Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a popular left-wing response to military action against Iran.
If there’s a consensus talking point among the critics of the military action against Iran, it’s that it’s an “unnecessary war of choice.” The complaint doesn’t stand up, but it’s so frequently repeated that it’s worth a careful look to understand precisely why not.
The Democratic nominee who lost to President Donald Trump in 2024 and who is a possible 2028 candidate, Kamala Harris, used those terms in her statement: “unnecessary … war of choice.” So did another potential 2028 candidate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat of New York: “unnecessary … a deliberate choice of aggression.” Mayor Pete Buttigieg, another 2028 contender, used the same terms: “war of choice … unnecessary war.”
The Democrat-aligned press offered the same interpretive framework. “Trump’s War of Choice, With a Key Question: Why Now?” was the front-page headline over a New York Times article by David Sanger, who teaches a class at Harvard on “Central Challenges of American National Security, Strategy, and the Press.” Sanger described the U.S. military action as “the ultimate war of choice” and noted, “In international law, the difference between a war of necessity and a war of choice is huge.” …
… How does the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran stack up against the standards set by the Talmud, Maimonides, Augustine, and Grotius? There’s a separate, parallel conversation about how it comports with the Constitution or international law, but those considerations strike me as somewhat downstream of the political and moral conversation.
It does not seem to me as if it’s a war of choice in the sense of territorial expansion or enlarging borders. Neither Israel nor the United States is planning to capture Iranian territory on a permanent basis and colonize it. If this were a joint U.S.-Israeli operation to seize Greenland from Denmark, I might be in favor of it, but I wouldn’t be here defending it as a war of necessity rather than a war of choice.
