Program: International Policy Journal

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint military strikes against Iran in what the Pentagon designated Operation Epic Fury. The operation came two days after the most substantive round of U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations in years had concluded in Geneva, with both parties agreeing to continue talks. Within hours of those assurances, the bombs fell. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Strikes targeted the Iranian president, military chief of staff, and extensive military infrastructure. A strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab reportedly killed nearly one hundred children between the ages of seven and twelve.

This article is not primarily about those facts, though they deserve full moral weight. It is about what those facts represent in the architecture of international law: not an aberration, but the latest and most severe instance in a deliberate, escalating pattern of U.S. policy that treats the prohibition on the use of force as optional, the Security Council as a procedural nuisance, and unilateralism as astrategic doctrine. From Venezuela to Iran, from Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 to the military raid on Caracas on January 3, 2026, to Operation Epic Fury in February 2026. The question for the international community is whether it will respond with proportionate seriousness or retreat, once again, into diplomatic ambiguity.

This article draws on the author’s prior analysis, examining U.S. strikes in Venezuela and the legal framework governing the use of force, as well as a companion analysis on civilian protection and the prohibition on the use of force in the Iranian context. It argues that the time for legal cataloguing alone has passed. What is needed now is a dual-track approach: constraint from within the United States, and constraint from without.

The Illegality is Not in Dispute

The legal analysis of Operation Epic Fury is straightforward. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Two exceptions exist: Security Council authorization under Chapter VII, and individual or collective self-defense in response to an armed attack under Article 51. Neither applies here.

The Security Council did not authorize the use of force against Iran. The United States did not request such authorization. Iran was not attacking the United States or Israel at the time of the strikes. Whatever residual concern might be derived from earlier Iranian actions had long ceased to generate an ongoing armed attack capable of activating the self-defense exception. Iran was, by all accounts, engaged in active negotiations. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence had testified as recently as March 2025 that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and its supreme leader had not reauthorized the program suspended in 2003. The IAEA affirmed it had found no proof of a systematic weapons effort.

The strikes were also launched in violation of Article 2(2) of the Charter, which requires good faith in the fulfillment of Charter obligations. Launching military operations during active diplomatic negotiations, operations that the U.S. president had, days earlier, indicated would wait, is a breach of the most elemental duty of good faith that the Charter’s architecture depends upon. Iran’s Foreign Ministry characterized this correctly.

Separately, the stated U.S. objective of regime change, explicitly framed by President Trump as a goal of the operation, and echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who declared the aim was to “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran,” constitutes an independent violation of international law. The prohibition on forcible regime change is not a contested doctrine. It flows directly from Article 2(4)’s protection of “political independence” and from the customary norm of non-intervention. It is, in the language of the International Law Commission, a peremptory norm from which no derogation is permitted. 

A Pattern, Not an Episode

What distinguishes the current crisis from earlier controversies is not merely its scale. It is the administration’s explicit abandonment of any pretense of legal compliance. In the living memory of every diplomat, lawyer, and policymaker currently active in international institutions, the United States has consistently sought to present its uses of force as legally defensible, however strained those defenses sometimes appeared. The post-September 11 doctrines of preventive self-defense and the “unwilling or unable” standard were legally contested, but they were doctrines, attempts to operate within an interpretive framework rather than to discard it entirely.

In Venezuela, beginning in September 2025, the United States conducted lethal strikes against boats in the Caribbean, framing them as law enforcement operations to avoid triggering the War Powers Resolution. In January 2026, U.S. forces conducted a military raid into Caracas, killing dozens, capturing President Maduro, and announcing that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a new government was installed. The attempt to reframe a manifest use of armed force as a domestic law enforcement action is not merely legally incorrect; it is a deliberate attack on the conceptual architecture that makes international law legible.

The cumulative effect is the construction of a new operational norm, one in which the most militarily powerful state on earth reserves to itself the right to use lethal force anywhere, against anyone, for purposes it defines unilaterally, accountable to no external legal authority. This emerging pattern of blatant disregard of international law, if allowed to consolidate, will not remain the exclusive property of the United States. China, Russia, India, and regional powers are watching. Every precedent accepted becomes a precedent available. The erosion of the jus ad bellum (use of force) framework is a problem for every state that has historically relied on that framework for its own security.

The Regime Change Trap

Beyond the immediate illegality of the strikes, Operation Epic Fury has another grave problem: it has no plausible endpoint. With Khamenei dead and the Iranian command structure targeted, the power vacuum is not a side effect; it is the current situation. History provides no encouraging precedent.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, similarly framed as targeting a dangerous regime with weapons of mass destruction, produced a multi-decade military presence, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, a regional security vacuum exploited by non-state actors, and a country that has never returned to the stability that even its imperfect prior condition represented. Libya in 2011 demonstrated that air operations designed to facilitate regime change produce state collapse, not democratic transition. These are empirically established outcomes.

Iran is a country of almost 90 million people, with a sophisticated military establishment, an extensive regional network of proxy forces, missile capabilities capable of striking U.S. bases throughout the Middle East, and a political culture that has historically rallied around national sovereignty under foreign pressure. The killing of Khamenei does not eliminate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It does not dissolve the Quds Force. It does not prevent successor leadership from emerging. It may, as multiple analysts have noted, accelerate Iran’s determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent, the very outcome the operation was ostensibly designed to prevent.

President Trump has urged Iranians to “take over your government,” a statement that confuses aspirational rhetoric with operational planning. There are no credible exile groups capable of assuming state functions in Iran. There is no post-conflict stabilization plan of record. Instead, there are many indicators of a prolonged military engagement, regional escalation, and the kind of unsustainable occupation that has defined the two-decade aftermath of every comparable U.S.-led regime-change operation. 

A protracted military presence in Iran, even through proxy arrangements, would constitute one of the largest strategic and humanitarian failures in the history of modern warfare, in a country whose geography, population, and political culture make external occupation far more complex than any preceding U.S. intervention. International law prohibits this operation not because lawyers are squeamish, but because the legal prohibition reflects hard-earned collective wisdom about what such operations produce.

International Law Ignorance as Policy

It would be a mistake to treat the current administration’s approach to international law as simply incompetent or uninformed. The pattern suggests something more deliberate: a calculated decision that the costs of legal compliance exceed its benefits, and that U.S. structural advantages, Security Council veto, dollar-denominated global finance, and unmatched military projection capacity all insulate Washington from meaningful accountability. This calculation may not be wrong in the short term. What it ignores is the systemic consequence.

There is a further assumption embedded in this posture that deserves direct challenge: that the chaos generated by unilateral force can be managed, contained, and ultimately directed toward preferred outcomes. This has not proved true. The history of U.S. military interventions is a history of second and third-order effects that escaped prediction, planning, and control; sectarian fragmentation in Iraq that persists two decades on, state collapse in Libya that turned the country into a transit hub for migration and arms across the Sahel, and a counter-terrorism campaign in Somalia now in its third decade with no measurable endpoint.

The assumption of controllability flatters the intervening power. It imagines that military and economic superiority translates into the capacity to shape political outcomes in deeply complex societies. It does not. Even the United States, with its unmatched alliance networks, its forward-deployed forces, its intelligence apparatus, and financial leverage, has repeatedly discovered that it can destroy a government far more efficiently than it can build a successor one. The chaos that follows the removal of even a repressive order does not wait for instructions. It does not respect the preferences of the power that unleashed it. And it does not remain contained within the borders of the state where it begins.

The international legal order, imperfect and unevenly enforced as it has always been, functions not because powerful states are compelled to obey it but because most states most of the time conclude that compliance serves their interests better than defection. The Charter system’s prohibition on the use of force exists because states recognized, after two world wars, that a world of unilateral military discretion produces catastrophic outcomes even for the powerful, and it persists because most states still recognize this truth. When the most powerful state in the system openly repudiates that framework, the signaling effect is global and immediate.

We are already observing the downstream consequences. Western partners have responded to Operation Epic Fury with studied ambiguity rather than unambiguous condemnation. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling on Iran to negotiate, as if Iran were the aggressor, while carefully avoiding any characterization of U.S. and Israeli strikes as unlawful. Australia’s prime minister expressed support for the strikes as “acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” These responses legitimate the legal theory underlying the strikes: that anticipated capability development, assessed by the striking state alone, constitutes sufficient grounds for military action against a country engaged in active negotiations. The logic, once accepted, has no limiting principle. It applies to any state that any powerful neighbor believes might at some future point develop threatening capabilities. Its adoption by Western governments is not a minor diplomatic concession. 

Inside the United States

The question that follows from legal analysis is not merely descriptive. It is operational: what can be done? The answer requires distinguishing between actions available within the United States and those available in the international system. Both tracks matter.

Within the United States, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires that presidentially initiated hostilities be reported to Congress within 48 hours and terminated within 60 days, absent explicit Congressional authorization. Operation Epic Fury has not been authorized by Congress. The administration’s prior pattern, invoking Article II Commander-in-Chief authority, is constitutionally contested and legally fragile. 

Congressional oversight mechanisms also provide near-term leverage. Appropriations authority gives Congress the power to prohibit the use of funds for specific military operations or for operations directed at the stated objective of regime change. The annual National Defense Authorization Act process, combined with supplemental appropriations, provides multiple leverage points. The New York City Bar Association has called explicitly on Congress to halt the administration’s violations of U.S. and international law in Venezuela; the same call applies with greater force to Iran.

Outside the United States

Following the Caracas raid of January 3, the Security Council convened in emergency session but produced nothing; no resolution was even tabled, because the structural reality of the U.S. veto foreclosed any attempt. This paralysis is itself the clearest evidence that the Security Council cannot currently function as a constraint on the United States.

The United Nations General Assembly retains authority under the Uniting for Peace procedure, established in 1950 for precisely the contingency in which Security Council paralysis prevents collective response to a threat to international peace and security, to convene emergency special sessions, pass resolutions characterizing the use of force, and authorize collective action short of binding enforcement. A General Assembly resolution characterizing the U.S.-Israeli strikes as a violation of Article 2(4) would carry significant normative weight, particularly if adopted by a large majority. 

States with sufficient institutional capacity should also consider referrals to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). While the Court cannot compel the United States to pay damages or halt operations; Nicaragua v. United States demonstrated in 1986 that a favorable ICJ judgment is unenforceable when the respondent holds a Security Council veto, an ICJ finding of illegality produces legal record of the highest authority, shapes subsequent customary law development, and imposes reputational costs that affect U.S. alliance relationships and diplomatic leverage across multiple issue areas.

The Responsibility to Respond Lawfully

This article has argued throughout for the legal constraint of U.S. military power. It is important to be precise about what that argument does not mean. It does not mean indifference to Iran’s internal repression. The Iranian government’s violent response to protests, its systemic violence against dissidents, and its documented human rights violations are real and serious. They generate legitimate humanitarian concern and justify a robust multilateral response.

What they do not generate is a unilateral legal entitlement for military intervention, including the intervention that has now occurred. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was constructed within the institutional architecture of the Charter. It recognizes that sovereignty entails obligations, not only rights. But it equally and deliberately rejects the theory that individual states may determine unilaterally when intervention is justified. The moment humanitarian concern becomes accepted as a self-licensing basis for military action, it ceases to be a protection mechanism and becomes a standing authorization for the most powerful states to intervene wherever they characterize conditions as sufficiently dire.

International observers, United Nations mechanisms, and human rights organizations have documented patterns of lethal repression, arbitrary detention, and systemic violence against protestors and dissidents. Yet the existence of atrocity risk, however grave, does not create a unilateral legal entitlement for external military intervention.

The System Holds Only If States Make It Hold

Operation Epic Fury is not the end of international law. Breaches of law do not invalidate the law; if they did, no legal system could function. In 1986, the ICJ found the United States in violation of international law for its operations in Nicaragua. The United States vetoed Security Council enforcement. The law remained. What changed was the willingness of the international community to hold the line.

The current moment requires a similar choice. States that have spent decades insisting on their commitment to a rules-based international order must now decide whether that commitment is conditional on the identity of the violator. The ambiguous responses from London, Paris, Berlin, and Canberra suggest, so far, that it is. That decision, too, has consequences, not only for Iran, but for the precedents that will govern the next use of force, and the one after that.

The United States built much of the legal architecture now being dismantled. American lawyers, diplomats, and policymakers shaped the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, and the norms of customary international law that govern the use of force. The prohibition on the use of force was built on the ruins of the last catastrophe. The task now is to ensure it does not have to be rebuilt on the ruins of the next one.

Finally, there is a deeper conceptual error embedded in any sustained posture that disregards international order. National interest, properly understood, is not a free-standing concept that exists before and independent of international order. It acquires meaning and practical traction only within a system in which the interests of states are mutually recognized and can be pursued through stable frameworks of interaction. A state can have a foreign policy objective; it can identify resources it wishes to secure, alliances it wishes to maintain, and threats it wishes to neutralize. But the pursuit of those objectives, their translation into durable outcomes rather than momentary impositions, depends on a surrounding order that holds. When that order is replaced by an ad hoc revolving door of unilateral force and managed instability, national interest dissolves. The powerful state finds itself not in a world it controls but in a world it has made ungovernable, one in which its own preferences can no longer be reliably projected, its own commitments no longer credibly made, and its own security no longer structurally guaranteed.

Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.

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