By Johan Romin
Whether the war currently raging between the United States and Israel, and Iran, is compatible with international law is attracting significant media attention.
When Swedish Prime minister Ulf Kristersson appeared on news program Aktuellt in Sweden on Monday evening, the question of the war and international law was repeated again and again. Former Prime minister and secretary of state in Sweden, Carl Bildt, is among those criticizing the United States and Israel with reference to international law, but for that he has also received strong criticism. Not least from Swedish-Iranians who despise the mullah regime in Tehran.
What many people forget here is to make both a regional and a global analysis of this war.
When examining the war, one must look at it from two perspectives.
Then it becomes clear that the conflict concerns a major global chess game as well as a smaller regional chess game. This means that one party’s driving force and strategic objective are not necessarily the same as the other party’s.
In other words, two parallel wars are raging: one between the United States and Iran, and another between Israel and Iran. Since the beginning of the war, other surrounding states have also been drawn in due to Iran’s attacks; that constitutes a third front.
If we begin with the conflict between Israel and Iran, it is at least 40 years old. Iran has maintained rhetoric toward Israel stating that the country should be crushed and cease to exist. In line with this, Iran has pursued a military strategy of building allied armies and militias and supporting regimes hostile to Israel.
Anyone who now invokes international law arguments in this conflict must answer the question: name a single day when there has been peace between the current Iranian regime and Israel? If Israel is said to be violating the principle of peace – when was there peace?
In fact, all the wars Israel has been involved in since 1948 are part of the same conflict. We should therefore speak of the Battle of Six Days rather than the Six-Day War; we should say the Battle of Lebanon 1982 rather than the Lebanon War. The Gaza War is also part of the same conflict and should be called the Battle of Gaza.
Some actors in the conflict that began in 1948 – Egypt and Jordan – have withdrawn from the conflict, while other actors, such as Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, have joined.
But the fundamental conflict remains the same. The Arab/Muslim side cannot accept that there is a Jewish state in the area they believe should be under Muslim control and devotes military force and alliance-building to defeating the Jewish state.
That is why countries such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, Transjordan, and Lebanon attacked Israel on May 15, 1948. That is why there is war today.
And since 1948, which day was there peace? Not a single day!
If Israel, however, were in 2026 to attack Egypt – with which it has a peace agreement – that would of course be a violation of international law, particularly if there were no military threat or genocidal rhetoric from the Egyptian side.
But from Iran there is well-documented military action, the building of proxy armies and support for allies, as well as genocidal rhetoric, which was expressed, among other things, in the countdown clock that stood in Tehran until the 12-day war this summer.
Iran has an arsenal of weapons and a regime that very much constitutes a military threat to Israel, and it is also acting within the framework of a conflict that has been ongoing for 78 years. A series of wars have broken out – the 2006 Lebanon War and the Gaza War of 2023–2025 (which should thus be termed battles), to name a few.
It is, of course, not contrary to international law to defend oneself in this situation.
The United States is waging a war that more closely resembles a global chess game. Here, it is perceived as strategically correct by the Trump administration to strike at the Russia–Iran–China axis by targeting the weakest of them. In exactly the same way, the Western powers acted in 1943 when they attacked Italy on the grounds that Mussolini was on Hitler’s side and that Italy at that stage represented the easiest opportunity in the effort to weaken Nazi Germany and its allies — the soft belly, as Italy was sometimes called.
Iran is today’s soft belly.
Iran is not a nuclear-armed state; China and Russia are. Iran also supplies China with oil and Russia with drones. A different leadership in Iran would be good for the West, not least for Ukraine.
We live in a world with actors such as Putin and Xi Jinping, and until a few days ago, Khamenei. These individuals – excuse the expression – do not give a damn about international law. They kill, threaten, bomb, build military and strategic alliances, and seek control and dominance in the world.
Those of us who stand for democracy and freedom must simply play the game. We did not choose this, but we must nonetheless deal with countries such as Russia–China–Iran. And that is what is happening right now.
Johan Romin is a Swedish military historian and journalist.