By Angelo Karlo T. Guille
In the international legal regime that developed after the Second World War, few rules are more fundamental than the principles of the non-use of force and non-intervention. The first is a general prohibition against military aggression by one state against another, while the second is a guarantee against interference from other countries. Both principles are essential for the achievement and maintenance of international peace and security.
Incidentally, and maybe unsurprisingly, both principles are also the same legal norms most often breached by the United States. The recent unprovoked attacks carried out by the United States and Israel against Iran are only the latest in a long line of incidents exhibiting a clear pattern of American aggression and interference.
Twice in the past nine months, US and Israeli forces launched a bombing campaign on Iranian territory under the pretext of decimating the country’s nuclear program and bringing about regime change. The twelve-day war initiated by the United States and Israel in June 2025 resulted in hundreds of Iranian deaths and saw US naval and air assets destroying Iranian facilities in Fardow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The current US-Israeli campaign that began just days ago is a much larger operation that has already killed over 500 people across Iran, including dozens of children in an elementary school in Minab, the country’s political and spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and numerous high-ranking Iranian officials.
However much the United States and its allies portray the attacks against Iran as legally justified, its aggression has no basis whatsoever in international law. The principle of the non-use of force lays down a clear prohibition against the threat or use of force in international relations. This prohibition is reflected in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and forms part of customary international law, which means the rule applies to all states.
There are only two recognized exceptions to the said rule: first, the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter; second, the authorized use of force pursuant to a resolution of the UN Security Council. None of these exceptions is applicable as neither the United States nor Israel was under attack from Iran, and there was no UN Security Council resolution approving military action against the Islamic Republic. As a matter of fact, having been the subject of US-Israeli aggression, Iran enjoys the legal right to defend itself through defensive actions or counter attacks against US and Israeli units.
The principle of non-intervention, on the other hand, is the right of every state, including Iran, to conduct its own affairs – political, economic, social, and cultural – without outside interference tantamount to coercion. This principle is a necessary implication of the foundational concept of state sovereignty embodied in the UN Charter and entrenched in modern international law. In Nicaragua v. United States(1986), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) explained that coercion is particularly obvious when intervention uses force through military action. In the earlier Corfu Channelcase (1949), the Court warned that invoking a “right of intervention” – which seems to be what US foreign policy is based on – would be a “manifestation of a policy of force such as has, in the past, given rise to most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the present defects in international organization, find a place in international law.”
The principles of the non-use of force and non-intervention form part of customary international law and are reflected in UN General Assembly resolutions such as the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States. The 1970 Declaration also reiterates that a war of aggression, apart from violating the UN Charter, is a crime against peace. Consistent with this label, the International Law Commission considers the prohibition against aggression among the peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens), meaning that it is hierarchically superior to other rules of international law.
Even if the United States views Iran as a threat to American interests in the region, absent an armed attack from the latter or a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, a US military strike amounts to unlawful aggression. The decision of the ICJ in Congo v. Uganda(2005) affirmed that a state cannot invoke its perceived security needs in order to violate the principle of non-intervention and the prohibition on the threat or use of force. Based on this and similar rulings by the ICJ, such aggression would also qualify as an internationally wrongful act for which the United States, along with Israel, will be legally obligated to make reparation for the injury caused to Iran.
What is astonishing is not that the United States is responsible for such blatant violations of international law. Anyone even remotely familiar with the geopolitical tensions and wars that permeated the last century could easily identify a slew of countries, mostly in the Global South, that have been victimized by US foreign policy. The astounding aspect of that history is that with all the countries attacked by the United States, all the coups instigated by its Central Intelligence Agency, all the societies and communities plunged into chaos following US invasions – even with all that – the narrative of America as the champion of “freedom” and the “rules-based order” still holds sway. Two reasons for the dominance of the US narrative immediately come to mind, one concerning the role played by institutions in propagating that narrative, and the other relating to the impunity the United States enjoys whenever it violates international law.
Most governments and social institutions, especially in the West, echo US-Israeli talking points designed to attribute blame to the country or people being victimized. Just as they did when they blamed the Palestinians for resisting Israeli apartheid and genocide, the United States and its pundits claim that the assault against Iran is a preemptive strike caused by the latter’s refusal to negotiate on its nuclear program. Even minimal research on this matter would immediately demolish this claim and the hypocrisy attending the US narrative.
Iran is a party to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and previously allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its facilities. The United States has huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, which it refuses to relinquish, contrary to its treaty commitments. The United States is, of course, the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another nation when it bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians.
In 2015, Iran, the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom entered into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) whereby Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program and permit inspection of its facilities in exchange for the easing of crippling Western sanctions. Though Iran was meeting its obligations under the deal and allowing IAEA inspections, the United States abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed sanctions against Iran.
The United States also displayed utter bad faith during negotiations when it carried out military strikes against Iran while talks were underway, the first instance in June 2025 and the second just days ago.
Despite the numerous falsehoods that come with it, the US narrative always finds a ready platform for disinformation in state and corporate media, which refuse to critically examine its underlying claims or discuss important historical context.
The impunity attending repeated violations of international law by the United States also reinforces the notion that it is effectively immune to legal norms accepted by the rest of the international community. As mentioned earlier, the non-use of force and non-intervention are foundational principles in the era following the Second World War. Yet throughout that period, the United States attacked, invaded, occupied, or intervened in the domestic affairs of dozens of countries in line with its aggressive foreign policy, and it has not been held to account for these flagrant transgressions of international law.
Iran, in particular, has long been at the receiving end of unchecked US aggression. After the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh moved to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, thereby threatening Western oil interests, the United Kingdom and the United States, through covert operatives, engineered a coup in 1953 that overthrew the Mossadegh administration. In its place, the United States reinstalled a pro-Western monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The CIA then helped create and train the SAVAK, an internal security apparatus that became notorious for extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and torture.
It took more than two decades for the Iranian resistance to swell and consolidate, finally culminating in the 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the fall of the US-backed Pahlavi monarchy, with the Shah fleeing to the United States. Since then, the country has firmly resisted US control over the Middle East.
In the years that followed, the United States spearheaded a campaign to undermine the Iranian government, even supporting and arming neighboring Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. Later, the United States imposed coercive unilateral sanctions that triggered successive economic crises in the country.
In 2002, the United States, under George W. Bush, labeled Iran as part of an “axis of evil”, along with North Korea and Iraq, which by then had outlived its usefulness to the US government. That label turned out to be a pretext for US aggression. In 2003, American forces invaded Iraq under the false premise that it had developed and maintained chemical and biological weapons. US Secretary of State Colin Powell famously appeared before the UN Security Council to peddle US intelligence on the supposed existence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”. These were later revealed to be outright lies. The United States’ claims contradicted the findings of the IAEA and UN monitoring teams. When US forces finally occupied the country, no WMDs were ever found. Now the same playbook is being used against Iran.
In January 2020, the United States carried out a drone strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force – an elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – while he was traveling in Iraq. Soleimani was arguably the most high-profile victim of a series of assassinations undertaken by US and Israeli forces against Iranian scientists and officials over a span of several years.
International institutions never held the United States accountable for its repeated acts of aggression against Iran or, for that matter, any of the other countries that suffered from US attacks. There is, instead, a trend to constantly adjust positions and responses in order to accommodate US foreign policy. This trend is all too evident in the manner in which US allies, especially members of NATO and the European Union, Western-funded think-tanks, and major media outlets readily accept and replicate US propaganda in a concerted effort to rationalize US aggression around the globe. These actors were quick to condemn Iran’s acts of self-defense, while refusing to acknowledge the illegality of US attacks or the broader political and historical context within which these events took place.
A failure in critical analysis adds a protective layer to the impunity already enjoyed by the United States, and only hollows out the UN Charter and international law in general. Worse, it projects the international legal regime as a framework that may be enforced against everyone except the United States and its allies. Reversing the impact of this failure and of US impunity demands an understanding of context and constant interrogation of the rationale offered by the United States to justify its wars of aggression. Otherwise, principles such as the non-use of force and non-intervention, while accepted as legal norms, will remain meaningless as they find no application whenever invoked against a hegemonic power like the United States.
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