“No imminent threat,” declare the sceptics. “An illegal war,” they insist. Such phrases betray a profound misunderstanding of history and responsibility. They treat sovereignty as a shield for aggression and “imminence” as a stopwatch that only starts once the warhead is in flight. We in the region’s Arab states—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman—ought to know better. We have lived with the Iranian threat for forty-seven years.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic has pursued a doctrine of exportable upheaval with methodical persistence. It has armed, trained and directed a transnational network of proxies that stretches from the Levant to the Horn of Africa, from the streets of Baghdad to the tri-border region of South America, and onward into Asia.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the various militias of Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi, and a constellation of smaller but lethal affiliates have served not as rogue actors but as calibrated instruments of Tehran’s will.
These groups have sown chaos on a truly global scale: the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 304 people—including 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers—in the deadliest terrorist attack on Americans until 9/11; the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 truck-bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre, which together claimed more than 114 lives in Argentina’s deadliest terrorist outrage; the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American airmen; the supply of explosively formed penetrators that killed and maimed hundreds of U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq after 2003; the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington; the 2019 Aramco strikes; and the relentless campaigns against international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman.
These are not isolated incidents but chapters in a single, uninterrupted strategy of regional domination and global subversion.
Qassem Soleimani, slain Quds Force commander and architect of the “Axis of Resistance,” openly boasted of this empire. In a message to his American counterpart he declared: “Dear General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.” That assertion, with the regime’s repeated claims of commanding an “Axis of Resistance” spanning multiple Arab capitals, reveals Tehran’s long-standing ambition for hegemony across the region and into the eastern Mediterranean.
To dismiss this record as lacking “imminence” misunderstands the concept in the nuclear age. A responsible leader does not wait until the missile is on the launch pad and the warhead mated. As former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett observed in his recent interview with Christiane Amanpour, “responsible leaders… if you wait for the threat to be imminent, it is too late.”
Ethically, this position is anchored in the just war tradition. As Michael Walzer demonstrates in his seminal work Just and Unjust Wars, states—like individuals—have the moral right to defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not yet actual. “For aggression often begins without shots being fired or borders crossed. Both individuals and states can rightfully defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not actual.” Waiting for the first blow when an adversary possesses both declared intent and advancing nuclear capability is not moral prudence; it is moral abdication.
Iran possesses both the technical capability—advanced uranium enrichment, ballistic-missile production lines, and a clandestine weapons programme long documented by the IAEA—and the explicit intent, voiced repeatedly by its supreme leader and Revolutionary Guard commanders. Add to this an extensive missile arsenal capable of reaching every capital of the surrounding region and beyond, and the calculus changes. Imminence, in the nuclear age, is not a matter of hours but of irreversible momentum.
Nor is the charge of illegality sustainable. Critics invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorises self-defence “if an armed attack occurs.” Yet the Charter itself describes this right as “inherent,” a pre-existing principle of international law that has always encompassed anticipatory action when the necessity is clear and the danger existential.
The classic precedent remains the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from becoming operational—acting before any launch, not after. No credible legal authority has ever branded that decisive intervention unlawful. The same logic governs here. Iran’s decades-long pattern of armed attacks, direct and by proxy, combined with its nuclear advances, satisfies every test of necessity and proportionality under international law.
General Jim Mattis, in his Firing Line interview, dismantled the illegality argument with the clarity of a commander who confronted this threat for decades: one could “probably never make a charge that this is an illegal war” given Iran’s long pattern of direct and proxy assaults on its neighbours, on American forces and on allied interests across the region.
These are not hypothetical grievances; they are a documented record of aggression that previous administrations, through sanctions that proved porous and diplomacy that proved naïve, allowed to fester. The result was not peace but emboldenment.
We in the region did not seek this war, nor did we initiate it. For years we counselled against military confrontation, exercising a restraint that has exceeded even our critics’ expectations. We did so not from illusion but from a pragmatic assessment of the risks: the sudden collapse of the current theocracy, absent any ready alternative, could plunge Iran into civil war, unleashing waves of refugees, radicalism and instability across our borders. Its ballistic-missile arsenal and deeply entrenched proxy networks might fracture into even more dangerous splinter groups, turning a contained threat into a hydra of uncontrolled violence.
Today, we absorb provocations — drone swarms, missile barrages, economic sabotage — against a history of flagrant aggression that had justified retaliation long ago. Yet we are pursuing every diplomatic channel precisely to avert such chaos.
Nonetheless, let there be no mistake: when the Islamic Republic turned its weapons directly and unprovoked against neighbouring territory, our shipping lanes and our citizens, the calculus shifted. Unlimited restraint is no longer prudence; lest it be confused with surrender. The gloves have come off because the alternative — endless appeasement of an aggressor that has already crossed every red line — poses the greater peril.
The campaign now under way is neither precipitous nor unlawful. It is the overdue correction of a strategic imbalance that earlier hesitancy only worsened. It is unfashionable, in some quarters, to acknowledge that President Trump has done what multiple preceding administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—would not or could not. Decades of half-measures allowed Iran’s nuclear programme to advance, its proxy empire to entrench itself, and its ideology of resistance to metastasise.
The cost has been borne disproportionately by the peoples of the region, by the Lebanese and Yemenis caught in proxy crossfire, and by Israelis living under the perpetual shadow of annihilation. To pretend otherwise is to rewrite history in real time.
The states of the region stand ready, as always, for a stable and prosperous Middle East free of hegemonic ambition. We seek no wider conflagration. But we will not feign blindness to the threat that has defined our security landscape for nearly half a century.
True legality and true responsibility lie not in waiting for the perfect casus belli to arrive gift-wrapped in a mushroom cloud, but in acting when the evidence of capability, intent and historical conduct is overwhelming. Iran’s revolution exported war; the present campaign seeks, at long last, to contain it. The states of the region understand this. The world ought to listen.
