The first casualty of war is truth, the rest are mostly civilians.
Academics for Palestine WA was recently part of a snap action at the US Consulate (Borloo/Perth) in response to the recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran. In true academic fashion, we used the opportunity for a quick internationals relations 101 public lecture, using the strikes on Iran as a case study.
This piece exposes the staggering chasm between expert consensus and the narratives pushed by political leaders and the media. In the current climate, academics are compelled to highlight this divide, because accepting the official rhetoric requires abandoning our own expertise and relinquish our capacity to think critically.
We write (and we spoke) on Whadjak-Noongar boodja, country which was never ceded. There still has not been a treaty, truth or justice. The strikes on Iran are a continuation of this colonial injustice that tramples on the principles we claim to hold dear. For a brief historical context, see Because Capitalism’s latest piece here.
The tone of the article is assertive, it strives to strike a balance between political urgency and intellectual rigour. A couple of caveats must be formulated.
1) This article is squarely focused on the legality, legitimacy and likely outcomes of the recent strikes, it is not interested in assessing the human rights’ record of Iran. This kind of whataboutism may work as political rhetoric but it does not constitute grounds for serious legal, ethical or strategic analysis: one state's internal policies do not provide a casus belli (a legal justification for war) for another state to launch an attack, particularly one of this nature.
2) Expert consensus doesn't imply unanimity, it simply means that a strong majority of specialists have reached the same critical conclusion. If there was unanimity, there would be no need for this kind of article. While any consensus can (and should) be challenged, doing so requires valid (and sound) arguments, not rhetorical tricks or brute force. Our purpose here is to establish the fact there is a staggering gap between expert consensus and the official narrative; understanding why it exists and how to address it is a problem for another time.
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.1
1) Illegality:
The action was a flagrant breach of foundational international law. The UN 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 U.S. territory to destroy the steamboat Caroline for supplying Canadian rebels, it was the U.S. 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 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.”
2) Illegitimacy:
This legal vacuum is compounded by a profound lack of democratic mandate, a deficit cultivated over decades through the systematic erosion of legitimate oversight. This represents a deliberate turn away from the ‘rules-based order’ that the United States 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 at the Security Council. Needless to say, that the ‘coalition’, has been further degraded and no longer needs to be ‘willing’. Leaders like Albanese are seemingly forced into supporting the unilateral action after the fact. Domestically, a parallel decay has occurred, with Congress' constitutional power to declare war being usurped by an executive branch acting unilaterally.2
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."3 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.
3) Hypocrisy:
This legal charade is made more glaring by the hypocrisy at its heart. Israel, who launched this illegal attack, is a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with 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 NGOs globally, 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 JCPOA, 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 our Australian leaders and mainstream media manage to spin it any other way beggar’s belief. A few well-known figures such as Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton have even gotten out of their way to state that pro-Palestine students were ‘poorly informed on a complex issue’. Let us get the record straight, this is absolutely not the case. Experts in the field, whether genocide, international law (ICJ, ICC, OCHCR, UN Special Rapporteur, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, etc.), or even international relations and military strategy (RAND, CNAS, CSIS, INSS, War on the Rocks, etc.) are largely in accord with the students protesting genocide: the US and Israel are not only in serious breach of international law, committing the gravest of all crimes, they are also tactically focused (bombing targets, degrading capabilities) but ‘strategically adrift’, lacking the clear, coherent, and achievable political objectives that are the ultimate purpose of using military force. It is our leaders who are at odds with the law, the treaties they are party to, the expertise, the ethics and the principles they are meant to stand for as elected representatives in so-called democratic countries.
4) Military strategy madness:
As experts on fascism could have easily predicted (e.g. the ‘Führerprinzip’, ‘the Duce is always right’), MAGA supporters seem to be more committed to Trump than to the isolationism he ran his campaign on and most of them are supportive of these strikes. Nevertheless, there are deep fault lines in the conservative/MAGA movement. Personalities like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen have been vocally opposed to these strikes and to the subservience of the US 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’ (e.g. 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 (see here and here, and even then, Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t exactly resounding successes despite the amount of resource and lives wasted). 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. Which 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.4
And yet still, Israel, despite having destroyed over 92% of housing units and killed 377 000, has been unable to take over Gaza, which is 4500 times smaller than Iran, has no missiles, no army, no airforce, etc. 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? Is that a question they even ask?
5) Self-defeating, 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.5
Actors like Trump seem to have misunderstood the take away from realpolitik (most realists - Posen, Walt, Mearsheimer - are critical of both Trump and Netanyahu)6: 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.7
Indeed, even by realpolitik standards completely unconcerned with so-called ‘wokeness’: do these strikes not teach the rest of the world a dangerous lesson? That cooperation is for fools. Iran played by the rules and is now in a far worse position than North Korea, which defied the international community, built a nuclear deterrent, and secured its regime (see Arnaud Bertrand’s excellent article). The reluctance of nations like Japan and South Korea to fully commit to recent NATO summits suggests this lesson is being learned; aligning with this thrashing brand of unilateralism is ill-advised. Does this then not necessarily lead to the rational proliferation of nuclear arms even as the US and Israel bombs nuclear facilities? Iran unanimous vote (221-0) to suspend cooperation with the IAEA after the US-Israeli strikes certainly points that way.
This strategic short-sightedness from these thrashing hegemons is not just a theoretical flaw; it is a predictable outcome confirmed by decades of experimental data. Longitudinal studies in social psychology consistently find that while bullies may achieve temporary dominance, they ultimately suffer from social rejection, poor relationships, and lower life achievement. In controlled negotiation experiments, aggressive "hardball" tactics are shown to destroy trust, prevent the discovery of mutually beneficial solutions, and earn the aggressor a toxic reputation that leads to future isolation and failure (here and here). Perhaps most compellingly, game theory experiments like the "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" mathematically prove that purely aggressive strategies are unsustainable (here for a summary of Axelrod’s (1984) famous The Evolution of Cooperation). While they might "win" a single round through exploitation, they guarantee long-term mutual loss by destroying the trust required for cooperation. The most successful strategies are consistently those that are cooperative but retaliate against aggression, demonstrating that stable, prosperous systems are built not on bullying, but on predictable, reciprocal trust—the very foundation being eroded by the actions in question. Trump may have had success with past business deals (although even this seems doubtful, here and here), but countries and nations aren’t fungible, one cannot rely on short term exploitation tactics in geopolitics hoping to simply scam the next sucker, we are condemned to deal with the same actors over and over again, we are all condemned to co-existing on this planet.
6) Conclusion: 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 (dated but good) will show 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 (here, here and here). This of course, is something that Netanyahu and Israeli leaders in general have grasped extremely well (see Antony Loewenstein’s Palestine Laboratory - the book or the documentary).
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 or 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.
There is a difference between bombing nuclear plants and uranium-enriching facilities, however, there are not only radiation risks associated but also chemical contaminations. Here is the IAEA statement after the strikes, emphasising that the main concern is “chemical toxicity”. See also the ICRC blog post: “Dangerous forces: the protection of nuclear power plants in armed conflict”.
Interestingly, President Truman justified not seeking congress approval for the intervention in Korea by claiming he was acting under the authority of the UN Security Council, which, as we saw, was later also undermined.
For those wondering where this kind of logic comes from or leads to: some Israeli leaders had already made the case that they should assume the worse of Palestinian babies and children and strike first too: here, here and here.
This is on top of the statements made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog (October 2023) - "it's an entire nation out there that is responsible... it's not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved" - Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (October 2023) - "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" - as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Amalek story.
Report to Congress on Voting Practices of UN Members for 2022:
Page 6: "In 2022, Israel had the highest voting coincidence with the United States (91 percent)... The average voting coincidence for contested resolutions... between the United States and the other 192 countries in the UN General Assembly was 48 percent for 2022."
Page 7: "In 2022, the United States voted against 53 percent of voted UNGA resolutions (which represents 27 percent of all resolutions), the most of any other UN member state besides Israel. Israel also voted against 53 percent of voted UNGA resolutions in 2022. UN member states voted on average... against eight percent of resolutions in 2022."
Why or how ‘raw power’ is applied at all if not to achieve what one thinks should be is not a question asked by ‘realists’, they seem to be satisfied with ‘maximising self-interest’ – how that is conceived is mostly left undefined. One should of course be sceptical of anyone or any school calling themselves that way, they are most likely themselves engaging in an ‘epistemic power move’ so to speak (somewhat telling of a school of thought focusing on power moves but largely overlooking its own).
Not to imply that Trump reads political theory of course.
A materialist argument would here point out that Trump and Netanyahu are not entirely ‘in charge’, the material conditions (lobbies, decline in legitimacy, rise of competing powers, military superiority, etc) are such that war appears like a rational decision. In other words, the US and Israel are losing their hegemony and there isn’t much they can do about it other than ‘lash out’ in the hope that it will reverse the tide.
Exhibit A: Iran votes unanimously (221-0) to cease cooperation with the IAEA. When you bomb the negotiating table…
https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-parliament-suspend-iaea-cooperation-nuclear/33454363.html