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........

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