The Immorality of Trump’s War with Iran Matters

When Trump ordered the first wave of strikes in this ongoing war with Iran last month,

he did so while his administration was engaged in active negotiations with the Iranian government.

That echoed the situation last June when Israel launched a bombing campaign days after Trump

scheduled new talks with Iran.

A move Trump later claimed was a deliberate deception to help make the Israeli strikes

more effective.

This time around, in that first wave of strikes on February 28th, American cruise missiles

targeted and destroyed a building that ended up being a girl's school, killing more than

168 young children who had just started their day of classes.

In the week since, the specific toll of the war on the Iranian people has been obscured

by a thick fog of war and a nationwide internet blackout.

But the initial reports and anecdotes that have managed to slip through suggest that the

civilian death toll from the intense bombing campaigns on and around dense residential

areas has been extensive.

Then, last Saturday night, Trump announced that if Iran did not fully open the Strait

of Hormuz within 48 hours, the U.S. would begin targeting and destroying Iran's power

grid and energy infrastructure.

Trump did announce Monday morning before markets opened that he'd extend his deadline until

after markets closed this weekend, suggesting it may have been a bluff.

But still, the fact that Trump is officially threatening this at all is a big deal.

Because destroying Iran's power grid would not just turn the lights off for a few days,

it would irrevocably destroy Iran's ability to sustain the current population that lives

there.

Food production, sanitation services, water purification, healthcare services, and more

would be greatly diminished if not stopped entirely, and the result would be mass civilian

death.

And more so, if Iran carried out the retaliation they promised and hit similar infrastructure

in nearby U.S. allied countries.

As all of this has unfolded in the last three weeks, the surprise attacked during negotiations,

the violent deaths of Iranian civilians as a result of U.S. and Israeli bombs, and the

credible threats of escalations that would significantly intensify civilian deaths.

Anyone who has voiced any concern about the ethics of any of this has been either dismissed

by the administration and its supporters as a naive utopian pacifist or demonized as

a serious internal impediment to an operation that will finally bring about the kind of

lasting regional peace that virtually everyone claims to desire.

But ethics matter, especially in war.

War is no trivial subject, its violence on the widest scale.

At their best, wars can throw off the worst tyrannies and liberate the oppressed, but

they can also bring about the worst atrocities.

That is why it is so important to have a firm and precise understanding of when violence

is justified.

History shows that without this, it is far too easy for our healthy human responses to

real atrocities and tyrannies to be funneled into support for further crimes that only

trap us in an escalating series of indiscriminate revenge cycles that create a more violent, tyrannical,

and lawless world.

Only just wars are only possible when grounded in a precise understanding of what is and

is not just.

And the best single articulation of that in the context of war is Murray Rothbard's 1963

essay, War, Peace, and the State.

In it, Rothbard clarifies that the difference between war and all other questions of crime

and punishment is simply a matter of scale.

Economic moral truths do not magically change or disappear if more people are involved

in either committing or responding to a crime.

In any context, everyone is justified in resisting or repelling any invasion of their

person or property, extracting restitution or exacting punishment in response to an

invasion, or helping someone else do the same.

It doesn't matter what governments say, that is a basic universal right.

However, as Rothbard lays out one of the most important concepts that often gets lost

or forgotten in the fog of war is that violence may only be used to resist or punish the

aggressor.

Any violence committed against an uninvolved third party in response to a crime is itself

a new crime that can be justly repelled or punished.

Just about all of us seem to have a firm understanding of this nuanced but important ethical

truth when we, our families, our communities, or our nations are on the receiving end of

an unjustified violent attack.

It's when we are mobilized or at least taxed to help attack someone else that were propagandized

into forgetting or disregarding it.

Virtually all Americans understand that the 9-11 attacks were wrong because even if the

Washington-enabled bombings of Middle Eastern civilians were propping up a brutal dictators

in the region that convinced the men on those planes to do what they did were unjust.

The civilians in those towers and on those planes were not responsible for it.

In recent weeks, the man who appears to have been so upset about this new war on Iran that

he shot and killed people enjoying a night out in Austin, Texas was wrong because even

if this war is unjustified, the people at that bar that night were not responsible for

it.

The man who drove an explosives-filled car into a Michigan synagogue last Thursday was

wrong because even though his brothers and young niece and nephew were killed in Israeli

airstrikes two weeks before, the kids in that synagogue's onsite school were not responsible

for it.

But by that same basic ethical standard that is, again, uncontroversial when it's applied

to ourselves, the bombing of that girl school that killed all those children was a crime.

Without the kind of bureaucratic government crime that, at most, results in a drawn-out

internal investigation and some dry report about how similar mistakes could probably be

avoided, but a real, at best, mass manslaughter that the individuals responsible need to be

held accountable for.

And on that note, Trump's plan to destroy the infrastructure that millions of Iranian

civilians rely on to survive because he's frustrated their government has so far outmaneuvered

him in the Straits of Hormuz would be such an unbelievably egregious crime that every

American should be absolutely outraged, that the politician who ostensibly represents

us on the world stage even dared to mutter it out loud.

I've already dealt in recent weeks with plenty of the talking points trotted out by

proponents of this war to convince us and themselves that actions that are so clearly

immoral are, in fact, warranted.

But in short, this war was not launched preemptively to take out an imminent threat of Iran starting

a nuclear war with Israel.

It was an aggressive attack, launched during negotiations as part of a broader joint

U.S.-Israeli effort to protect and expand Israel's hegemony in the Middle East.

And then there's the idea that while war is always a messy business, collateral damage

like this is a risk that is necessary to face in order to liberate the region and really

all future generations from the unique threat posed by the Iranian regime.

That is propaganda, not just pushed by the groups who agitated for this specific war,

but also sewn by the massive war machine in D.C. that spent decades inflating threats

to justify its continued existence.

There's nothing new about this dynamic.

It's the story the American population has been told dozens of times before.

The German Hun, where a unique obstacle to European peace that needed to be taken out,

in the Nazis and Japanese were the great threat standing between the world and peace.

Then the USSR was, then communist in Korea, and then communist in Vietnam.

Then it was Saddam Hussein.

If he could just be removed from power, the Middle East would finally enjoy a level of peace

and stability not seen in thousands of years.

Then he was, and it turned out that Gaddafi and Assad were the real final obstacles.

And now, after all that, it's Iran.

In every one of these cases, war advocates acted like it was a certainty that if the American

people could just roll up their sleeves, contribute a bit more of their paycheck through

taxes or inflation, and temporarily set aside any inconvenient moral considerations just

long enough for the American war machine to do what was necessary, to knock the current

villain off the geopolitical chessboard, we would finally see a genuine lasting peace

take hold.

And it has never been the case.

This time is no different.

But even if this were a different situation, and this really was a just war that could

not be avoided, it would still be imperative to demand that those running the war effort

would go to every possible length, not just to prevent the deaths of uninvolved civilians,

but more importantly, to hold those who do kill civilians accountable.

Otherwise, we risk becoming entirely defined by politicians who are gleeful about doing

something as dishonorable, as pretending to negotiate, to set the stage for an unnecessary

surprise attack, by a federal bureaucracy that protects the individuals responsible for

actual crimes from accountability.

And by citizens who shrug off or even embrace a policy that if fully carried out would constitute

a moral atrocity on the level of some of the worst regimes of the 20th century.

Said another way, we should not let our government turn us into the kind of unfeeling, even

evil excusing, morally deformed society that Americans have always, rightfully, despised.

This was The Immorality of Trump's War with Iran Matters, published on the Mises wire

on March 25th, 2026, written by Conor O'Keefe, read by the author.