The president makes another threat to start a war with Iran:
In Trump’s first remarks since Iran rejected direct negotiations with Washington last week, he told NBC News that U.S. and Iranian officials were talking, but did not elaborate.
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in a telephone interview. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
The U.S. government is one of the only ones in the world that routinely threatens other states with illegal punitive military action. Americans have become so accustomed to hearing these threats from our leaders that many of us can forget how insane and outrageous this behavior is. If any other major power made threats like this against smaller countries, our government would be among the first to denounce them as aggressors. It can’t be stressed enough that any U.S. attack on Iran would be illegitimate and unjustified.
As a matter of international law, even the threat to use force against another state is a breach of the U.N. Charter. Using force when it is not in self-defense is a flagrant violation of international law. No one honestly believes that the U.S. would be defending itself if it bombed Iran.
The U.S. has no international mandate to use force against Iran. The president also has no authorization from Congress to use force against Iran. Even if Congress rubber-stamped it, an attack would still be a crime. When Trump makes these threats, he is announcing that he intends to be a war criminal.
Threatening another country with bombing if they don’t make a “deal” is pure extortion. It is the thuggish behavior of a rogue state. It is international gangsterism. This is exactly the sort of thing that the prohibition on the use of force was meant to eliminate.
Threatening to bomb Iran is also reckless and unnecessary. Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. wouldn’t have any right to attack them if they were, but the Trump administration isn’t pretending that this is the issue. The president is threatening to bomb them if they refuse to bend the knee.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
