The widening U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran is usually narrated as a Middle Eastern crisis. That is true, but strategically incomplete. Since the 28 February 2026 strikes on Iran and the wider conflict that followed, European governments have tried to distinguish non-participation, defensive assistance, and offensive enablement, while Asian governments have had to reckon with disrupted shipping, energy risk, and the possibility that American attention and assets could be drawn away from the Indo-Pacific. The most revealing theatre of the war is therefore not only the Gulf. It is also the wider political space in which states decide whether international law still constrains allies as well as adversaries. That question matters well beyond Iran. Any future crisis over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or coercion against a treaty ally will require more than U.S. military power. It will require a diplomatic coalition willing to name aggression publicly, align sanctions, absorb economic costs, and defend a common legal vocabulary. The strategic issue, then, is not moral consistency in the abstract. It is coalition-organising power: the ability to persuade other states that the standards invoked against rivals also bind one’s own side.
Iran is a hard case, which is precisely why it clarifies the issue. Tehran remains repressive at home, deeply troubling on the nuclear file, and violent through regional partners and proxies. The IAEA safeguards report of 27 February 2026 recorded grave and unresolved proliferation concerns, while also noting continued diplomatic engagement and serious verification gaps. Hard cases are where legal restraint matters most. If force becomes acceptable whenever the target is odious enough, law stops operating as restraint and becomes a vocabulary of selective exemption. My claim is not that legality overrides strategy. It is that legality is itself part of strategy. In a more plural order, partners are less likely to align durably behind states that present Charter limits as binding for adversaries but elastic for allies. The Iran war is therefore a Middle Eastern conflict with Indo-Pacific consequences. This is why the Iran case reaches far beyond the usual debate about Western hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral description. Strategy requires a different register. The relevant question is whether selective legality raises the diplomatic, fiscal, and domestic-political costs of future alignment for third states. In a system where many partners are neither dependants nor neutrals but selective co-producers of order, that cost matters enormously.
Law as Strategic Capital
This is why legality should be understood as strategic capital rather than ethical afterthought. Thomas Franck’s classic account of legitimacy in the international system, Ian Hurd’s work on legitimacy and authority, and Hurd’s later reflections on international legalism point toward the same reality: rules matter not only because they can be enforced, but because actors still feel compelled to justify themselves in legal terms. In world politics, law is part of how coalitions are assembled, contested, and sustained. That insight also sits close to John Ikenberry’s account of liberal internationalism and order-building and Amitav Acharya’s account of a more multiplex post-American order. If order is less hierarchical and consent matters more, then reciprocity matters more too. A state that wants others to share costs in a future Asian crisis must show that the rules it invokes are not merely discretionary instruments.
For that reason, the relevant benchmark in the Iran case should not be the infinitely elastic slogan of a “rules-based order”. Recent work by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Malcolm Jorgensen, and Marc Trachtenberg shows why the phrase can blur the line between binding law and looser political preference. In this case the relevant standard is the UN Charter. Once the issue is framed that way, the strategic stakes become clearer. Liberal democracies do not defend an order simply by wielding superior force. They defend it by persuading others that force is exercised under shared restraints. If those restraints are seen as optional whenever close partners act, then legal language becomes less persuasive when later deployed against Russia, China, or any other challenger. The point is less moralistic than it may sound. Legal argument is one of the arenas in which authority itself is contested. States can live with disagreement over policy. They are less willing to absorb serious costs for a coalition if they suspect that its legal vocabulary is reciprocal only when convenient. Selective legality therefore corrodes not merely reputation, but the practical willingness of others to align.
From Charter Restraint to Preventive War
The legal baseline is not obscure. Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, and Article 51 preserves self-defence only under narrow conditions. The Nicaragua judgment remains central because it resists the idea that a generally dangerous adversary supplies a standing warrant for force.
There is of course a long-running debate over anticipatory self-defence. But even narrower accounts of that doctrine still insist on imminence, necessity, and proportionality, as both recent legal analysis and the classic doctrinal literature on armed attack and Article 51 make clear. Anticipatory self-defence is still about an immediate and unavoidable attack, not a broad licence to strike because another state may later become more dangerous or less deterable. Once that temporal limit dissolves, prevention begins to masquerade as pre-emption.
The chronology matters. The IAEA safeguards report did not describe a benign nuclear file. It underscored serious proliferation concern, recalled that Iran had accumulated 440.9 kilograms enriched up to 60 percent, and stressed that the Agency lacked access sufficient to verify current inventories at affected facilities. But the same report also recorded ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations on 17 and 26 February, and Rafael Grossi told the Board of Governors on 2 March that diplomacy and negotiations remained “the only way” to secure long-term assurance that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons. That combination is precisely why the case is hard: the threat was real, but diplomacy had not plainly run its course.
Necessity is therefore as important as imminence. On demanding Charter readings, force becomes lawful only when peaceful alternatives are unavailable or exhausted. Even on broader accounts of anticipatory self-defence, the core intuition is the same: the attack feared must be sufficiently immediate that delay would forfeit the right of defence. Brian Finucane’s analysis of the U.S. Article 51 letter and Marc Weller’s argument converge here. The law does not ask whether another state is gravely threatening in a general sense. It asks whether resort to force has become unavoidable now.
The U.S. Article 51 letter to the Security Council invoked self-defence to protect U.S. forces, regional allies, and freedom of navigation. Yet the letter also thickened the claim of present necessity by invoking a long history of Iranian hostility. As Finucane notes, that move turns a catalogue of past conduct into a continuing entitlement to use force. The difficulty is doctrinal and strategic at once: once decades of enmity can substitute for imminence, the exception starts to swallow the rule.
The broader reaction from legal experts is important because it shows that the objection is neither fringe nor anti-Western. A public letter signed by more than one hundred scholars and practitioners warned against the unequal application of international law and against aid or assistance to internationally wrongful conduct. UN experts speaking through OHCHR likewise insisted on de-escalation, accountability, and non-selective legal scrutiny. One need not endorse every line of these interventions to see the central point: the better view is that the opening resort to force was not convincingly covered by the Charter.
None of this romanticises Tehran. Iran’s own conduct, including attacks on civilians, maritime threats, and regional strikes, raises grave questions under both jus ad bellum and international humanitarian law. But later unlawfulness by Iran cannot retroactively legalise the initial resort to force. Once strategic intelligibility is allowed to displace legal sufficiency, law stops constraining war and starts explaining it away.
Europe’s Uneasy Conditionality
European reactions reveal the difficulty with unusual clarity. In their 28 February statement, the E3 stressed non-participation, regional stability, and renewed negotiations. Their 1 March follow-up, issued after Iranian retaliation spread across the region, kept distance from the opening strikes but introduced language about “necessary and proportionate defensive action”. London then published a summary of its legal position that confined British involvement to specific and limited defensive action in support of allies under attack. The sequence mattered. It showed not simple endorsement, but an effort to preserve legal distance while remaining operationally useful.
That distinction is harder to sustain than governments often suggest. In a 3 March NATO press conference, Mark Rutte described allied contributions as “key enabling support”. The phrase was unusually candid. Modern campaigns do not consist only of the states that visibly launch the strike. Overflight permissions, basing, logistics, intelligence-sharing, refuelling, interception, and cyber support are integral to how force is projected. As Marko Milanovic notes, legal scrutiny cannot stop where trigger-pulling ends if enabling support is operationally decisive.
By mid-March, that ambiguity had become harder to sustain. In Berlin, Friedrich Merz said Germany would not participate in the war or in using military means to keep the Strait of Hormuz open while hostilities continued, stressing the absence of a UN, EU, or NATO mandate. In Paris, Emmanuel Macron similarly ruled out French participation in operations to open or liberate Hormuz in the current context, while leaving open a later non-belligerent escort arrangement once the main bombardments had stopped. In London, Keir Starmer insisted that any UK action required both a lawful basis and a viable, thought-through plan and later rejected participation in a blockade.
What emerged was not anti-American rupture. It was Atlantic conditionality: continued alliance loyalty, coupled with growing unwillingness to convert that loyalty automatically into offensive participation. That pattern matters because it suggests that even inside the West, legality still functions as a language of political self-protection and public justification. Yet conditionality without candour is unstable. If public legal reasoning appears only after the offensive phase is under way, it does not meaningfully constrain force; it manages political distance from faits accomplis. For governments that want to invoke the Charter robustly against Russian aggression or future Chinese coercion, that sequencing is costly. Legal language delivered after the bombs fall is not restraint. It is damage control.
Europe is therefore caught in a genuine trilemma. It remains dependent on U.S. hard power, rhetorically invested in universal legal standards, and materially exposed to the costs of a wider regional war. Those three facts do not always align. Support Washington too openly and the claim to universality weakens. Oppose Washington too sharply and alliance cohesion suffers. Try to split the difference and governments drift into legal compartmentalisation: public non-participation, private facilitation, and selective resistance once the political costs become impossible to ignore. The point is especially delicate for Germany. Support for Israel’s security and an uncompromising struggle against antisemitism are non-negotiable. But equal legal scrutiny is not moral equivalence. It is the minimum condition of legal seriousness. The European Council’s March conclusions themselves called for de-escalation, protection of civilians, and full respect for international law. A credible European position has to be able to say several things at once: that Iran is dangerous, that antisemitism must be fought without compromise, and that preventive war without a persuasive Charter basis remains unlawful even when close partners wage it.
Asia Is Already the Second Theatre
For governments in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Canberra, Jakarta, and Manila, these questions are not abstract. In Tokyo, the immediate response combined the protection of nationals and the monitoring of sea and air routes with repeated calls for diplomacy, a negotiated settlement, and the proposition that Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons. That sequence mattered. It showed that a close U.S. ally was trying to hold together deterrence, diplomacy, and legal restraint at the same time. For Asian partners more broadly, legality is not ornamental rhetoric. It is a practical indicator of whether American force appears bounded, predictable, and therefore politically supportable in future crises.
Taiwan’s concern sharpened the point. Officials in Taipei feared that Beijing could exploit both U.S. distraction and the propaganda value of the war through intensified pressure and cognitive warfare across the Strait. China does not need to prove itself a principled guardian of law to benefit from that situation. It only needs to reinforce the perception that Washington invokes law selectively.
Material exposure is equally important. The IEA’s assessment of the Middle East and global energy markets shows how quickly the conflict translated into fuel-price anxiety, subsidy burdens, rerouted flows, and shipping risk across Asia. Japan and Indonesia moved to deepen coordination on energy resources and supply-chain resilience; South Korean officials described a KRW 26.2 trillion supplementary budget and related measures to stabilise prices and supply chains; the Philippines sought direct assurances from Tehran on safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz; and ASEAN called for continued negotiations, consolidation of the ceasefire, and restored navigation in accordance with the UN Charter and UNCLOS.
By mid-April, Japan had announced an approximately $10 billion regional framework to help Asian partners secure oil, expand stockpiles, and strengthen supply chains. South Korea, for its part, paired its emergency response measures with a supplementary budget designed to stabilise prices and supply chains. At the IMF and World Bank meetings, finance ministers from a wide cross-section of U.S. partners warned that renewed hostilities or continued disruption in Hormuz would threaten growth, inflation, energy security, supply chains, and economic and financial stability well beyond the Gulf. The economic message was clear: even if the fighting remains geographically concentrated, the costs do not.
The material transmission belt is especially important because the burden is structurally uneven. The IEA’s Strait of Hormuz brief notes that about four-fifths of the oil and oil products transiting the Strait in 2025 were destined for Asia, while its wider market assessment underlines that almost ninety percent of LNG volumes exported through Hormuz were likewise headed to Asian markets. That asymmetry helps explain why a war justified in Washington or Jerusalem in security terms is received in Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, and beyond as a question of vulnerability, resilience, and American prioritisation.
This is the Indo-Pacific meaning of selective legality. It does not arrive as a seminar about norms. It arrives as insurance costs, reserve releases, subsidy bills, rerouted cargo, and renewed doubt about U.S. prioritisation. The category of the middle power is contested, but that heterogeneity strengthens the present point. Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and others do not experience exposure in identical ways. What they do share is the need to justify alignment to domestic audiences under conditions of material risk. That has a second-order coalition effect. In a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis, the United States will need more than bases and access. It will need diplomatic partners willing to bear political and economic costs in the name of rules they regard as genuinely shared. When legally disputed force reaches Asia as concrete economic and strategic risk, the rhetoric of universality becomes harder to sustain.
The domestic-political consequence should not be underestimated. Leaders across Asia must justify strategic alignment before publics that increasingly read contemporary conflicts comparatively: Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and perhaps tomorrow the Taiwan Strait. In that setting, legal credibility is not a moral luxury. It is part of what allows governments to defend costly strategic choices at home. Selective legality weakens not only interstate trust, but also the domestic coalition-building on which external alignment increasingly depends.
China’s Comparative Opportunity
None of this turns China into a principled guardian of international law. Isaac Kardon’s study of China’s maritime practice and the South China Sea arbitration are enough to preclude romanticism. Beijing uses legal language instrumentally, invokes sovereignty opportunistically, and rejects adverse rulings when it suits its interests. Yet geopolitics is comparative, not theological. Since the outbreak of the war, Beijing has repeatedly framed the crisis in the language of ceasefire, diplomacy, civilian protection, shipping security, and the primacy of the Charter. On 8 March, Wang Yi described the war as one that “should not have happened”. On 11 March, China’s Foreign Ministry stated that the use of force without UN authorisation clearly violated international law. On 31 March, China and Pakistan issued a five-point initiative calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, peace talks, protection of civilians and peaceful nuclear facilities, safe passage through Hormuz, and a settlement grounded in the UN Charter and international law. On 14 April, Wang Yi again described the ceasefire as fragile and urged the international community to oppose any action that would undermine it.
The point is not that Beijing has become universalist. It is that Western conduct has made Charter language easier for China to inhabit and harder for Washington to monopolise. As Agathe Demarais argues at ECFR, China rather than Russia may prove the principal geopolitical beneficiary of the war. The important caveat is that China gains comparatively, not normatively. It benefits because many states are no longer asking which great power is virtuous. They are asking which appears less arbitrary, more predictable, and less openly exempt from the rules it proclaims.
That is a lower bar than liberal democracies once set for themselves, but it is increasingly the bar that matters. The issue is no longer whether Western states can prove themselves uniquely virtuous. It is whether they can avoid appearing exceptionally arbitrary. Every time they evade a direct legal appraisal of allied force, Beijing’s rhetoric becomes easier to market. Liberal democracies cannot repair that problem simply by denouncing Chinese revisionism more loudly.
Toward a Coalition of Legal Consistency
A more serious Western response would begin by treating legal consistency as a strategic asset rather than a moral luxury. First, governments should publish public legal reasoning before granting support to offensive military action that lacks an evident Article 51 case or Security Council mandate. That obligation should apply not only to direct participation but also to overflight, basing, refuelling, intelligence-sharing, cyber enablement, and maritime support. If enabling support is operationally decisive, it should also be politically accountable.
Second, parliamentary scrutiny should extend beyond trigger-pullers. Legislatures in Europe and the Indo-Pacific should treat enabling support as a matter of war scrutiny rather than bureaucratic routine. That is especially important for countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and South Korea, whose territories and facilities can become indispensable to U.S.-led operations even when governments seek rhetorical distance from them.
Third, maritime coalitions in and around Hormuz should be explicitly defensive, multinational, and legally delinked from belligerent war aims. Their purpose should be safe navigation, demining, escort, and civilian protection, not the extension of a disputed war by other means. A joint statement of 19 March by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan pointed in the right direction by coupling navigation and de-escalation rather than subsuming both under offensive escalation.
Fourth, energy resilience should be treated as part of legal strategy. States that fear every oil shock will always be tempted to soften principle in the name of short-term stability. Diversification, stockpiles, alternative routes, and regional coordination are therefore not merely economic policy. They are what give governments the freedom to insist on legal standards when crisis strikes. Japan’s regional energy-resilience framework is significant for precisely that reason.
The broader point is that lawful alliance management is not an oxymoron. Alliances are more durable when members can distinguish collective defence from discretionary war. Europe has begun to rediscover that distinction under pressure. Indo-Pacific partners will need to do the same. Their task is not to choose between opposing Chinese revisionism and opposing allied exceptionalism. The two problems are connected.
The more consistently democracies apply legal standards to themselves, the easier it becomes to persuade others that Chinese coercion, blockade, or aggression should likewise be resisted. In a harsher and less forgiving international environment, power will remain indispensable. But power alone will not organise the coalitions that the next crisis will require. The real test posed by the Iran war is therefore not Tehran’s character. It is whether the governments that speak most insistently in the name of international order still believe that law binds friends as well as enemies. If they do not, the most durable strategic cost will not be borne only in the Gulf. It will be borne in the weakened coalition politics of the Indo-Pacific. If they do, then international law will have to become a reason of state rather than a vocabulary reserved for adversaries. That is not moral vanity; it is prudent strategy.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
