The Ethics of Intervention in Iran

In justifying the joint United States-Israel airstrikes on Iran, US politicians have adopted humanitarian rhetoric, claiming that their action will enable the liberation of the repressed Iranian population.[1] The leader of the Iranian opposition in exile, Reza Pahlavi (the son of the deposed Shah of Iran), has called the action a “humanitarian intervention”, suggesting that its “target is the Islamic Republic, its repressive apparatus, and its machinery of slaughter”.

In light of the awful brutality by the Iranian government against the uprising in late December 2025, the case for humanitarian intervention in Iran is not obviously implausible. The Iranian writer, Hamidreza Zarifinia, argued in early January 2026 that “intervention is not only permissible, but is regarded as a moral duty” and “can be considered entirely legitimate and humanitarian”. In similar vein, writing shortly before the strikes, the Volt party in Europe argued that the Iranians “deserve” intervention “in the face of a mounting number of civilian deaths and unlawful executions”, although cautioned about a US-led military intervention without the authorisation of the Security Council and in contravention of the requirements of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.

In this respect, there are echoes of the justifications presented in the buildup to the 2003 War in Iraq, where those supporting the action highlighted the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime to help defend the war. Like the 2003 War in Iraq, moreover, the intervention in Iran is illegal. It is also not the last resort, given that diplomacy was starting to work in exerting pressure on the Iranian regime, and it lacks legitimate authority, without any attempt to seek the approval of the United Nations Security Council.[2] Indeed, like Iraq, the intervention in Iran fails to meet all the traditional criteria of Just War Theory. But I want to argue that the action in Iran is even worse, having even weaker grounds to be deemed humanitarian than the War in Iraq.

1.     Humanitarian Regime Change?

The United States and Israel’s actions suggest that they desire regime change in Iran. Regime change generally has a bad rap. Yet it would be an error to claim, as some did in response to the intervention in Libya and the debate around the War in Iraq, that regime change can never be humanitarian.[3] The removal of a repressive regime can potentially be humanitarian – and a legitimate goal of humanitarian intervention, to the extent that it facilitates the end of a humanitarian crisis (which is rare). But for regime change to be humanitarian, it needs to be likely that the regime will be replaced by something better – by a stable liberal democracy, for instance.

Yet, in the case of Iran, it seems that, even if there were successful regime change, it is questionable that any alternative regime would be much better. The Shah’s son has been mooted as a potential successor, but it is unclear that he would have sufficient support within Iran. It’s also dubious that there is a clear path to regime change. The Ayatollah was not the regime; the removal of the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps will be extremely difficult, with most commentators suggesting it would require boots on the ground or a major internal uprising. As Max Boot argues, “[t]here are good reasons why previous presidents were reluctant to become embroiled in a War in Iraq. Trump has ignored all the caveats”.

2.     Motives and Intentions

Moreover, the motives of Trump and Netanyahu for undertaking the action seem to be far from humanitarian, with some suggesting that their motives are to help them with their upcoming elections, and, in the case of Trump, to help to provide a distraction to relieve some of the pressure about his ties to Epstein. Likewise, the motives for George W. Bush’s actions in the War in Iraq were widely suggested to ultimately be about securing oil, as well as to fulfil the legacy of his father, who had failed to remove Saddam Hussein 12 years previously.

But the motives of those undertaking intervention don’t determine whether it’s a humanitarian intervention. Motives are far too difficult to determine reliably, given the difficulty of knowing another’s mindset. This is why criminal law rarely relies on motives for assessing the violations of the law; it uses them only to determine sentencing, and even then only when they are apparent. Instead, we look to intentions to help define actions – to the purposes of actions rather than underlying reasons.

How does one determine an intervener’s intentions? There are three potential indicators. On all three indicators, the action against Iran scores very poorly – and even worse than Iraq.

a.     General Rhetoric

The first is to examine the general rhetoric of the actors and the role that humanitarian justifications are playing. In the case of the intervention in Iran, the rhetoric is generally inconsistent. At best, humanitarian claims are largely an afterthought. With Iraq, there was a clear plan for the combat phase to achieve the stated objectives – the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime. (As is well known, there was no plausible post-war plan, leading to carnage). With Iran, there is not even a clear plan for achieving the objective of regime change, given that bombing alone seems unlikely to lead to this. So, even if the stated goal of regime change were potentially humanitarian, there is no clear plan for this.

b.     Actions

The second indicator is to examine the ongoing or likely actions. Are they indicative of a humanitarian response, such as by attempting to minimise civilian casualties? Here it seems extremely unlikely. Already there are reports that an elementary school has been hit, killing 165 people, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12. There are also reports of double tap strikes (a strike followed by another one once aid workers arrive) and attacks on civilian infrastructure. An intervener with a humanitarian intention would surely take much more care.

It was warned prior to the intervention that there would be major humanitarian blowbacks with action, with warnings that the Strait of Hormuz could be shut, leading to a potential food crisis as the region lacks sufficient fertiliser, as well as harm to the global economy – which typically greatly affects the most vulnerable, who bear much of the costs. It was also expected that Iran would strike civilian targets and those of allies of the United States and Israel. Although Iran is clearly responsible for such harm, and is itself fighting a hugely unjust war of self-defence, its intervening agency does not completely abrogate the responsibility of Israel and the United States, given that the harm was foreseeable, and agents are still responsible for mediated harms.[4] My point, then, is that the likely disproportionality of the action – the likely severe humanitarian effects – demonstrates a lack of humanitarian intention.

c.     Past behaviour

The third test is previous behaviour. Has the agent undertaken humanitarian action previously that suggests that this is a pattern of behaviour? It might be thought that only legitimate states can undertake humanitarian intervention. But the history of humanitarian intervention has been littered with cases of seemingly illegitimate states – of states that are far from being liberal democracies – intervening for humanitarian purposes in other states, such as Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda in 1979 and the Nigerian-led interventions in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the early 1990s.

What matters for this assessment is not the intervener’s treatment of its own population, but its record of external behaviour. The human rights violations and growing authoritarianism of the Trump and Netanyahu regimes internally don’t discount the possibility that their states could in principle undertake humanitarian intervention. But their external behaviour – their recent foreign policy – clearly suggests that this is highly unlikely. There’s no need to belabour the point that this indicator is clearly not met, given the Israeli abuses in Lebanon and beyond, and ongoing US support for human rights abuses in the West Bank, as well as the destruction of the humanitarian aid regime by the Trump administration.

3.     Justification versus Classification

Some might hold that whether the action in Iran is a humanitarian intervention is beside the point. Indeed, it’s important to separate the classification of an action from its justification. There have been humanitarian interventions that were unjustified; some claim that was true of the 2011 intervention in Libya. There are also some nonhumanitarian interventions that have been justified, such as those that aim to ensure self or other-defence against serious external aggression. Yet it’s quite clear that the intervention in Iran is hugely morally problematic, even if it were somehow deemed still ‘humanitarian’. Indeed, it seems even worse than the War in Iraq in another way.

The War in Iraq demonstrated deep hubris and led to hundreds of thousands dying, as well as wider regional instability. The intervention in Iran threatens this – indeed, this seems a likely outcome at the time of writing. And, like the War in Iraq, the intervention causes huge damage to the laws and norms governing the resort to force. But, in Iraq, there was at least a commitment to attempt to stay and sort out the mess, even if this did lead to a hugely problematic post-war occupation. Colin Powell famously invoked the Pottery Barn Rule – ‘you break it, you own it’. For all its problems, the Pottery Barn Rule at least demonstrates a sense of duty to redress wrongs and to attempt to ensure beneficial consequences over the long term. With the intervention in Iran, by contrast, there seems to be the opposite to the Pottery Barn Rule – break it and run.[5] There is no commitment to the population, to fulfil the remedial duties to fix the likely major mess.

We can see then not only is the war in Iran far from being humanitarian intervention and a just war, it’s even worse than the 2003 War in Iraq, the quintessential unjust war of the past three decades.

James Pattison is Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester and an expert on ethical issues in global peace and security. He is the author of several books on war, intervention, and global justice, including Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should Intervene? (OUP, 2010) and The Alternatives to War: From Sanctions to Nonviolence (OUP, 2018).

Notes:

[1] Trump claimed that “[f]inally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand…when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” Various Republican figures have come out strongly in support of the action and some have invoked humanitarian justifications. For instance, Don Bacon states that “[a]fter the regime just murdered approximately 50,000 Iranians, it is time to help the Iranian people get rid of the Ayatollah once and for all”.

[2] The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has described the US-Israeli strikes as squandering the opportunity for diplomacy.

[3] Marc Wellar hints at this view on Iran.

[4] The mainstream view on intervening agency is that responsibility for harm is only somewhat diminished and agents are still responsible for bringing about reasonably foreseeable harms.

[5] Trump’s move away from the Pottery Barn rule is celebrated by one commentator.

Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed on The Public Ethics Blog are solely those of the post author(s) and not The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Stockholm University, the Wallenberg Foundation, or the staff of those organisations.