Sometimes, the morally right thing to do is to support an unjust war. The thought behind this is simple. Some wars are morally mixed: they have just and unjust aims. It’s usually unjust for a government to wage these mixed wars because it usually has the option of pursuing only the just aims. But suppose private individuals can help promote the just aims only by also lending support to the unjust ones—they’re a package deal. In such a case, it might be morally permissible for them to do so—if the just aim is very important (such as stopping atrocities) and the unjust aims are comparatively minor. (I made this argument about fifteen years ago, in the very first publication to my name).
Here I want to argue that the inverse is also true. Sometimes, it can be morally wrong to support a just war. Sometimes, we shouldn’t hope that the good guys win. The reasons why have implications for the military conflicts of the Trump administration. And they ultimately provide, I believe, instructive lessons for how to theorize about war ethics.
Imagine Country A embarks on a military intervention with the humanitarian aim of toppling the oppressive government of Country B, a small nation whose government has committed massacres against a minority ethnic group. Suppose that this military intervention would be just. However, a successful intervention will reshape A’s strategic expectations and domestic political incentives in a way that makes it much more likely that the country will resort to unjust military force in the future. Consequently, A will unjustly invade its large neighbor C, causing a humanitarian catastrophe many times greater than what it prevented in B.
Now suppose it’s reasonably foreseeable to us, as private citizens, what the consequences will be if A successfully intervenes in B. Should we lend support to the intervention? That is, should we vote for those who defend it, donate to its advocates, and contribute to the political momentum that brought it about? The problem is, by doing so, we effectively do the same for A’s subsequent unjust invasion of C. Of course, we might not intend that outcome, and we might oppose it in just the ways listed. The point, though, is we have a strong reason against lending support to the intervention of B, because that makes the invasion of C more likely.
Now, turn to recent events. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces carried out a raid in Venezuela’s capital and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. They were flown out of Venezuela and taken to the U.S., where Maduro was indicted on narcoterrorism and drug-trafficking charges in federal court. Following the operation, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez became acting president in Venezuela.
Proponents of the raid in Venezuela argue that it produced substantial benefits for the Venezuelan population. They note that the transitional government has released many political prisoners and that the operation has helped reopen Venezuela’s oil trade and restore economic relations with the US and other countries, which is expected to facilitate economic recovery and improve access to basic goods and services. In my view, none of this justifies what appears to be a violation of international law. But suppose I am wrong, either in thinking that the attack was illegal or in thinking that its legal status is morally decisive. That is: suppose, for the sake of argument, that the U.S. raid was morally just.
The administration portrayed the success in Venezuela as evidence that decisive military force could quickly remove hostile regimes at relatively low cost. Encouraged by what appeared to be a successful demonstration of this strategy, the administration then turned to Iran, launching strikes against Iranian targets in February 2026, while presenting that conflict—at least in part—as another effort to remove a hostile regime. If the intervention in Venezuela had failed, or even if it had proved far messier than it was, it is exceedingly unlikely that the White House would subsequently have authorized the attack on Iran.
So far, the war in Iran appears strategically and morally disastrous. The administration’s stated aims have shifted and proliferated. Any benefits the war has achieved so far do not warrant these human, environmental, and economic costs, which have mounted dramatically worldwide. As a result, it’s difficult to see how the conflict is justified. If the war in Iran is unjust, and if it would not have occurred but for the successful military raid in Venezuela, then those who supported the raid have a reason to regret doing so, even if the raid itself was just. After all, the good achieved by the raid is clearly outweighed, on an impartial assessment, by the harms of the war in Iran. (Venezuelans themselves, though, might have a special permission—an agent-centered prerogative—to privilege themselves in such a calculation).
Supporters of the raid in Venezuela who agree the war in Iran is a disaster might insist that they support the former but not the latter. Of course, they can intend to support one without necessarily supporting the other, even if the first causes the second. But by supporting the former they increase the likelihood of the latter—whether they like it or not. And that provides a strong reason against doing so.
The upshot is that whether military action is itself just (considered independently of whether it encourages the belligerent to undertake further wars) does not, on its own, determine whether we ought to support it. But we can go even further. Some observers take an ambivalent stance toward the war in Iran. They oppose the war yet still “hope for the best,” in particular, by hoping that it culminates in a relatively rapid and uncomplicated regime change. These hopes have already been dashed, and in my view, foreseeably so. But that outcome, however unlikely it might have been, is one we had decisive reason to hope for, or so it might be thought. But if what I’ve argued is correct, this is a mistake.
Imagine a pie-in-the-sky counterfactual history in which the February 2026 attack on Iran precipitated a rapid and orderly regime change there, replacing the theocracy with a liberal democracy. An unmitigated strategic success of this sort would almost certainly have further emboldened the Trump administration, vindicating the use of military force, and thereby encouraging further invasions. Perhaps Cuba would be next. Regardless of what we ultimately think about regime change there, successful interventions in Iran and Cuba could easily encourage the Trump administration to go even further still by invading and annexing Greenland, a move that would be disastrous. (Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in the US annexing Greenland and has not ruled out the use of military force, which has alarmed Denmark and other allies). The current unfolding catastrophe in the Persian Gulf seems to make this considerably less likely. The broader lesson is that the best-case scenario in the war on Iran might not be desirable, since it might make things worse overall.
Of course, predictions of this kind—about what will happen or what would have happened—might well be mistaken. Maybe the unfolding crisis in Iran will motivate the Trump administration to double down, with results worse than what they would have been given the alternative: a militaristic White House emboldened not once but twice by a pair of easy military victories. Or perhaps, following a failure in Iran, the Trump administration will look for an “easy victory” elsewhere, such as in Cuba. This point, though, cuts both ways. Hoping for a quick and easy victory—even in a just war—can be morally dangerous when the war is conducted by an administration easily emboldened by success and largely insensitive to the justice of the causes for which it fights.
I will end with a broader point about the ethics of military force in its canonical and revisionist formulations. Both sometimes produce unduly “ahistorical” moral evaluations of military force. Such accounts morally assess the use of force at the point in time at which a state (or other political actor) decides whether to resort to force. At that point, familiar jus ad bellum considerations (such as just cause, necessity, and proportionality) are brought to bear on the proposed use of force. The problem, though, is that this method (with some important exceptions) treats military conflicts as if they were morally self-contained episodes, whereas in fact, they frequently stand in causal and political relationships with one another (as the raid in Venezuela and the attack on Iran demonstrate). Evaluating each conflict in isolation risks obscuring morally relevant connections between them. (For notable exceptions to this approach, see here and here).
A more dynamic and interactive approach to the ethics of military conflict would instead assess conflicts partly in light of the further conflicts they help to make possible. On such an account—returning to the stylized example of countries A, B, and C—A’s intervention in B could be unjust (contrary to what was assumed) partly because it predictably helped bring about the subsequent invasion of C. Likewise, the moral evaluation of the military raid in Venezuela might depend in part on the role it played in enabling the later attack on Iran.
Saba Bazargan-Forward
Saba Bazargan-Forward is a professor of philosophy at UC San Diego. His research is on normative ethics, with a focus on war ethics and on individual accountability for cooperatively committed wrongs. Recent works include “Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability” (2022) and “Compensation and Necessity in War” (2026).
While I think that Prof. Bazargan-Forward offers an interesting argument against both the military operation in Venezuela and the war against Iran, since the first might have led to the latter, I am afraid that the analogy is not necessarily illuminating. The operation in Venezuela was limited in its scope, and whether the success of such an operation, despite its violation of International Law, precipitated the decision by President Trump to embark in the wider war on Iran remains a matter of speculation. To argue that a limited successful military operation might not be justified because it might lead to a wider unjust war presupposes that there is a correlation between the first and the latter, so that the latter would not have occurred if the first did not take place. But such a correlation is more often than not difficult to ascertain. The objective in Venezuela was to bring to justice a tyrant who has been charged in a US court for engaging in international narcoterrorism. Its limited scope and the success of the military operation can be justified on moral grounds, but not necessarily on the grounds of International Law. The war on Iran, however, is a war of aggression justifies neither on the grounds of International Law nor on moral grounds regardless of how despicable the theocratic Iranian regime is.
Bazargan-Forward appears to accept that the US attack on Venezuela was illegal under international law, which I believe it clearly was. But he accepts for the sake of argument that it was, considered on its own, morally justified. The main point of his piece is that, even if this is so, it ought not to have been supported, as its success would predictably embolden Trump to use military force more promiscuously, as he has subsequently done in Iran. And, by Bazargan-Forward’s plausible logic, Trump will be more likely to invade Cuba and overthrow its government if he can ultimately convince voters in the US that the war against Iran has been in some sense a success. It seems to me that the substance of Bazargan-Forward’s argument is entirely correct, though Medina is also right that the counterfactual basis of Bazargan-Forward’s argument – that if the US had not succeeded in Venezuela, Trump would have been less likely to attack Iran – is speculative.
The speculation is, however, quite plausible; for Trump’s sole motivation in acting is to elicit applause and obeisance, and he is sufficiently simple-minded to conclude that if one war fails to produce what he wants, another is likely to fail as well. A similarly speculative counterfactual claim is that, if the Nobel Peace Prize had been an immediate possibility on February 28, Trump would have not have joined Netanyahu in attacking Iran but would have told him to do it himself. That too seems to me quite plausible.
I would, nevertheless, articulate Bazargan-Forward’s central claim differently from the way he does. Rather than saying that, even if the brief war in Venezuela was a just war, it was morally wrong to support it because its probable success would encourage Trump to initiate further wars that would be unjust, I would say that the war in Venezuela was an unjust war because it was foreseeably disproportionate in its likely consequences. That is, if we include among the likely consequences of a successful war in Venezuela the bad effect on Trump’s primitive psychology of weakening any inhibitions he had about initiating wars, it then becomes more plausible to suppose that the probable bad effects of that war outweighed the probable good effects – and thus more plausible to suppose that the war was objectively disproportionate, and perhaps foreseeably so.
A final point. Medina distinguishes between the war in Venezuela and that in Iran on the ground that “the objective in Venezuela was to bring to justice a tyrant who has been charged in a US court for engaging in international narcoterrorism.” Trump’s cozy relations with Putin, Kim, and others shows that he has nothing against tyrants, and his pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández shows that he has nothing against narcoterrorists who traffic drugs to the US. Trump himself is a murderer (of civilians in boats in the Caribbean, civilians in the streets of the US, and others), a molester and rapist, an insurrectionist, an inveterate liar, and a convicted felon. Still, it would probably be wrong for some state to attack the US in order to remove him from office and hand him over to the International Criminal Court.
Prof. McMahan offers philosophically interesting and worthwhile observations on Prof. Bazargan-Forward’s argument and my brief reply to him. I still think that one can offer a compelling moral argument supporting the military operation to bring to justice a ruthless and corrupt tyrant, like former President Maduro of Venezuela, despite the operation being an evident violation of International Law (IL) and its possible dangerous precedent. Like large scale wars, military operations, are always nasty and messy. The fact that President Trump acts as a wannabe tyrant, and assuming that he is one, does not take away the cogency of the argument from removing and bringing to justice in a US court a presumed narcoterrorist. Despite President Trump’s subliminal wish to be a tyrant, the US legal system is independent from his wishes. Also, his open admiration and relationship with tyrants, like Putin, Kim Jong Um, and the like, simply demonstrates his hypocrisy, double standards, and moral opacity. Still, regardless of President Trump’s motivation, Venezuelan citizens are better off without Maduro than with him in power. In addition, the global community is better off with one less tyrant. There is now a real possibility that Venezuela may transition into a decent democracy in the not-too-distant future.
Regarding the president’s “primitive psychology,” I just add that it is always challenging to speculate about human psychology, and given his erratic behavior, President Trump’s case is no exception. It is precisely based on his “primitive psychology” that I find it difficult to defend the counterfactual that if he had been granted an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize, he would have probably not team up with Prime Minister Natanyahu to wage an aggressive and hence unjust war on Iran. My hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that he would have gone along anyway because he seems to be motivated by self-regarding and delusional self-aggrandizing ambitions, which is an open secret to anyone who listens to his public cacophonies.
Whether President would be emboldened, given his prior success in removing the Venezuelan tyrant from power to do a similar operation in Cuba, is doubtful. Cuba is a failed state with not much to offer to President Trump and his acolytes and least of all to their citizens. Also, the appointed president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, has not been charged by a US court nor by an international tribunal for engaging in narcoterrorism. For sixty-seven years Cuba has suffered from a ruthless dictatorship: from 1959 to 1976 under a charismatic dictator and from 1976 to the present under a single party Marxist dictatorship. But the human cost of an invasion might be too costly, and in President Trump’s eyes he has not much to gain from it.
I think the question of which wars of our nation we can support (as “just”) begins with the question of which wars we can ask our fellow citizens to fight and die in. If no one can say why a war is being fought, and the nation’s leaders give new–often conflicting–reasons for it every day (see: Iran), I don’t see how anyone can be asked to fight and die in it–if we take soldiers seriously as moral agents, that is (as revisionist theory does). This is the moral impulse behind the traditional just war requirement that wars be “declared”, i.e. that their aims be publicly stated at the start. But soldiers are no longer given good reasons for what they do, instead that are “honored” for their “sacrifices” regardless of how ambiguous, pointless, or criminal the war is. Whether or not a war is “just” in some further sense, if its aims are not specified at the start, and if they do not warrant asking fellow citizens to fight and die in it, then the war should not be supported.