Extract from Eureka Street
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- Vol 35 No 12
- The end of deterrence, or the beginning?
- Binoy Kampmark
- 18 June 2025
The tenets of international law deem the pre-emptive use of force against a state a matter of extreme resort and almost impossible to justify. The use of force in international relations is ideally rationed through the curative offices of the United Nations Security Council and the UN Charter, which permits self-defence but not the crime against peace. The threat must evince itself through an obvious intent to inflict injury, evidence preparations of what Michael Walzer calls a ‘supreme emergency’, and arise in a situation where risk of defeat would be dramatically increased if force is not used.
Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including the targeted killings of its military leadership and the scientific community (the latter labelled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ‘Hitler’s nuclear team’), are based on a few sketchy presumptions: that Iran had reached a stage where it could accelerate a weapons production program to build a nuclear device and, in having such a device, would use it specifically against Israel either directly, or through its proxies.
Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz offers some wishful thinking in justifying the attack, codenamed Operation Rising Lion. ‘We are now at a critical juncture. If we miss it, we will have no way to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons that will endanger our very own existence.’ Netanyahu was grandly hyperbolic. ‘If we don’t attack, then it’s 100% that we will die,’ he declared in a video statement to the nation.
The threat posed by Iran was given a dousing of cold water in March this year when US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that while Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was ‘at its highest levels’ and ‘unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons,’ Iran was ‘not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.’ That intelligence assessment remained unchanged, according to Susan Miller, a recently retired CIA official who served as station chief in Israel.
The official pretext given for the strikes has been tethered to the June 12 declaration by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in nearly two decades. In its May 31 report, the IAEA noted that Iran had amassed enough uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity — just shy of the 90 per cent threshold constituting weapons-grade material, and sufficient material, in theory, to construct nine nuclear warheads. But the report, while provocative in its implications, stops short of confirming an active weapons program.
It is also clear that Israel ignored international law prohibiting attacks on nuclear facilities. This is the view of Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In condemning the tepid response of European states, notably Germany, in justifying Israel’s attacks, blithely ignoring the importance of Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibiting the use of force subject to the right to self-defence, he issued a barbed reminder of another neglected injunction: targeted strikes against the nuclear facilities of any party ‘are prohibited under Article 56 of the additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions to which Germany is a party’.
ElBaradei was also in a mood to reflect historically, referring to another of Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on nuclear facilities, specially the attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in June 1981. The reaction then was distinctly different to now, with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 487 (1981) unreservedly condemning the attack as a violation of the UN Charter, acknowledging that Iraq was a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and had permitted the IAEA inspections of the facility, accepting that Iraq had a right to establish and develop civilian nuclear programs and called on Israel to place its own nuclear facilities under the jurisdictional safeguards of the IAEA.
'Unfortunately for Israel, its attacks on Iran have merely confirmed, not repudiated, the importance of nuclear deterrence – especially against a power that also has its own nuclear stockpile. While morally and ethically contentious, a realist’s assessment of the dilemma would favour acquiring such weaponry.'
It is also clear that, whatever legal theory might be used, Netanyahu had already given a directive in November 2024 that Tehran’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb would be thwarted. ‘The directive,’ he confirms, ‘came shortly after the assassination of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah’.
Troubling in these pre-emptive attacks are the similarities between Netanyahu’s justifications, and the apologias of a previous leader, US President George W. Bush, in attacking Iraq in 2003. That common ground: fear that proxy groups might also be armed with destructive weaponry, necessitating the elimination of the supplier. In light of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda, Bush declared a ‘Global War on Terror’ of considerable elasticity. As he reasoned in his 2002 State of the Union address, North Korea, Iran and Iraq formed an ‘axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.’ By seeking weapons of mass destruction, such states ‘could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.’
Here are Netanyahu’s words, delivered in a video message: ‘We had information that this unscrupulous regime was planning to give the nuclear weapons that they would develop to their terrorist proxies. That’s nuclear terrorism on steroids. That would threaten the entire world.’
Unfortunately for Israel, its attacks on Iran have merely confirmed, not repudiated, the importance of nuclear deterrence – especially against a power that also has its own nuclear stockpile. While morally and ethically contentious, a realist’s assessment of the dilemma would favour acquiring such weaponry. The late international relations theorist Kenneth N. Waltz tended towards the view that nuclear weapons stabilised rather than up-ended the international system. In 2012, he argued that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would ‘most likely […] restore stability to the Middle East’ while ending Israel’s destabilising nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.
Examples of Waltz’s lessons are not hard to find. North Korea could point to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat with WMDs he did not have. The collapse of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya after aerial strikes by the US, UK and France in 2011, having been convinced to give up its own nuclear program, was also salutary to those in Pyongyang. As one North Korean commentary went, both ‘could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord.’
The final, potentially calamitous outcome of these decapitating strikes by Israel is the destabilising danger posed by regime change. While the mullahs have shown themselves to be harsh in their authoritarianism, ambitious in pursuing a foreign policy that has made enemies from Washington to Riyadh, history shows that externally imposed solutions via the missile and sponsored coup often end catastrophically. One need go no further than Iran’s own democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who was deposed by a US and UK funded operation in 1953, setting in train a series of events that eventually gave us the theocrats in Tehran.
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