Foreign Policy > Iran

Pondering the New Rules of War

Is it now okay to bomb the hell out of your enemy’s regime HQ and kill all the leaders?

Christopher Chantrill | March 17, 2026

I don’t know if you noticed, busy as you are with your taxes, or planning to move to a new state now that your Democratic state politicians have implemented swingeing new taxes to fuel the warmth of collectivism, but the rules of war have changed.

So my question is: Is it now okay to bomb the hell out of your enemy’s regime HQ and kill all the leaders?

Leaving aside all the niceties of international law to the ghost of Woodrow Wilson still busy making the world safe for democracy, I repeat: What’s the New Rules?

Strictly speaking, Iran has not been at war with the U.S. and Israel for the last 47 years, although, as all the world knows, its clerics and philosophers, after exhaustive study and examination of the mind of Mohammed, have declared the U.S. to be the Great Satan and Israel to be the Little Satan.

Instead of real war Iran has fought a proxy war: with Hezb’allah, Hamas, and the Houthis, whose job it is to make war on Israel at arm’s length from Iran. Obviously, the Hamas October 7, 2023 attacks changed all that, and I think we can say, in retrospect, that 10/7 was a strategic error by Iran, because it gave Israel an excuse to escalate the proxy war into direct war with Iran.

But now Israel and the U.S. have moved on from blowing up Ayatollah Khomeini to blowing up military installations to eliminating Basij checkpoints with drones. And, based on the posts I’ve seen on X, I assume the Israelis are using hacked street cameras to identify Basij checkpoints and report on eliminations. Now President Trump has attacked the military installations on Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal.

I just checked on Bluesky to see what our liberal friends are up to, and Chuck Schumer is busy saying that “Donald Trump is Putin’s puppet” and Democrats are ready to fund TSA but “Republicans are blocking it.” No sign of any Iranians that I could see. I wonder why?

Seriously though. If I were President Putin and President Xi I would be worrying about Barry Goldwater’s joke about lobbing a missile into the men’s room at the Kremlin. Because it’s a joke no more.

I haven’t heard a word from the experts yet on all this. But I am sure that mostly peaceful protesters from Iran regime sleeper cells will shortly be hacking U.S. street cameras to assist in drone attacks on ICE agents violating the human rights of innocent migrants.

Back in the Cold War there developed an understanding that Washington wouldn’t nuke Moscow and that Moscow wouldn’t nuke Washington. Who wanted to flatten the other guy’s capital city if he could turn around and do the same to you? But now what? Will all the leaders of the world now declare Enough Already and settle all their differences with Trumpian tariff wars and make war on the drug cartels instead of the country next door?

And by the way, just how well protected are the temples of our sacred American Experiment -- the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument -- from the new rules of war? The Jews have had two temples destroyed in their history: first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. Experts agree that temple destruction leads to nothing good for the people.

Then there’s the bigger issue, of just why the Iranian regime has spent the last 47 years yelling at Israel and the USA. That, of course, is fairly simple. There is no politics without an enemy. Sen. Chuck Schumer can spend his days fulminating on Bluesky about the monster Trump, and it’s all good clean American fun, because we all know that Chuck would never weaponize the IC or the FBI to spy on Trump. But Iran doesn’t have domestic enemies for its mullahs to fight against. The whole country is tamped down by IRGC and Basij and no domestic enemies dare to raise their heads above the parapet. So the only enemies in town get to be Israel and the U.S.

Okay, enough with the fun and games. The fact is that President Trump has reset the rules of warfare. And we don’t know what will happen next.

President Trump has picked off Maduro, picked on the mullahs, and he’s picking over the rent roll of the heirs of Castro, all in a few months. As a certain TV star likes to say: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Now it’s your turn, experts. What do you think that the New Rules are, and what do they mean? In particular, I wonder what the New Rules mean for experts.

I note that some experts have been attacking and doxxing @CynicalPublius. @DataRepublican is on the case, so I think you experts better watch out.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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