Legal Illegal: The Question of Whether this War is Legal is the Wrong Question

2 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

Democrats are incensed that the US war on Iran is illegal. But how many US wars and other interventions, including sanctions, have been authorized by the Congress and blessed by the UN Security Council? Since 1945, the year the UN Charter came into force, most US wars and sanctions campaigns have either been undertaken without Congressional approval or have contravened international law or both. Criminal US wars and sanctions are not an anomaly; they’re the norm.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is part of an ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state. The state’s lawless conduct is reliably characterized as a departure from the norm, rather than the norm. “This isn’t who we are. We uphold and live by international law. The current war is an exception.” No, it’s not. It’s precisely who you are.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is a reflection of what the philosopher Charles Mills called ‘the epistemology of ignorance” – refusing to see what’s staring you in the face. For example, one can only believe that the United States is a beacon of liberty and paladin of democracy by refusing to see that:

• the country carried out a genocide of the indigenous people and stole their land;
• enslaved millions of Africans and exploited their labor;
• didn’t give women the vote until 1920;
• failed to provide blacks even formal civil liberties until 1965;
• established formal colonies in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and informal colonies around the world;
• practices democracy for the few billionaires and political impotence for the many;
• defends and upholds the exploitation of wage and salary earners as a matter of law and high moral principle.

There has been a substantial increase in freedom and democracy since 1776, but that’s only because the people who were so long denied these advantages fought long and hard to win them. It would be more accurate to say that contained within the US nation has been a movement of the oppressed and exploited that has fought heroically against a contending movement of oppressors and exploiters. The two movements continue to define political struggle in the United States today, and around the world.

Democrats and liberals who oppose this war (mainly because it’s Trump’s war), also contribute to maintaining the fiction that the US state is legitimate by demonizing the war’s victims. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman began his blog today with a shockingly puerile assertion: “The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise.” In other words, maybe the war is illegal, but the Iranian regime is heinous, so we can be assured that at the end of the day Washington’s intentions are good and everything will work out for the greater benefit of humanity. Apparently, childish analysis disqualifies no one from winning a Nobel Prize in economics. It may even be a prerequisite.

To return to the lawlessness of US wars. The trouble with dwelling on the illegality of US interventions, as if they could be expected to be otherwise given that they almost always are illegal, is that, not only does this buttress the notion that the conduct of the US state is, at its core, legitimate (when it clearly is not), but avoids asking the relevant question: Why is this intervention being undertaken?  For surely, if we’re troubled by the kinds of wars, both military and economic, that the United States and its pals wage against what are usually largely defenseless countries and peoples, we should want to know what causes them, so that we can know how to put an end to them.

Since February of 2022, the month Russia tried to conquer Ukraine, I’ve spent much of my time studying the origins of major wars. This has led me to the works of international relations (IR) scholars, including the neo-realists, the most visible of whom, these days, is John Mearsheimer. IR scholars can be commended, Mearsheimer included, for seeking the root causes of war, rather than indulging in pointless moral sermonizing. But they can’t be commended for their analyses.

Take Mearsheimer, for example. He began by articulating a model of major wars based on security competition within an anarchic inter-state system. States, he argued, try to maximize their military power in order to defend themselves against the possible aggressions of rival states. On this basis, he predicted that the United States would avoid major wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe in order to concentrate on containing China, its closest near-peer rival. When Washington embroiled itself in major wars in the Middle East, contrary to Mearsheimer’s theorizing, he declared the Middle East an anomaly, and attributed the failure of his theory to account for US conduct to an alleged hijacking of the US state by Israel and its lobbyists.

In fact, Mearsheimer’s argument that the Israel lobby runs US foreign policy, while allowing him to get out from under the failures of his “offensive realism” thinking, is part of the same ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state that is expressed in portrayals of illegal US warfare as a departure from the norm. Don’t blame the US state for its malignant wars on West Asia; at their core, the US policy- and decision-makers are decent and benign human beings who want to do the right thing. The trouble is that they have fallen under the sway of the Israeli Svengali.  The idea that Jews lurk in the shadows manipulating world events refuses to die.

I have leaned toward Lenin’s analysis of war, articulated in his voluminous writings from 1914-1918 on the first world war. The obvious limitation of Lenin’s thinking is that it is based on one war and the events leading up to it. He didn’t undertake an historical survey of wars, and obviously, could not take account of wars that have been fought since. Moreover, he used the term imperialism in a highly inconsistent way which has led to no end of confusion. All the same, I have found his thinking to offer a useful way to think about war waged by major powers.

Unfortunately, those who might be interested in Lenin, often read him second hand, rather than exploring what he said in his own words, free from the interpretations of others. Furthermore, on matters of war, they usually consult his pamphlet on Imperialism, which, in my view, is the least interesting and useful of his war-related work, though, sadly, the most frequently consulted.

Unlike IR realists, such as Mearsheimer, who are IR theorists because they want to advise the US foreign policy establishment on grand strategy, Lenin’s aim was to understand the origin of war in order to bring about a world whose realization would mean the end of war. In this respect, his concerns resonate best with those of anti-war activists, a compelling reason for turning to him rather than Mearsheimer and his IR colleagues, whose careers in academe tend to depend on how helpful their work is to a US foreign policy establishment whose aim is to exploit other countries and cement US domination over the rest of humanity.

Back to legality. Should it matter whether a war is legal? Who decides what is legal or illegal? It certainly hasn’t been people trying to free their country or class from exploitation. The United States and other large powers wrote international law and control the Security Council. If the Security Council says a war is legal, does that make it just?

I would argue, and so did Lenin, that a just war is one that brings us closer to a world free from the exploitation of one class by another and of one state by another. That is a just war, worth fighting, even if it is condemned by the US Congress and prohibited by international law and the Security Council.

Musical coda