The U.S. and Israel attacking Iran is not just another war in a region already at war. It is a potentially transformative event that could dramatically alter the balance of power and politics in the Middle East and beyond. The rationale for such an attack is to stop Iran’s nuclear program and slow its growing influence in the Middle East. However, an attack on Iran would set off a volatile explosion of unintended consequences, destabilising forces and events that would affect far more than just the people of Iran. Force can only temporarily silence the Iranian nuclear program and its facilities. It cannot address the underlying reasons for Iran’s nuclear program or its broader ambitions in the Middle East. Rather than a solution to the problems of the Middle East, an attack on Iran would be more like a trigger that opens a Pandora’s box of unanticipated and potentially destabilising events.

The doctrine of the pre-emptive strike is at the root of all the troubles that we are facing today. Washington and Tel Aviv maintain that Iran’s nuclear program constitutes an existential threat, and therefore, there is no time to allow diplomacy to run its course. This argument is simply illegitimate. It violates the principles of sovereignty and international law, which have formed the backbone of the United Nations and the world order since the aftermath of World War II. The principle that has been violated is that a country has no right to carry out military strikes on the territory of another country that does not pose any threat to it, as long as it can come up with an argument that the country being attacked poses an existential threat to itself. This is not an argument that one can associate with the ideas of law and order in the world, which are ideas that the United States and Israel claim to stand for. The United States and Israel have carried out the attack, and thus, have increased the complexity of the Middle East crisis and undermined the world institutions that were established precisely to prevent such unilateral use of force. However, the damage to the field of diplomacy is far greater. The attack has taken into account the fact that Iran........

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