George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
A fortnight ago, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, destroyed significant portions of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, and triggered a regional counterstrike that hit Gulf civilian infrastructure, closed major airspace, and set the Middle East on the edge of a wider war. The British government lent its bases for ‘defensive’ strikes, scrambled RAF aircraft to intercept Iranian missiles over the Gulf, and announced, with apparent sincerity, that it did not want to see further escalation.
The British commentariat’s response was, broadly, to reach for international law. Was the strike legal? Was it sanctioned? Did it violate the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggression? The SNP invoked Article 2(4). The Greens called it illegal. Academics queued to explain the self-defence thresholds under Article 51. It was, as the same conversation was in January over Venezuela, a performance of legal seriousness that served primarily to avoid the actual question.
The actual question is simpler: was it strategically justified, and what should Britain do now?
I argued elsewhere in January, writing about Venezuela, that international law in military matters has always been more facade than framework: that it lacks enforcement mechanisms, that it derives its apparent authority from hegemonic sponsorship, and that appealing to it not only fails to constrain great power behaviour but obscures the real debate. The intervening weeks, culminating in Operation Epic Fury, have provided a rather emphatic real-world test of that thesis.
The Legal Debate Is Not the Debate
The legal arguments are real, in a technical sense. The US-Israel strikes almost certainly do not satisfy the imminence threshold for Article 51 self-defence as it is generally understood. Iran had not launched an armed attack immediately preceding the operation. The 2025 US intelligence assessment judged that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon. The Security Council was not consulted. On a strict reading of the UN Charter, this is legally difficult territory.
None of this matters, in any practical sense, and the reason it does not matter is the reason it never mattered: the UN Security Council exists primarily to formalise great power disagreement, not to constrain great power behaviour. Russia and China have condemned the strikes. They condemned the Libya intervention in 2011. They condemn Israeli operations with metronomic regularity. The condemning party and the acting party have simply traded positions depending on convenience, and the ‘law’ in each case is invoked to legitimise the position already held.
What the legal framing does, more damagingly, is replace a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the US-Israel strikes were strategically wise, what their likely consequences for regional order are, what Britain’s interests actually are in the outcome, whether a destabilised or collapsed Iranian state serves Western interests better than a constrained one: these are questions that can, with difficulty, be analysed and answered. Whether the strikes violated Article 51 is a question that, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, generates argument without resolution and virtue-signalling without consequence.
The legal framing replaces a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the strikes were strategically wise is analysable. Whether they violated Article 51, in a world with no enforcement, generates argument without resolution.
Britain’s Position Is Incoherent
The British government’s own position illustrates the confusion perfectly. We did not participate in the strikes. We do not want escalation. We have, however, lent our bases for what the Prime Minister called ‘a specific and limited defensive purpose,’ and we have RAF aircraft actively intercepting Iranian missiles in the Gulf. The legal architecture being invoked by our opposition politicians would, if applied consistently, render Britain a co-belligerent. The government has chosen to say nothing about this, presumably because acknowledging it requires engaging with the strategic question directly.
This is not a criticism of the operational decision. The case for lending bases and providing defensive air cover is defensible on national interest grounds: British personnel and bases were directly at risk from Iranian strikes, Gulf stability is a British economic and strategic interest, and the alternative was to watch from the sidelines while America conducted the operation without us, sacrificing influence over its conduct and aftermath. These are real considerations. The problem is that the government is unwilling to make them publicly, because making them publicly requires abandoning the international law frame and admitting that British policy is being made on the basis of interests and judgements, not legal obligation.
Conservatives should find this uncomfortable, because the clarity they routinely demand of others on national sovereignty and the rejection of supranational constraint does not appear to extend to military matters when the politics are difficult. A conservatism that invokes sovereignty against Strasbourg and Brussels but retreats to UN Charter language when asked about Tehran is not a coherent position. It is convenience dressed as principle.
What the Strategic Questions Actually Are
Set the legal framing aside and several genuinely difficult questions emerge, to which honest answers are available.
Was the operation strategically justified?
The strategic case rests on the combination of Iran’s nuclear trajectory, its missile programme development timeline, and the judgement that the window for military prevention was closing. Contra the 2025 intelligence assessment’s headline conclusion, Iran’s enrichment levels were well above civilian requirements and its ICBM development timeline was being actively compressed.
Quite pithily, in order for Iran’s pacifist claims to be true, they would be the first and only country in the world to enrich Uranium to 60% for peaceful purposes. The pacifist claim requires not just that the late Ayatollah was peace-minded, but that he and his many associates were nuclear pacifists unprecedented in history. A high bar for the claimant to clear, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Against this, Iran was in active diplomatic negotiations when the strikes occurred, which is either evidence that diplomacy was viable and was therefore prematurely abandoned, or evidence that Iran was using negotiations as cover whilst continuing to develop capability. Which reading is correct matters enormously for the strategic assessment, and the British media has largely not tried to find out.
What are the likely consequences for regional order?
The killing of Khamenei and significant IRGC leadership creates a succession vacuum of unpredictable dimensions. CIA assessments before the strikes identified potential successors, many of whom appear to have been killed in the operation. A weakened, internally fractured Iran may be less capable of projecting force through proxies; it may also be less capable of the kind of centralised rational calculation that made deterrence work. The history of Western-induced regime instability, Libya being the obvious comparator, suggests the second risk is the more serious one, and it deserves more serious treatment than it has received.
What are Britain’s actual interests here?
They are not primarily legal. They are: the security of British personnel and bases in the region; Gulf economic stability and energy prices; the prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran; the avoidance of a regional war that would generate refugee flows and further terrorism; alongside the maintenance of influence with Washington over the shape of whatever post-conflict settlement emerges. A British government willing to articulate these interests clearly would be in a better position to advance them. A British government hiding behind ‘we don’t want escalation’ is in a position to advance none of them.
What Conservatives Should Say
A coherent Conservative position would acknowledge the following. First, that the legal framing is largely performative and that the real question is strategic. Second, that the strategic case for the operation has genuine weight, even if the execution and timing can be questioned, and that pretending otherwise for the sake of appearing principled is neither honest nor useful. Third, that Britain’s interests in the outcome are substantial and specific, and that maximising influence over the post-conflict settlement requires engaging with Washington directly and credibly rather than signalling disapproval from the sidelines. Fourth, that the risk of an ungoverned Iranian state is at least as serious as the risk of a nuclear-armed one, and that any coherent policy towards Iran must now address both.
Thatcher did not discuss the Falklands primarily through the lens of UN Security Council resolutions, though she engaged with them. She discussed it through the lens of British interests, British principle, and British will. The clarity that served British foreign policy well in that conflict is the clarity that is missing now, and its absence is not a symptom of excessive legalism. It is a symptom of a political class that has forgotten how to think about power.
The legal framing is not neutrality. It is the avoidance of accountability for strategic judgements that need to be made. Britain has interests in Iran’s outcome. We should say what they are.
The death of international law, as a meaningful constraint on great power military behaviour, is not new news. It has been dying since at least 2003, and arguably never fully lived. What Iran has done is make the body impossible to ignore. The question for British Conservatives is not whether to mourn it, but whether to develop a foreign policy capable of operating honestly in the world that remains.
George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
A fortnight ago, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, destroyed significant portions of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, and triggered a regional counterstrike that hit Gulf civilian infrastructure, closed major airspace, and set the Middle East on the edge of a wider war. The British government lent its bases for ‘defensive’ strikes, scrambled RAF aircraft to intercept Iranian missiles over the Gulf, and announced, with apparent sincerity, that it did not want to see further escalation.
The British commentariat’s response was, broadly, to reach for international law. Was the strike legal? Was it sanctioned? Did it violate the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggression? The SNP invoked Article 2(4). The Greens called it illegal. Academics queued to explain the self-defence thresholds under Article 51. It was, as the same conversation was in January over Venezuela, a performance of legal seriousness that served primarily to avoid the actual question.
The actual question is simpler: was it strategically justified, and what should Britain do now?
I argued elsewhere in January, writing about Venezuela, that international law in military matters has always been more facade than framework: that it lacks enforcement mechanisms, that it derives its apparent authority from hegemonic sponsorship, and that appealing to it not only fails to constrain great power behaviour but obscures the real debate. The intervening weeks, culminating in Operation Epic Fury, have provided a rather emphatic real-world test of that thesis.
The Legal Debate Is Not the Debate
The legal arguments are real, in a technical sense. The US-Israel strikes almost certainly do not satisfy the imminence threshold for Article 51 self-defence as it is generally understood. Iran had not launched an armed attack immediately preceding the operation. The 2025 US intelligence assessment judged that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon. The Security Council was not consulted. On a strict reading of the UN Charter, this is legally difficult territory.
None of this matters, in any practical sense, and the reason it does not matter is the reason it never mattered: the UN Security Council exists primarily to formalise great power disagreement, not to constrain great power behaviour. Russia and China have condemned the strikes. They condemned the Libya intervention in 2011. They condemn Israeli operations with metronomic regularity. The condemning party and the acting party have simply traded positions depending on convenience, and the ‘law’ in each case is invoked to legitimise the position already held.
What the legal framing does, more damagingly, is replace a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the US-Israel strikes were strategically wise, what their likely consequences for regional order are, what Britain’s interests actually are in the outcome, whether a destabilised or collapsed Iranian state serves Western interests better than a constrained one: these are questions that can, with difficulty, be analysed and answered. Whether the strikes violated Article 51 is a question that, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, generates argument without resolution and virtue-signalling without consequence.
The legal framing replaces a tractable question with an intractable one. Whether the strikes were strategically wise is analysable. Whether they violated Article 51, in a world with no enforcement, generates argument without resolution.
Britain’s Position Is Incoherent
The British government’s own position illustrates the confusion perfectly. We did not participate in the strikes. We do not want escalation. We have, however, lent our bases for what the Prime Minister called ‘a specific and limited defensive purpose,’ and we have RAF aircraft actively intercepting Iranian missiles in the Gulf. The legal architecture being invoked by our opposition politicians would, if applied consistently, render Britain a co-belligerent. The government has chosen to say nothing about this, presumably because acknowledging it requires engaging with the strategic question directly.
This is not a criticism of the operational decision. The case for lending bases and providing defensive air cover is defensible on national interest grounds: British personnel and bases were directly at risk from Iranian strikes, Gulf stability is a British economic and strategic interest, and the alternative was to watch from the sidelines while America conducted the operation without us, sacrificing influence over its conduct and aftermath. These are real considerations. The problem is that the government is unwilling to make them publicly, because making them publicly requires abandoning the international law frame and admitting that British policy is being made on the basis of interests and judgements, not legal obligation.
Conservatives should find this uncomfortable, because the clarity they routinely demand of others on national sovereignty and the rejection of supranational constraint does not appear to extend to military matters when the politics are difficult. A conservatism that invokes sovereignty against Strasbourg and Brussels but retreats to UN Charter language when asked about Tehran is not a coherent position. It is convenience dressed as principle.
What the Strategic Questions Actually Are
Set the legal framing aside and several genuinely difficult questions emerge, to which honest answers are available.
Was the operation strategically justified?
The strategic case rests on the combination of Iran’s nuclear trajectory, its missile programme development timeline, and the judgement that the window for military prevention was closing. Contra the 2025 intelligence assessment’s headline conclusion, Iran’s enrichment levels were well above civilian requirements and its ICBM development timeline was being actively compressed.
Quite pithily, in order for Iran’s pacifist claims to be true, they would be the first and only country in the world to enrich Uranium to 60% for peaceful purposes. The pacifist claim requires not just that the late Ayatollah was peace-minded, but that he and his many associates were nuclear pacifists unprecedented in history. A high bar for the claimant to clear, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Against this, Iran was in active diplomatic negotiations when the strikes occurred, which is either evidence that diplomacy was viable and was therefore prematurely abandoned, or evidence that Iran was using negotiations as cover whilst continuing to develop capability. Which reading is correct matters enormously for the strategic assessment, and the British media has largely not tried to find out.
What are the likely consequences for regional order?
The killing of Khamenei and significant IRGC leadership creates a succession vacuum of unpredictable dimensions. CIA assessments before the strikes identified potential successors, many of whom appear to have been killed in the operation. A weakened, internally fractured Iran may be less capable of projecting force through proxies; it may also be less capable of the kind of centralised rational calculation that made deterrence work. The history of Western-induced regime instability, Libya being the obvious comparator, suggests the second risk is the more serious one, and it deserves more serious treatment than it has received.
What are Britain’s actual interests here?
They are not primarily legal. They are: the security of British personnel and bases in the region; Gulf economic stability and energy prices; the prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran; the avoidance of a regional war that would generate refugee flows and further terrorism; alongside the maintenance of influence with Washington over the shape of whatever post-conflict settlement emerges. A British government willing to articulate these interests clearly would be in a better position to advance them. A British government hiding behind ‘we don’t want escalation’ is in a position to advance none of them.
What Conservatives Should Say
A coherent Conservative position would acknowledge the following. First, that the legal framing is largely performative and that the real question is strategic. Second, that the strategic case for the operation has genuine weight, even if the execution and timing can be questioned, and that pretending otherwise for the sake of appearing principled is neither honest nor useful. Third, that Britain’s interests in the outcome are substantial and specific, and that maximising influence over the post-conflict settlement requires engaging with Washington directly and credibly rather than signalling disapproval from the sidelines. Fourth, that the risk of an ungoverned Iranian state is at least as serious as the risk of a nuclear-armed one, and that any coherent policy towards Iran must now address both.
Thatcher did not discuss the Falklands primarily through the lens of UN Security Council resolutions, though she engaged with them. She discussed it through the lens of British interests, British principle, and British will. The clarity that served British foreign policy well in that conflict is the clarity that is missing now, and its absence is not a symptom of excessive legalism. It is a symptom of a political class that has forgotten how to think about power.
The legal framing is not neutrality. It is the avoidance of accountability for strategic judgements that need to be made. Britain has interests in Iran’s outcome. We should say what they are.
The death of international law, as a meaningful constraint on great power military behaviour, is not new news. It has been dying since at least 2003, and arguably never fully lived. What Iran has done is make the body impossible to ignore. The question for British Conservatives is not whether to mourn it, but whether to develop a foreign policy capable of operating honestly in the world that remains.