A Critical Assessment of the Legitimation of Aggression: From Legal Manipulation to Political Domination, with a Case Study of the Second and Third Imposed Wars against the Islamic Republic of Iran

The threat or use of force constitutes a broader form of armed attack. Such conduct is prohibited under the Charter of the United Nations. Nevertheless, where threats to world peace and international security exist, the collective security system established under Chapter VII of the Charter authorizes the use of force, albeit in a limited manner and subject to specific conditions. However, where the use of force is unlawful and entails an imminent or ongoing armed attack, the threatened State possesses an inherent right of self-defense, the conditions and limits of which are expressly set forth in Article 51 of the Charter. Accordingly, any armed attack falling outside the two aforementioned exceptions, subject to the satisfaction of the other applicable legal conditions, may constitute the international crime of aggression, which itself entails specific legal rules and consequences under international law and international criminal law.
In political practice, however, powerful and hegemonic States have sought, through the conceptual manipulation of self-defense, to advance a politics of legal domination in pursuit of their own interests and to perpetuate their hegemonic processes. The military aggression by the United States and the Israeli regime against Iran in two phases—June 2025 and February 2026—constitutes a prominent example of such narrative construction by the hegemonic order to impose its will upon independent States and to advance colonial objectives against free nations. This study seeks, through a descriptive-analytical methodology, to expose the process of such conceptual manipulation of self-defense and to demonstrate that the politics of domination pursued by hegemonic States through reliance upon a conception of self-defense that they themselves have constructed amounts to nothing other than unlawful military aggression. This is particularly significant because the crime of aggression is an international crime carrying criminal consequences.