A Just and Necessary War? Christian Ethics and the Iran Conflict

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This is part two of my series on the current conflict in Iran. Part one assessed the actual background of what happened and why. In this part, I will assess the ethics of the conflict, for the United States, from a Christian just-war lens. I begin with a discussion of the just-war tradition, then assess the reasons the U.S. entered the conflict (jus in bello); the ethics of U.S. actions in the conflict (jus ad bellum); and the necessary conditions for peace, order, and conciliation after the conflict (what political scientist and professor Dr. Eric Patterson defines as jus post bellum).

I. What Is the Just-War Tradition?

The just-war tradition takes as its cornerstone the idea that war is a “lesser good.” For the just warrior, the purpose of government is to punish the wicked and restrain evil. Such a mandate originates in Genesis 9 with the Noahic Covenant: “And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.'” (Genesis 9:5-6, ESV).

The fundamental basis of the just-war tradition comes from the New Testament, in which the Noahic Covenant is reaffirmed as the ethical basis on which Gentile Christians should act. This is made clear in Acts 15, and Paul, unsurprisingly, reaffirms this core commandment as the purpose for which God ordained government in Romans 13. On this basis, Augustine sees governments’ restraint of evil as a good thing, done in fulfilment of God’s purposes, though it is a lesser good than salvation in Christ.

Beginning from this central understanding, the just-war tradition establishes a series of questions one ought to ask about any conflict. Does the government in question have the right authority to conduct the military action in question? Is the purpose of the military action to restrain evil? Does the sovereign authority in question have a reasonable likelihood of success? Have all reasonable options short of war been exhausted? In the conduct of war, is a distinction made between military and civilian targets, and, when attacks are launched, are they driven by military necessity?

Responding to the last eighty years of frozen and unresolved conflicts, Regent’s own Eric Patterson has elaborated criteria for a just peace, to include clear victory, a post-war order, justice for the victims of the evil perpetrated, and a more peaceful situation between belligerents after the war. While not all just-war scholars have adopted Patterson’s framework, I think it is relevant due to the widespread concern about “forever wars” and the lack of clear-end conditions.

II. Jus In Bello: Was It Ethical to Go to War?

In evaluating the Iran conflict, we should begin with the jus-in-bello criteria. The easiest of these to address is right intent: Was the war launched to restrain evil? My last article discussed Iran’s post-1979 parade of horribles in detail. To review: Iran has taken Americans hostage; killed our soldiers in Iraq and our Marines in Lebanon; terrorized its neighbors; waged unending war on our ally Israel; broken innumerable U.S. laws in order to finance its global terrorist networks; tried to kill President Trump; and brutally massacred its own people countless times, including an estimated 30,000 dead in January.

However, the most urgent concern vis-à-vis Iran is its nuclear program. There are two disastrous outcomes if Iran acquires nuclear weapons: one hypothetical and the other inevitable. First, Iran might use such a weapon on Israel or, should its missile program have developed sufficiently, the United States. We must always remember that, since 1979, Israel has been the Islamic Republic’s pretext, but America is its first enemy and deepest hatred. Second, even if the Islamic Republic didn’t use a bomb, their mere possession of such a weapon would immediately spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, making the region more volatile and an eventual nuclear conflict more likely.

Every U.S. president in the past 20 years has sought to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. However, Iran has outwitted and outmaneuvered every administration that has attempted negotiations. Iran played the Obama Administration like a fiddle, extracting tangible benefits in exchange for vague promises it never intended to keep. The Biden Administration fared no better, and even Trump’s team has been repeatedly frustrated by Iran’s mendacity, belligerence, and unseriousness. Thus, President Trump struck Iran in June 2025 by launching Operation Midnight Hammer, hoping his destruction of much of their nuclear infrastructure would lead to a new deal. In response, Iran has only doubled down on its race to a bomb.

What about the question of right authority? For many of Trump’s more responsible critics, this is the primary objection. Trump, they argue, needs to go to Congress to receive authorization for the war. To some extent, this is true. Constitutionally, declarations of war are the exclusive province of Congress. Yet, presidents have also conducted operations against sovereign states with loose congressional authorization since the Jefferson Administration. Just as the Barbary Wars were fought under more general authorizations for naval action, the general post-9/11 authorization for use of force against terrorism certainly covers actions against the world’s chief state sponsor of terror.

Congress also specified and, to a degree, circumscribed its own authority over foreign policy with the War Powers Act, in which a president can act militarily for up to 90 days without congressional approval. From an ethical perspective, President Trump must follow applicable laws and precedents. If he is doing so and continues to do so, then the United States clearly has sovereign authority to conduct military operations against a state that has declared itself our enemy since its creation.

The final criteria to evaluate here is the prudential question: Does the U.S. have a reasonable chance of success? Amid the sturm and drang over Marco Rubio’s misquoted reference to Israel in discussing the immediate timing of the operation, many commentators have forgotten his discussion of why, in broader terms, the U.S. acted now. According to Rubio, the U.S. believed Iran was ramping up its production of short-range missiles at the same time it rebuilt its nuclear program. The goal was to make a future U.S. operation to set back or destroy its nuclear program impossible. In other words, the decision to strike now was a prudential one: If not now, more Americans would die. Also, in all likelihood, American targeting would be less accurate and kill more civilians.

With this in mind, the negotiations during the final week of February 2026 fulfill the “last resort” criteria. Iran had one last opportunity to peacefully give up its enrichment of uranium. According to Steve Whitcoft, a former special envoy to the Middle East and hardly a hawk within the administration, Iran’s response was to brag that they already had enough enriched uranium for eleven bombs. By any reasonable standard, at that point, negotiations were not going to succeed, leaving the U.S. with the alternatives to accept eventual Iranian nuclear breakout or engage in military action. Ethically, then, war was the right choice.

III. Jus Ad Bellum: On Balance, Has the War Been Conducted Ethically?

As we turn to an examination of the ethics of conducting war, we will focus on military necessities, out of which flow questions of proportionality and discrimination. Military necessity, as an ethical criterion, originates with the determination about right intent above. That is, we must first determine if the objectives of a given conflict are morally correct. If they are, then we next evaluate the degree to which actions taken in the war are militarily necessary to achieve these objectives. I will also add that, for the purposes of this essay, we are evaluating the U.S. and placing the heaviest weight on its actions. Israel has different objectives, since the Israelis feel, correctly in my view, the Islamic Republic is an existential threat to them, and so they are pursuing the objective of catastrophically weakening the regime.

As discussed below, I don’t think the U.S. can achieve a clear victory in its objectives if Israel’s portion fails. That said, Israel’s targeting of regime leadership matches its objective and, as such, should be evaluated separately. Finally, while rhetoric — particularly presidential rhetoric — has an impact on ethical considerations of war, From the perspective of war ethics, actions speak louder than words. For example, had President Trump acted on his threat to “destroy an entire civilization,” that would have been a mortal sin in Catholic theology and well outside the bounds of the just-war tradition. What happened, within hours, was a ceasefire, making ethical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric all the more challenging.

The United States is pursuing a policy of destroying the long-range weapons-making capacity of the Iranian regime. In the course of the war, a vital but secondary objective has also emerged: to remove Iran’s ability to threaten the global economy as a form of leverage. As to the first objective, the United States has selected a target list that is largely appropriate to this objective. While there are reports that one civilian target, an Iranian girl’s school, was hit early in the war, this seems to have been an accident due to imperfect targeting information. It is one of the great tragedies of war that no conflict in history has avoided such accidents entirely.

War, even when just and necessary, always has tragic elements — hence the great moral weight of the decision criteria. Aside from that incident, the U.S. military’s target list, based on currently available data, consists entirely of military targets. Threats were made regarding the destruction of Iran’s electrical grid, which would have disproportionately impacted civilians. This threat was not carried out; whether due to ethical concerns or a recognition that the government of Iran doesn’t care about its people is uncertain. Once again, rhetorical excess may detract from the ethics of a given war, but priority should be given to the actual military actions carried out.

If the targets meet the threshold of military necessity, we next evaluate questions of proportionality and discrimination. Discrimination is the clearest criteria to understand: To the greatest extent possible, do U.S. forces seek to avoid civilian casualties? Again, no force in history is perfect. To accept the necessity of war means accepting the inevitability of civilian casualties. That said, discrimination obligates the military to minimize such casualties to the greatest extent possible. Fortunately, modern military technology allows for a greater level of discrimination than ever before, notwithstanding the lack of discrimination shown by some modern forces, such as the Russians in Ukraine or Iran in this current conflict. In this regard, the United States has done a sufficient job with its actual targeted strikes.

Ironically, discrimination also may have played a role in the timing. Should Iran develop the massive stockpiles of short-ranged missiles Secretary Rubio mentioned, U.S. targeting would be less effective, increasing the likelihood of civilian casualties.

Proportionality is both a complicated and an often-misunderstood question in just-war ethics. The common misconception is that proportionality is reciprocity: “They kill one of our civilians, and we kill one of theirs.” Proportionality is directly related to military necessity. Disproportionate targeting of civilians occurs when a military force hits targets of little or no military value, purely for the purpose of harming the civilian population. Its grayest areas are civilian targets, such as factories, which serve a military purpose. Much of this gray area is eliminated if the factories are struck when civilian workers are not present. But even in that circumstance, military necessity applies. Here again, the U.S. has focused heavily on military targets. The challenge of assessing jus ad bellum in the middle of a war is that things are always changing, but it appears as though the United States has conducted the war within the bounds of the just-war tradition.

IV. Jus Post Bellum: Victory, Order, Justice and a New Middle East.

As Regent scholar Eric Patterson has laid out in detail throughout his career, justice after war is predicated on a concept all too often overlooked in modern conflicts: clear-cut victory. For a just warrior, a just war that becomes a “forever war” is less just, because clear victory conditions must be achieved to bring about the order and security Patterson sees as essential to a just peace. In short, the likelihood of success does not just pertain to one’s proximate military objectives but also to a victory that brings about peaceful order.

For Iran, victory will not entail any kind of open surrender. The Islamic Republic will never admit to losing a war with the West, and so we should not predicate estimates of victory on the assumption that they will. Rather, we might define clear victory in one of two ways, either of which would lead to a more peaceful and stable order. First, and more narrowly, we could define victory in this conflict as a tangible and substantive reduction in Iran’s ability to cause regional upheaval. This would leave the Islamic Republic less capable of supporting terrorist proxies; disrupting global trade; firing missiles at its neighbors; and, of course, holding the region hostage with nuclear weapons. The more these capacities are reduced, the greater the victory.

The second and maximal definition of victory would be the permanent collapse of the Islamic Republic regime, which would allow the oppressed Iranian people who detest their government to live freely. This is unquestionably the best outcome for the United States, the Iranian people, Israel, and every country in the Middle East, except those flirting with Islamic extremism. The prudential question is not whether this would be desirable, but the degree to which it is achievable and the degree to which any victory that doesn’t involve regime collapse is sustainable. The United States isn’t well-positioned to bring about regime change. Israel may have more capacity here, though that remains to be seen — and Israel is outside the scope of this current analysis. That said, any victory that does not lead to regime collapse is unlikely to be permanent.

What this means, in practical terms, is that just peace will require the United States to continue applying pressure to the regime after major combat operations cease. It also may require future military action if the regime doesn’t collapse and seeks to rebuild its nuclear capacity. Ideally, non-military pressures, combined with popular protests, would break the power of the regime’s mechanisms of oppression, leading to a transition away from Islamic extremism and toward democracy. Such a transition would take time, eighteen months to two years, as an optimistic estimate. Since the U.S. can’t maintain its current military posture in the region that long, other means of maintaining pressure must be found.

What would an unjust peace look like? In this case, contrary to the popular understanding that diplomacy is always necessary, a less just peace is likely to be found at the negotiating table. Iran has routinely outmaneuvered previous administrations and won for itself dangerous concessions at the negotiating table. Should President Trump grow weary of a war that isn’t popular and which he hasn’t fully explained to the public, he could seek an off-ramp that would allow the regime freedom to claim victory, reconsolidate its iron grip on its grip on the population, and rebuild — probably with China’s aid — to plot future mischief.

As of this writing, negotiations are off the table, and President Trump has discovered a very effective pressure mechanism with the blockade of Iranian ports and tightening sanctions enforcement. Here, it is worth saying that a just-war perspective ought to recognize that economic coercion is the use of force by other means and should still meet just-war criteria. Trump’s blockade primarily targets the sources of regime wealth and stability, since the country’s oil revenues go directly into the pockets of the fanatical IRGC. Without firing a shot, the U.S. can continue to weaken the regime substantially by cutting off its economic lifeblood.

The two final criteria for just peace are justice and conciliation. Generally, this would involve some form of restitution and a more permanent peace. However, there is room for pessimism here. Justice and conciliation would require a new, stable order. Thus, absent outright regime collapse, it seems unlikely that the many victims of the Islamic Republic will receive justice or that the Islamic Republic will permit Iran to live in peace with its neighbors. The ultimate hope for conciliation — and the less violent and volatile Middle East that would result — rests entirely with regime change. Thus, while a more just peace is possible, the best form of jus post bellum is unlikely to be achieved through the current war.

Conclusion:

On balance, then, the war with Iran is consistent with just-war principles. The rationale for going to war is consistent with the types of arguments articulated in the just-war tradition. The United States has focused on militarily necessary targets relevant to its stated mission. And there is, as of this writing, a clear path to a victorious outcome in the short-term and, potentially, a long-term outcome that will make the region more stable and the Iranian people freer. No war is ever perfect, and things could turn dramatically after this writing in the Iran conflict. However, as of now, America’s war with Iran is a just one.

A.J. Nolte is an assistant professor and director of Regent University’s master’s degree program in international development. He is also the director of the Institute for Israel Studies at Regent University.