howclose it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisitionis imminent has been made for decades now,and yet it has still not happened.  Inany event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by suchacquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter thewar, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest ofthe region for it to do so.

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

Iran should have signed the “deal” I told them to sign. Whata shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEARWEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuateTehran!

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

There aretwo criteria of just war theory that the president is violating, at least if wetake his words at face value.  First, fora war to be just, it must be fought using only morally legitimate means.  Thisincludes a prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians and civilianinfrastructure.  To be sure, just wartheory allows that there can be cases where harm to civilians and civilian infrastructurecan be permissible, but only if (a) this is the foreseen but unintendedbyproduct of an attack on military targets, and (b) the harm caused tocivilians and civilian infrastructure is not out of proportion to the good achievedby destroying those military targets.

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

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

The call for“unconditional surrender” is also highly problematic.  As the Catholic philosopher ElizabethAnscombe 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 theroot of all evil.  The connection betweensuch a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will beobvious.  And in itself the proposal ofan unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.

When acountry tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle fornothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby puttingthemselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fightmore tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country tosimilarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

The secondcriterion of just war theory most relevant to the present crisis is that inorder to be just, a military action mustnot result in evils that are worse than the one being redressed.  Now, as the history of the aftermath of thewars in Iraq and Afghanistan shows, regime change in the Middle East is likelyto have catastrophic consequences for all concerned.  Both of those conflicts resulted in years ofcivil war, tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties, and, in the caseof Afghanistan, a successor regime hostile to the U.S.  As Sohrab Ahmari arguesthis week at UnHerd, similarchaos is bound to follow a collapse of the Iranian regime.  Regime change thus seems too radical a waraim.  More limited measures, like those thathave for decades now kept Iran’s nuclear weapons program from succeeding, arethe most that can be justified.

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

It alsoshould not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new warin 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 fightingand policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died orbeen badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTOTHE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

But then, contradictoryand reckless statements are par for the course with Trump.  For example, Trump has portrayed himself aspro-life, but then cameout in support of keeping abortion pills available and of federal fundingfor IVF.  He promised to bring pricesdown, but haspursued trade policies that are likely to make prices higher.  His DOGE project was predicated on the needto bring federal spending under control, but now he supports a bill that willadd another $3 trillion to the national debt. And so on.  His record is one thatcan be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonestat worst.  This reinforces the conclusionthat his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

I concludethat Trump’s apparent plan to bring the U.S. into Israel’s war with Iran is notjustifiable and that he ought to be resisted on this matter (as he ought to beon other matters, such as abortion and IVF).

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

While somehave claimed that only the U.S. can take out the Iranian facility at Fordow,Hazony disagrees.  Moreover, itis 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 monthsto a year.”

Today, WhiteHouse press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimedthat Iran can now within just a couple of weeks produce a nuclear weapon thatwould “pose an existential threat not just to Israel but to the United Statesand to the entire world.”  Yet she alsoannounced that President Trump would be taking a couple of weeks to decide whatto do.  Needless to say, her firststatement is very hard to take seriously in light of her second statement.  Moreover, Trump’s own Director of NationalIntelligence Tulsi Gabbard hadrecently stated that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and SupremeLeader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in2003.”

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