The claim that the American–Israeli strikes on Iran are illegal collapses under any basic reading of international law. What remains—largely a supranational and primarily European reflex—is not a legal argument but a political excuse.
Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, states retain the right of individual and collective self-defense, allowing them and their allies to act in response to an armed attack or an imminent strategic threat. In that legal context, the current actions taken by the United States and the State of Israel fit squarely within the framework that the Charter itself establishes.
Against that legal backdrop, Iran’s behavior over the past two decades explains why the threat is imminent rather than theoretical. Tehran has constructed the largest missile and proxy war infrastructure in the Middle East while repeatedly declaring that Israel should be wiped from the map and enabling attacks on American forces through terrorist groups stretching from Iraq to Yemen.
Under those conditions, waiting for Iran to assemble nuclear weapons before acting would not represent legal restraint; instead, it would mean allowing the most aggressive regime in the region to decide when the nuclear age of the Middle East begins.
International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring documented that Iran has accumulated more than 440 kilograms (roughly 970 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a level that completes nearly 90 percent of the technical work required to reach weapons-grade material. A single nuclear weapon requires roughly 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, meaning Iran already possesses enough near-weapons-grade stock to fuel multiple nuclear devices if enriched further.
In practical terms, Tehran now sits a screwdriver’s turn away from nuclear weapons capability. That reality explains why the regime rejected a proposal to receive American-supplied fuel for a nominally civilian program while permanently renouncing nuclear weapons.
Yet Iran’s strategic posture does not solely rely on nuclear capability. Tehran has paired its nuclear-threshold status with the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, estimated at roughly 3,000 missiles, including systems capable of striking American and Israeli bases across the region and even parts of southeastern Europe. Many of these systems carry payloads exceeding 1,500 pounds and possess ranges between 600 and 1,250 miles, providing Tehran with a substantial conventional strike capability.
At the same time, Iran expanded an industrial drone infrastructure yielding thousands of Shahed-type attack drones, the same systems Russia now launches against Ukrainian cities in waves of 100–200 drones per night.
Beyond all this, Iran also built a broader regional war architecture. That is why Hezbollah alone holds up to approximately 25,000 rockets and missiles in Lebanon, and the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have conducted dozens of attacks against American forces in recent years. Meanwhile, the Houthis—armed with Iranian missiles and drones—have targeted commercial shipping in the Red Sea, threatening a maritime corridor through which roughly 12–15 percent of global trade normally passes. Taken together, this proxy network forms the most extensive state-backed terrorist infrastructure in the modern Middle East.
In light of this architecture, the relevance of the U.N. Charter’s self-defense provision becomes unmistakable. The Charter was written to allow states to respond to threats that combine military capability, hostile intent, and expanding operational reach before those threats fully materialize.
Despite all this, several Western governments—including Spain, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom—have questioned the legality of strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure. Yet their argument collapses under basic scrutiny: international law does not require a country to wait for a nuclear warhead before disabling the launch site.
After two decades of mass illegal immigration and growing demographic tensions, several European governments fear that supporting the United States or Israel against Iran could trigger unrest at home or alienate influential voting blocs in major cities. As a result, strategic judgment is increasingly filtered through electoral calculations. Too many European leaders are not evaluating the legality of the war against Iran so much as calculating the political consequences of saying so publicly.
The irony is geopolitical. Europe’s security architecture ultimately rests on American military power and the containment of hostile regimes in the Middle East. When the United States and Israel dismantle Iranian missile factories, drone corridors, and nuclear infrastructure, they not only protect themselves but also safeguard the broader Western security system that Europe depends on but hesitates to defend.
For that reason, questioning efforts to dismantle Iran’s military infrastructure does not defend international law but weakens the deterrent shield protecting Europe. Alongside this, this new fashionable legal rigidity loses credibility when it ignores modern threats, proxy warfare, and the distinction between aggressor and defender. Nevertheless, if Iran goes nuclear, today’s legal purists will become tomorrow’s supplicants.
