But suppose the safety of the State is endangered; our foresight can not extend too far. Are we to delay averting our destruction until it has become inevitable?… If an unknown man takes aim at me in the middle of a forest I am not yet certain that he wishes to kill me; must I allow him time to fire in order to be sure of his intent? Is there any reasonable casuist who would deny me the right to forestall the act?… Must we await he danger? Must we let the storm gather strength when it might be scattered at its rising?
Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758), 248-249
Resuming and Recontextualizing
The legal and strategic implications of Israel’s aerial offensive inside Iran – unprecedented in both scope and timing – are difficult to overstate. This was not retaliation. There was no missile barrage, no chemical warhead in the sky, no mass-casualty provocation. Ramadan had just ended. The region was diplomatically active, not ablaze. American, French, and Saudi officials were brokering normalization talks between Israel and Riyadh. The West wanted calm.
Netanyahu chose escalation.
Or did he?
Look closer, and the logic begins to snap into place – albeit under intense scrutiny and through a narrow legal aperture. There was no armed attack that might clearly trigger the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Israel acted not in response to violence, but to intelligence. This was anticipatory self-defense: a controversial exception to the general prohibition on the use of force. The legal test for self-defence– drawn from the 19th-century Caroline doctrine and later jurisprudence – demands that the necessity of self-defense be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”
According to Israeli and allied intelligence, Iran has recently accelerated its uranium enrichment to nearly 60% – a technical hair’s breadth from weapons-grade – and has been stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors. In short: time was running out. Israel assessed that it had no legal, political, or diplomatic safety valve remaining to forestall a clandestine Iranian nuclear breakout. So Netanyahu made a decision: to act unilaterally, launch precision strikes on high-value targets, eliminate nuclear scientists and senior members of Iran’s military command. And – news that has surfaced since my earlier commentary – his hit list reportedly included Iran’s highest political and religious authority: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Let’s be clear: this is not a minor escalation. It edges toward the decapitation of a sovereign regime’s leadership. That’s not just militarily risky – it tests the boundaries of international law in ways few democratic states have dared since 1945.
Netanyahu frames this campaign as an act of self-defense – not in response to an armed attack, but based on classified intelligence, strategic timing, and a judgment that the threshold of necessity had been crossed, even if quietly. And here lies the legal fault line.
I won’t sugarcoat it: Netanyahu’s record on truth-telling, particularly on Iran, is thin. His history of bombastic claims and doomsday rhetoric – hilariously lampooned by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show – undermines his credibility. His tendency to blur threat inflation with national urgency (not to mention political and even personal motives) should be met with healthy skepticism.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, Netanyahu may be right.
Credible, seasoned, reasoned voices within the Israeli security establishment – many of whom are far more measured and rational than Netanyahu – have backed the assessment that Iran is sprinting toward breakout capacity. These are not alarmists. These are professionals whose job is to discern signal from noise. They see not only a clear and present danger, but one that demands decisive action within a narrowing window.
This may not satisfy a rigid reading of international law – particularly the traditional UN Charter framework that prohibits the use of force except in response to an “armed attack” under Article 51. But reality tends to outpace legal doctrine. And when the stakes involve nuclear weapons in the hands of a regime that calls for your annihilation, the law must either adapt or be ignored. That’s the uncomfortable truth.
As a legal realist, I see international law here not as a fixed barrier but as a flexible – albeit fragile –framework, one that can inherently stretch within acceptable reason to accommodate this kind of operation if it is narrowly tailored, proportionate, and clearly linked to an identifiable threat. That’s a big if, and one that demands accountability. This flexible accommodation in regard to a state’s right to offensively defend itself has been accorded to states (or so it emerged from practice) from pre-1945 custom as legal scholars such as Samuel Pufendorf, Emer de Vattel, and Hugo Grotius inform.
Israel may not have rewritten the rules of anticipatory self-defense – but it may have forced the international community to finally admit that the old rules no longer suffice in the nuclear age. Whether this ultimately proves a necessary evil or a dangerous precedent will depend on what follows.
What began as a targeted campaign to degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities has now expanded – subtly at first, and then overtly—into a broader strategy to degrade the Iranian regime itself. Whether by design or drift, this is no longer just about preventing a bomb. It’s about collapsing the state that might one day build it.
Trump, while still hedging, has begun referring to Israeli air superiority using the collective “we” – a rhetorical shift that signals creeping U.S. entanglement. He has even called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” language with unmistakable echoes of regime change. America is involved, but not all-in. Netanyahu, however, seems eager to change that. He would gladly drag the United States into a full-scale regional war—American taxpayer, reputation, and economic stability be damned.
There is no plan for the day after. None. And if Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan are any guide, then the outcome – like the timeline, cost, and unintended consequences – is unknowable. This is where strategic prudence gives way to dangerous hubris.
Yes, Israel may have been justified in launching a preemptive/anticipatory strike under the doctrine of self-defense. But the evolution of that strike into a broader campaign against the Iranian state raises serious legal and ethical questions. If the true aim is regime change, then the legal rationale begins to crumble. At that point, anticipatory self-defense risks becoming a parody of itself—a fig leaf for a much more ambitious agenda: decapitating Iran’s leadership, crippling its economy, and stoking unrest to provoke collapse from within.
After revisiting the doctrine of self-defense under international law and interrogating the elasticity of “necessity” and “imminence” in an age of weapons-grade uranium, I will turn to the geopolitical chain reaction that could unfold if this crisis deepens—intentionally or otherwise. History shows that wars often begin not with deliberate provocation, but through miscalculation, miscommunication, or sheer momentum. Conflicts rarely follow clean scripts. They muddle through, cascade, and metastasize in ways no one can fully predict, let alone control.
Revisiting Self-Defense: Legal Doctrine Meets Strategic Reality
Much of today’s legal debate over anticipatory self-defense traces back to the 1837 Caroline affair, when British forces attacked a U.S. vessel aiding Canadian rebels. They justified the strike as an act of self-defense. In response, U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster articulated a stringent standard: necessity must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” That test—necessity, imminence, and proportionality – became the bedrock of customary international law.
Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves the “inherent right” of self-defense, but refers only to an “armed attack” – not preemptive strikes. Yet crucially, it doesn’t forbid anticipatory action either. Its silence is not a prohibition, but a space filled by state practice and evolving customary law.
Literalists argue that anticipatory self-defense is illegitimate under the Charter. But this interpretation ignores a foundational truth: the right to self-defense predates and survives the Charter. No state can be expected to wait until it is irreversibly exposed to destruction before it is allowed to act – especially in the nuclear context.
By a strict reading, Israel’s June 13 strike on Iran is difficult to justify under Caroline or Article 51. Iran had not launched an attack. The threat—though serious—was not visibly “instant.” Diplomacy was ongoing.
But that’s the problem. The law assumes a linear model of conflict: threat → attack → response. Nuclear weapons break that sequence. Once a nuclear state becomes operational, the strategic landscape changes irreversibly. Deterrence kicks in. Retaliation becomes exponentially more dangerous. Options shrink. Allies hesitate.
Article 51 doesn’t mention anticipatory self-defense, but many scholars and a minority of states have recognized it under customary international law—rooted in Caroline and tentatively reaffirmed after 9/11. Still, the prevailing interpretation, including by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has constrained its use. The ICJ’s Nicaragua judgment (1986) emphasized that self-defense is only triggered by an actual or imminent armed attack. In nuclear scenarios, that standard may be fatal. Because with nuclear weapons, the first strike is often the last.
That’s not law. That’s paralysis.
The principle of anticipatory self-defense is embedded in the sovereign right of self-preservation. To deny it in the nuclear era is to demand suicidal restraint.
International law often lags behind technological and strategic change. It did with cyberwarfare. It did with drones. And it is doing so again with nuclear latency. Iran has not detonated a weapon – but it has mastered every part of the nuclear fuel cycle short of final assembly. Strategically, that is nuclear latency: the capacity to build a weapon on short notice once the political decision is made.
Legally, does latency constitute an “armed attack”? Strategically, must a state wait until it does?
This is the core dilemma. If the legal threshold for action is set too high – if it requires perfect imminence or Security Council blessing—it risks detaching law from security. The UN Charter’s reactive framework assumes force is legal only after an attack. But nuclear weapons invert that logic. Once used, legal remedies become irrelevant. As Henry Kissinger warned during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence is not about responding to force—it’s about avoiding a situation in which response is futile.
Israel’s June 13 strike forces us to confront that inversion. If international law prohibits action even after decades of Iranian enrichment, deception, missile testing, and open threats—then it’s not law. It’s a suicide pact. This is not to say every preemptive strike is legal. Nor is “existential threat” a license to bomb at will. But the binary distinction between legal and illegal force needs recalibration. Without that, we risk a perverse world in which only the reckless survive, while the rule-abiding perish waiting for permission. Even so, the legal objections to Israel’s action remain serious—and deserve full airing.
The Case Against the Strike
First, Article 51 explicitly ties self-defense to an “armed attack.” The ICJ, in Nicaragua, reinforced this interpretation. Iran’s nuclear activities – while concerning – do not meet that threshold. No missiles were fired. No troops mobilized. No imminent military operation was underway. That matters.
Second, the requirement of imminence remains central. Even if Iran’s enrichment had progressed, critics argue it did not meet the Caroline test of being “instant and overwhelming.” A latent or potential threat, however serious, is not the same as an imminent one. Lowering that bar risks eroding the prohibition on the use of force itself.
Third, the strike violated the UN Charter’s core rule: no use of force without Security Council authorization or clear self-defense. The Council had not authorized force against Iran. Several members, including Russia and China, condemned the strike. IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi warned that the attack disrupted inspections and undermined transparency.
Fourth, the normalization of such strikes is dangerous. If every state claims the right to preempt based on future capabilities, then the logic of non-aggression collapses. Why not strike North Korea? Pakistan? Or a state simply suspected of harboring intent? This slippery slope leads to instability, not deterrence. Indeed, by this metric is Israel, a known but not acknowledged nuclear power, at risk of being hoisted by its own petard?
Fifth, critics point out that alternatives were not exhausted. Diplomacy, sanctions, intelligence-sharing, and covert operations all remained viable. Resorting to overt military force short-circuits these channels – and increases the risk of a broader war.
These are valid and urgent criticisms. In a rational world, Israel wouldn’t need to act unilaterally. But Israel does not live in a rational world. It lives in the Middle East. And when international enforcement mechanisms are paralyzed, states will act – lawfully if possible, lawlessly if necessary.
There is precedent. In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor—a move condemned at the time but later viewed as prescient. In 2007, it struck Syria’s covert Al-Kibar facility – again without UN approval, again with limited fallout. In both cases, the legal protests were loud. The strategic consequences, quiet.
The real failure here is not Israel’s. It is the international system’s. The UN Security Council is frozen by vetoes. The IAEA has been stonewalled. Iran’s missile development and nuclear violations have gone largely unchecked. The ICJ has no enforcement arm. Sanctions don’t dismantle centrifuges. UN resolutions don’t stop uranium enrichment.
If the law is to be respected, it must offer more than procedure. It must offer protection. And if the international community wants to deter unilateral strikes, it must provide credible, enforceable alternatives. Otherwise, the law will be obeyed only when it is convenient – and ignored when it matters most.
Sovereignty without security is a fiction; law without teeth is a ritual.
The Politics Behind the Timing: Netanyahu, Iran, and the Legal Abyss
All that said, the timing and scale of Israel’s operation raise serious concerns. Before listing them, I want to return to a fundamental question: Why now?
Answering that may help contextualize what I see as a shift in Israel’s objectives – from degrading Iran’s nuclear and ballistic capabilities, to degrading the Iranian regime itself, and perhaps toward outright regime change. That last aim, if it is the aim, is pursued with no plan for the day after, no regard for historical precedent, and no assurance that the next regime won’t be a military junta or an even more repressive theocracy. Afghanistan anyone?
That’s the quiet collapse we’re already witnessing – not in Tehran, but in the legal order meant to constrain such choices. The UN Security Council is paralyzed by great-power vetoes. The ICJ lacks enforcement power. The Rome Statute binds only the willing – and even then, rarely the powerful. What remains? Condemnations, draft resolutions, and press releases.
If international law wants to retain relevance, it must evolve. That doesn’t mean abandoning rules – it means adapting them to modern threats. Perhaps that means revising the definition of imminence. Perhaps it means articulating clearer norms around nuclear latency and hostile intent. But whatever the legal form, the law must recognize that existential threats don’t always arrive with missile trails and mushroom clouds.
The hard truth is this: when a legal system demands that a state risk its own annihilation to comply with doctrine, the system will be bypassed. First quietly. Then openly. Unless doctrine evolves – or gains real teeth – it won’t deter aggression. It will encourage unilateralism. Not because states despise law, but because they refuse to die for it.
This isn’t just a legal argument; it’s political reality. In the nuclear age, it is one we ignore at our peril.
Still, the timing of Israel’s strike raises troubling questions. Why now? Why not wait to see if U.S.–Iran negotiations yielded a breakthrough? Why not give diplomacy – however fragile – the full 60-day window envisioned by previous backchannels?
Israel’s June 13 strikes on Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure may not have been solely about politics, or elections, or distraction – but with Netanyahu, the imminence of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the urgency of his own political survival are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are deeply intertwined.
Where national security crises end, Netanyahu the political operator begins. For him, existential threats and political opportunity often occupy the same space. He seizes on emergencies – some real, some inflated – and justifies his actions with a volatile mix of fact and fiction. That’s why it’s critical to examine the stated aims of this military operation in context. As the strikes unfold, so do their likely unstated objectives – ones obscured by the chaos of war and the fog of global reaction.
At face value, the operation was about denying Iran the capacity to fulfill its long-standing threats of genocide against Israel. And while the timing may have been influenced by domestic politics – as most state actions are – the core motivation appears strategic. You don’t launch precision strikes hundreds of miles into hostile airspace unless you believe the stakes are existential.
But we cannot separate this operation from the political calculations behind it. Netanyahu’s motivations are not purely defensive. He is under mounting international pressure over the war in Gaza, faces growing domestic unrest, and remains entangled in corruption trials. A high-stakes military confrontation with Iran serves multiple purposes: it unifies the home front, dominates headlines, and sidelines political negotiations that threaten his hardline agenda.
Part of this is ideological. Netanyahu fundamentally distrusts Iran, the international community, and any diplomatic compromise that permits Tehran even limited uranium enrichment. But there’s also a more cynical logic—one rooted in the political utility of perpetual crisis. His career has been built on security emergencies, real or manufactured. War reshuffles media narratives. It rallies nationalist sentiment. It defers accountability.
The strike may also have been calibrated to sabotage diplomacy on multiple fronts. It disrupted U.S.–Iran nuclear talks days before a possible breakthrough. It undermined the French–Saudi push to revive a two-state solution – an outcome Netanyahu has long resisted, preferring incremental de facto annexation over a negotiated settlement. The timing wasn’t accidental.
Strategically, the moment looked opportune. Iran is under internal strain. Its economy is battered. Its population is disillusioned. Its military, though formidable, is overstretched and reliant on proxies that have taken heavy losses in Syria, Iraq, and Gaza. From an Israeli perspective, this may have looked like the perfect window: Iran weakened at home, isolated abroad, and diplomatically vulnerable.
There’s also the shadow of regime change. By targeting not just nuclear assets but senior military and intelligence officials – and reportedly even considering strikes on Supreme Leader Khamenei – Israel signaled that this was more than a nonproliferation campaign. It was a decapitation strategy. The logic? Break Iran’s strategic program and destabilize the regime at the same time.
The United States, for now, is playing a reactive role—intercepting retaliatory strikes but refraining from direct involvement. Trump, always the transactional tactician, may see advantage in letting Israel “soften” Iran before re-entering negotiations. A weakened, humiliated Iran might be more likely to accept terms it previously rejected. No military action is ever purely legal or purely strategic—it is always political.
Netanyahu is governing from a place of weakness. His coalition is fraying. His domestic opposition is resurgent. His government faces legal challenges and moral condemnation over Gaza. Some argue the June 13 strike was a political gambit – designed to pivot the national conversation, reassert deterrence, and preempt a diplomatic deal that would tie his hands on settlements and normalization. There is circumstantial evidence for this. The strike occurred just as U.S. diplomacy with Iran and the Saudis was gaining traction. If Netanyahu wanted to act before that window closed, the timing makes perfect sense. But that doesn’t mean the threat wasn’t real.
States rarely act from a single motive. A government can act out of both fear and ambition, both genuine threat perception and cynical political calculus. The key legal question is not whether Netanyahu had mixed motives – but whether the threat was credible, and whether the response was proportionate.
Netanyahu believes he is scattering the storm before it gathers into a mushroom cloud. Maybe so. But he also acted unilaterally, precipitously, and without full U.S. approval. And to achieve his strategic goals, Israel will likely require American offensive support – risking escalation into a broader war that neither country is prepared to control.
That would be disastrous.
Into the Valley of the Unknown Unknowns
Here are just some of the concerns that lead me to believe there are far too many unknown unknowns for Israel – or the United States – to escalate what could have remained a limited operation, into a full-scale war. A war that will, inevitably, engulf the region and carry devastating global economic and security consequences.
This could have been different. The original mission – however controversial – might have been leveraged into a viable agreement of the sort Trump once pursued. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something to build on. And as anyone in diplomacy knows, behavior is easier to change than beliefs.
Instead, we appear to be heading off a cliff.
First, the scope of the mission appears to be expanding. Reports suggest that Israel may be targeting not only nuclear infrastructure, but political leadership. A decapitation strike aimed at regime change is an entirely different legal and strategic proposition—one with exponentially greater risks.
Second, dragging the United States into a war of Israel’s making is perilous. While Washington has so far limited its role to intercepting Iranian retaliation, any escalation requiring U.S. offensive support risks a full-blown regional war. That would be catastrophic – not only for the region, but for the global order.
Third, Iran is unlikely to take this lying down. Far from deterring it, the strike may accelerate its drive toward nuclear weaponization. The strategic paradox is chilling: if Iran already possessed a deliverable nuclear warhead, Israel likely would not have attacked. The lesson Tehran may now draw is clear –build the bomb, or be bombed.
Fourth, regime change – even if achieved – offers no guarantees. Iran is not Iraq. It is four times larger, more internally complex, and fiercely nationalistic. A post-theocracy Iran might not be liberal or pro-Western. It could just as easily be a military junta—or something worse.
Fifth, regional destabilization is all but certain. Oil markets are jittery. Energy prices are rising. Inflationary pressures could ripple across global economies. The long-term effects will not be confined to the Middle East. They will reach every country that depends on energy markets or global trade stability—which is to say, all of them.
Finally, there’s the question of perception. The Iranian people – many of whom loathe their own regime – are watching Gaza burn under Israeli bombs. They may resent the ayatollahs, but Netanyahu’s brutal campaign has alienated countless would-be allies. If Israel hoped to foment internal dissent or catalyze regime collapse, this was not the way to do it.
Legal Realism, Not Legal Nihilism / Doctrine, Not Dogma
I’m not defending Netanyahu’s politics. I’m not advocating for war. And I’m not calling for anticipatory self-defense to become an open-ended doctrine. What I am calling for is a sober reckoning with the limits of international law when it collides with the imperatives of national survival.
The right to self-defense is not a suicide pact. But neither is it a blank check. It must be governed by necessity, proportionality, and good faith—not manipulated for domestic gain or regional domination.
Yet if international law cannot evolve to meet the realities of nuclear latency and ambiguous threats, it will be ignored—not because states despise law, but because the law no longer speaks to the threats they face.
The world needs legal norms that deter aggression – but also frameworks that recognize existential risks in the nuclear age do not come with countdown clocks. Anticipatory self-defense is not a license to destroy. The threat must be real. The response must be proportionate. The intelligence must be credible. The alternatives must be exhausted.
Legal realism is not legal nihilism. But neither should doctrine become dogma.
International law must evolve – not to weaken it, but to preserve it. Imminence must be redefined. Norms around nuclear latency, hostile intent, and strategic ambiguity must be clarified. Because in the nuclear age, existential threats don’t come with warning shots. They come with timelines too opaque to wait for certainty.
The hard truth is this: when a legal system requires that a state risk annihilation to comply with outdated norms, the system will be bypassed. First quietly, then openly. Israel’s June 13 strike may be legally dubious. But it is strategically comprehensible. And it exposes a far deeper problem: a legal order incapable of grappling with 21st-century threats.
That’s not just Israel’s problem.
It’s everyone’s.
P.S. Click here to read Part I.
About Author
I don’t think preventive strikes could be a legal solution when an enemy is developing nuclear arms. If it was , Nato could have the right to bomb the USSR before they could produce their first atomic bomb? India would have been in a situation of self-defence when it disovered that Pakistan was working on it’s bomb or vice-versa ? What about China and North Korea? And had the Arab countries or Iran (with the help of the USSR?) a right of self-defence when Israel was working on nuclear arms? The way chosen by the states and the international community since Hiroshima to avoid a nuclear war until now is mutual deterrence. Pakistan will not use it’s bomb because India would react the same way. Why would Iranian leaders launch a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv, knowing that Israel or the US would answer with the complete destruction of their country? The first result would also be the killing of hundred thousands Arab an muslim civilians and possibly the destruction of some holy places of the Islam. Are those people crazy at that point? If Iran is really working on a nuclear bomb (but why it takes such a long time? ) I think that its intention is probably to avoid the possibility of a nuclear strike from Israel by shaping mutual deterrence.
I respectfully disagree with you.
The Iranian regime has consistently called for the destruction of Israel and has refused to recognize its right to exist. This stance has been a core tenet of Iran’s foreign policy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Its stated policy is to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth. In these circumstances, I believe Israel is correct in launching a preemptive strike under the doctrine of self-defense, as Mr. Karnavas suggests.
I do not believe, in any of the examples you cited, despite the existence of mutual animosity, has one nation-state repeatedly avowed its official intent to destroy the other and stated it does not recognize its enemy’s right even to exist. I do not condone war and believe in the peaceful resolution of disputes. And I believe the decades-long sustained policy of the US in eventually winning the Cold War and taking down the authoritarian communist regime of the USSR is the path to follow in taking on one’s avowed enemy or adversary. But the USSR never to my knowledge announced its refusal to recognize the US’s right to exist or repeatedly called for its annihilation. And neither the US nor the USSR were nations led by religious zealots capable of launching suicide attacks similar to those we saw on 9/11 to ingratiate themselves with Allah. The policy of mutally-assured destruction only works with rational actors on both sides.
I realize these are controversial issues where reasonable minds can differ. I mean no offense to anyone or any group in expressing the above views. And I invite critical analysis of my comments by all, including Mr. Karnavas himself.