36 No. 78 JUSTICE gone further still, arguing that the United States has found itself in an ongoing armed conflict with Iran since 1979. I think this is a very difficult argument to make doctrinally, because it ignores the armed attack threshold introduced in the Nicaragua case. The Gap Between Scholars and States I now turn to the second dimension of my remarks: the reaction of states, which has diverged strikingly from the academic consensus. Immediately after the war began, we saw a series of statements by senior politicians — mostly by European leaders, but also by Canadians and Australians — expressing some support for the operation. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands went so far as to say, in effect, that this is an operation outside the framework of international law, but that the framework of international law is not the only relevant framework. The Security Council adopted a resolution condemning Iran (Resolution 2817); it did not adopt in parallel a resolution condemning Israel and the United States. When Russia put forward a resolution on March 11, 2026 calling on all states to stop their attacks, only four members of the Security Council supported it. How do we explain this gap between legal and political attitudes? Amichai Cohen and I identified three possible explanations in a blog post we published on Just Security. The first one is the bleakest: international law is dead, as Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated at the 2026 Munich conference. Those who are strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. In this view, states simply no longer feel constrained by the prohibition on the use of force. This explanation is possible but highly unlikely: At least for some states, international law remains important. The UK Prime Minister, for instance, has stated that Britain will not send troops to the Gulf area if doing so is not compatible with international law. Still, we are witnessing, I believe, a walk away from the vision of international law as a liberal legal system. From 9/11 onwards, we have been in a process of normative decline. And if the most significant states in the world cease to believe in a vision of liberal international law aimed at constraining unilateral state power, we are going to see a swing back toward a more ancient form of international law — one that places state interest front and center. The second explanation is contextual. The U.S.-Israel operation took place a month and a half after the terrible suppression of the protests in Iran. Many states may have felt that it would be an abuse of international law for a lawless government like the Iranian regime to invoke international law as a shield against external forceful intervention. This resembles the familiar “unlawful but legitimate” category in international law — attempts to justify by a balance of justice considerations the 1999 Kosovo intervention, or the American threat to use force against Syria over chemical weapons between 2012-2018. The third explanation is that there may be an “Iran exception.” Iran, according to this view, is not an ordinary case: It is a country hell-bent on destroying another country — Israel. This context invites us to consider whether states can fall back on a right of self-preservation when the Security Council fails to address the long-term threat posed to them — an idea reminiscent of the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion of 1996, which held that the use of nuclear weapons is generally unlawful, unless states are confronting an existential threat.n Yuval Shany is the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair of Public International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This article is based on an IJL online webinar presenting a Legal Briefing on the current situation by Prof. Yuval Shany, on March 26, 2026.
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