For years, the Iranian government has attacked Israel mainly through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. More recently, it has launched direct, gratuitous strikes on the Middle East’s only relatively free country. If holding this regime accountable isn’t morally justified, there is no such thing as moral justification.
There is also a utilitarian argument in favor of pursuing this military action until unconditional surrender is achieved, which would obviously encompass no nuclear weapons, opening up the Strait of Hormuz, and ending the otherwise unending attacks on Israel by the Iranian proxies. There are more, but here are three.
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Other strategies have not worked — the Strait of Hormuz cannot be allowed to be controlled by one rogue government, and the alternative to war is not “peace.”
Every other option has failed
This is not a war of first resort. It is a war of last resort. The argument that diplomacy, sanctions, or international pressure could still work ignores 40 years of evidence that they don’t work. Sanctions have crippled the Iranian economy and impoverished ordinary Iranians without loosening the regime’s grip on power by one iota. Diplomatic engagement has not stopped this regime from funding terrorist activities throughout the Middle East. Internal uprisings have failed five times in fifteen years, and the January 2026 massacres proved that the regime will kill tens of thousands of its own citizens before it surrenders power voluntarily.
Military strikes have already accomplished what forty years of diplomacy could not — more than decimating senior IRGC leadership, destroying much of its nuclear infrastructure, and all but dismantling the command-and-control apparatus that directs Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
These modern military strikes, guided by intelligence and constrained by rules of engagement, are capable of a degree of discrimination between military and civilian targets that no street revolt can match. The GPS-guided munitions, bombs with smaller explosion radiuses and the precision-guided penetrating bunker buster bomb used in the war are designed to lower civilian collateral damage.
The Strait of Hormuz cannot be allowed to be controlled by one rogue government
This is an international waterway. It is not a built passage, such as the Suez or Panama Canal, for which tolls may be properly charged. When and if the oceans of the world come to be owned, privately, matters may well change. But in the present context, the Iranian takeover of Hormuz amounts to nothing less than a trespass against the rights of the world’s shippers. This outrage cannot be allowed to continue.
The alternative to war is not peace
Critics of the campaign speak as though the choice is between war and peace. It is not. The actual alternative is one of two things: A continuation of a terrorist state that has already killed tens of thousands of its own citizens and funded proxy armies all across the Middle East, or an internal uprising against a security apparatus with no interest in minimizing casualties and every reason to maximize them.
A popular revolt against the Islamic Republic, the seemingly only other viable path to regime change, would be unarmed civilians in the streets against a security state with no rules of engagement and no interest in minimizing casualties. This would likely be the bloodiest option of them all. Estimates vary on how many Iranians were killed in mass protests against the government in January. Estimated deaths range from 7,000 to 37,000. If Iranians rise up against the government again, deaths could dwarf those from January.
The arguments against this intervention
What about the case against intervention? One could argue that while individuals — Iranian or foreign — might be justified in taking up arms against Tehran’s regime, much as volunteers did against fascism in Spain in the 1930s, governments operate under a different standard. States, the argument goes, exist to protect their own citizens, not to police the world on behalf of people who never signed up for that protection.
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That argument doesn’t hold for Israel, which is fighting a defensive war against a regime and its proxies that have made clear their intent to destroy it. And it doesn’t hold for America either. Nothing in a limited government and restrained foreign policy rules out alliances, and the U.S.-Israel relationship has long been a two-way exchange of security and economic benefit.
More importantly, Iran has spent nearly five decades threatening “death to America” and backing those words with attacks that have killed hundreds of Americans since 1979. The U.S., too, then, can justify its participation in this war on grounds of self-defense. President Donald Trump didn’t start this war — but he may be the one who, hopefully, finally ends it.
James Delmore is an independent writer. Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans.
