One of the great privileges of being a Catholic is that it’s a cheat sheet. You inherit — simply by virtue of having some water poured over your head — a vast canon of moral and theological thinking, honed over two millennia, that you can apply to almost anything. You might disagree with it, of course, but its rules can help clarify why and where you might disagree.
So I thought it’s worth asking if Operation Epic Fury is a just war — on classical just war grounds? Let’s investigate.
Jus ad bellum — the first of two just war categories — refers to starting a conflict. Was the process legit? And even many war supporters concede it wasn’t. With no debate by the Congress, let alone a vote, and no attempt even to inform, let alone persuade, the American public in advance, the war is in a constitutional void. Yes, presidents have launched conflicts with no Congressional debate in the past century. But one that could cost well over $200 billion? With all our global alliances and the world economy in the balance? With a global recession possible? Nah, this is more George III than George Washington.
The war was also begun by a surprise attack: Israel’s sudden assassination of the entire Iranian leadership, which Marco Rubio said mandated our involvement (because it would have led to an immediate Iranian attack on us).But a just war requires an explicit declaration or ultimatum beforehand. The Iran War of 2026 is therefore the equivalent of what the Arab states did to Israel in 1967 and 1973, what Russia did to Ukraine in 2022, and what Japan did to the US at Pearl Harbor. FDR called that kind of surprise attack “unprovoked and dastardly.” For a reason.
Just war theory and international law also require an “imminent threat” to justify self-defense. So ask yourself: last month, how was the US “imminently threatened” by Iran? We weren’t. The only faint threat to the US — Iran’s potential nuclear weaponry — had already been “obliterated” last year. Sure, Iran’s conventional weaponry is still dangerous, but a sovereign state is allowed a military and, as we’ve seen, it’s no match for the mighty US and Israeli forces. And no, a potential threat for 47 years does not equate to an imminent one, unless the word imminent is drained of its entire meaning.
Was this a war of last resort? Hardly. We had, it’s worth recalling, a painfully negotiated deal with Iran to prevent their development of nuclear weapons. Our allies were with us. China too. And it had largely been working until Trump tore it up because anything Obama achieved was ipso facto evil, and because the Israel lobby and Israel wanted regime change, not non-nuclear coexistence, with Iran. Very credible reports suggest a deal was still possible in February if Witkoff and Kushner had had the expertise or will to engage. But the tantalizing prospect of killing Khamenei intervened.
Was it motivated by the right reasons? There is indeed a case for the war that is a righteous one: it is designed to remove a toxic theocracy that menaces its neighbors and terrorizes its own people. I sympathize with that case — as it’s the one I made passionately for war against Saddam (and the Dish doggedly covered the Green Revolution against the ayatollahs). But what I learned then is that good intentions are not enough. Regime change in Iraq happened for sure. But over 100,000 civilian deaths, over 3,000 American deaths, over 30,000 wounded, a cost of $2 trillion, and an empowered Iran came with it. And Saddam’s nuclear threat — the casus belli — didn’t exist. Neither does Iran’s anymore.
And at least the Iraq War was premised on a clear goal: WMD removal and regime change. The Iran War is premised on so many competing justifications you get dizzy hearing them. Here are a few from Trump: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” That’s war for bragging rights and conquest. “It was my opinion that they were going to attack first.” That’s George III again: you need more than a mere “opinion” for an imminent threat to be proven. Rubio: “We will not allow Iran to hide behind the immunity of a massive short-term ballistic missile inventory, or the ability to make them or launch them ... as well as the destruction of their navy.” But it is not a legitimate war aim to destroy a sovereign country’s ability to defend itself, when it isn’t imminently threatening you.
Necessary self-defense? Please. “They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force, their missiles are down to a scatter, their drones are being blown up all over the place including their manufacturing of drones,” Trump just boasted. So the war is currently an act of “death and destruction” — in the gleeful words of our defense secretary — deliberately “not a fair fight” and conducted with “no quarter.” In other words, in the aggressor’s own words, this is an immoral war of aggression for the sake of domination — the actual nemesis of just war theory. It’s the same lawless, amoral mindset that allows the mad king to pronounce:
Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah. Taking Cuba, I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth?
You cannot have a just war with an amoral tyrant in charge. Elsewhere Trump has trivialized the reason for war in the Middle East. “It’s almost like we do it for habit,” he mused. It’s “fun,” he crowed, explaining why the US had sunk 46 Iranian ships; and later said, “we totally demolished Kharg Island, but we may hit it a few more times just for fun.” The White House has put out memes equating this war with video games. “How do you like the performance?” Trump asked Jon Karl, as if war is a reality show. All of these are not just violations of just war theory; they are open declarations that the war is deliberately unjust and being waged by one of the baddies.
Is there a chance of success commensurate with the cost? Another jus ad bellum test. Hard to tell. But right now, it’s clear that a war for regime change without ground troops has no guarantee of success. It could lead to something worse: an entrenched, more extreme Islamist government shutting the Strait of Hormuz and wreaking havoc on the global economy. A war to demolish Iran’s ability to defend itself conventionally? That’s achievable, it seems. Almost done, in fact. But it’s unjust. A world in where a superpower can use force to ensure others cannot defend themselves is raw imperialism.
The second just war category is jus in bello — how you fight. And again, Hegseth and Trump have changed things. Hegseth has proudly loosened the rules of engagement, scorned the laws of war, championed war criminals, and rhetorically embraced the killing of enemy soldiers who have surrendered. On the first day of his war, his looser rules led to over 150 schoolgirls killed by mistake — and no words of regret from Trump or Hegseth. We fight from the skies, largely invulnerable, targeting and killing without any serious military resistance.
And we fight with an ally contemptuous of international law. Trump’s fellow war leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, started the war, after presiding over a relentless slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza in another massively unfair fight. His far-right government pursues relentless pogroms of non-Jews in the West Bank. More than 36,000 Palestinians there have been displaced from their homes in the last year alone; families have been murdered; sexual assaults are becoming more common; rapes of Hamas prisoners of war are celebrated, not punished; and ever-more fanatical Jewish theocrats arrive in Judea and Samaria by the day. The war on Iran has caused new curbs on Arab movement and “settlers deliberately graze livestock in Palestinians’ cultivated fields, destroy crops and stored food, steal livestock, and vandalise solar panels and water tanks.” Yes, the moral character of a nation matters for a just war. And this is our ally.
How should we account for the theocratic evil of the Iranian leadership? Well, we sure don’t have to deny it. It is a foul dictatorial theocracy as crazed as any of the Jewish fundamentalists who loathe it. They treat the Iranian people like cattle. They have far less legitimacy than Netanyahu or Trump. But foul regimes are still sovereign states. If they behave as hideously as the Tehran mullahs, containment is more prudent and just than pre-emptive war. If it was good enough for defeating the Soviets, it’s good enough for Iran. And containment was working with Iran until we — not they — walked away.
You can argue, of course, that just war theory is esoteric, widely ignored, and completely irrelevant to 21st Century conflicts. And yes, it does root itself in a radical preference for peace and a profound rejection of war as-always-hell. And you can see why a country like Israel might see itself at permanent war and so dispense with just war theory altogether.
But we are not a tiny country born to fight so our children can fight some more. We are the global superpower who has fought so that our children won’t have to, with a responsibility to the wider world, its security, its trade, its rules, and its peace. We have benefited enormously from the era of relative great-power calm that we were instrumental in creating after the Second World War.
And we are the inheritors of a Christian civilization that undergirds the entire West and the American experiment, reflecting our moral break from the barbarian past. We have been bequeathed the flawed but essential instruments of international law, military honor, and foreign policy restraint, and this conservative believes we should conserve that precious inheritance, not trash it. If you are not a pacifist, and I am not, then it is even more important to adhere to just war theory, if only because you know how war can become so evil and so destructive so fast and so easily.
And what is happening now is the replacement of all this with one degenerate’s will to power and one opportunist’s cunning. This is a war against our own civilization, not in defense of it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a chat with Matt Goodwin on mass migration and the earthquake in UK politics; a bunch of dissents over the Christianism of Talarico and the war on Iran; 12 notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for Sohrab Ahmari; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break cut from the Coen brothers; a window from a hospital in Detroit; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a returning paid subscriber:
I’m back. I’m sorry I’ve been rude in Substack Notes. This moment in history is really separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s clarifying to see who’s just a cheap reactionary and who has principles and abides by them. Thank you for the Dish.
New On The Dishcast: Matt Goodwin
Matt is an author, pollster, campaigner, and policy advisor. He recently ran for Parliament as a Reform candidate and came in second. He’s also a presenter at GB News and a writer on Substack. He’s the author of many books, including National Populism and Values, Voice and Virtue, and his new book is Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the flood of non-white migrants to the UK, and how accusations of racism shape the migration debate. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s debate with Eli Lake over Israel, as well as reader debate over James Talarico and Christianism.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jonah Goldberg on the state of conservatism, Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Derek Thompson on abundance, Tom Holland on the Christian roots of liberalism, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” and Tom Junod on his memoir and masculinity. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
A reader responds to last week’s column, “The Christianism of the Left”:
I’ve belonged to Presbyterian churches in red states on and off since the 1970s, including for the last 20 years at James Talarico’s home church, St. Andrew’s. I figured when this Senate race got underway, his past statements about transgender people would bait you. But calling him and progressive Christians illiberal and fundamentalist felt especially tone deaf in a piece that manages to not only police the speech of ordinary people whom he happens to worship with, but also name-call (“church of the woke”) those who honor different interpretations of scripture from your own.
In his public remarks, Talarico regularly stands up for the separation of church and state, and he emphasizes respecting different beliefs than his own. He has also passed bills with conservatives — somewhat contradicting your implied charge of him being close-minded and illiberal. He talks about inherent dignity and worth in everyone — even calling Donald Trump “a child of God.”
The context for his words really matters. You may hear echoes of online lefty extremism when he speaks of trans children as “perfect” and “sacred”, or when he suggests that punishing abortion-seekers feels un-Christian. I, however, hear a needed focus on people’s humanity in the face of actual extremism in Texas. This is the state that recently passed a law that could fine public institutions up to $125,000 for allowing trans people to use their preferred bathroom. The state worked to force trans children’s removal from their loving families, and it put $100,000 bounties on the heads of people aiding women seeking abortions, even before Roe fell.
Even the prayer you mocked Talarico delivering (“Holy Mystery, you have so many names”) benefits from knowing the context. He got the opportunity to pray at the start of a day of legislative activity not because of his status as a pastor in training, but as a lawmaker. About 18 lawmakers before him in that session had already made their own opening prayers, making no effort at ecumenical or interfaith inclusivity at all, instead calling only on “Jesus Christ” in our state’s Capitol.
What strikes me as threatening to the liberal order isn’t people finding connections between their faith and their politics. It’s the suggestion that expressions of faith become suspicious when people manage to stand astride both newer ways of thinking and millennia-spanning traditions.
“Newer ways of thinking.” Many more dissents — over Talarico, as well as Israel — are over on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the deteriorating war, the manosphere, and violence among furries. Below is one example, followed by a new substack:
Grace Lidinsky-Smith, a detransitioner, restarts her substack after four years — with a baby.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today — and it’s the 500th installment of the contest, which started way back in 2010. To commemorate it, here’s our postcard-making sleuth known as A. Dishhead:
Happy VFYW #500! Wow, what a milestone! After all these years, I still get an electric rush when the clues come together and a window comes into view. And contributing is all the more fun thanks to the community you’ve built over the decades(!) — from the Daily to the Weekly Dish. Thank you!
In honor of this momentous occasion, I made a collage of A. Dishhead postcards and miscellanea — from movie posters and magazines to maps and almanacks (uh, I mean substacks). I’m low-key impressed how much content I’ve submitted over the years : )
