Abstract The 2026 war in Iran is thus far the high-water mark of the interventionism of the second Trump administration. This essay argues that the war in Iran is profoundly unjust and even worse than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like the Iraq War, it fails to meet the main criteria of just war theory and lacks any plausible humanitarian justification. But it is also symptomatic of backsliding toward an autocratic way of war, rendering it wrong in ways that go beyond violations of the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The war in Iran is undemocratic, abdicates any sense of humanitarian or reparative responsibilities, and is highly revisionist of the prevailing international order. In these respects, it is even worse than the 2003 Iraq War.
In this article I am concerned with interrogating the intersection between the Newtonian and Cartesian intellectual inheritances of AI and machine learning, and ideas about the ethics of war. As militaries turn to new and emerging technologies to maintain or achieve a technological edge over their perceived adversaries, they create new imaginaries of future war-alongside the technologists, academics, and defense scientists crafting new terms, ideologies, and frameworks for making sense of these technologies. In this article I will argue that the intellectual inheritances of machine learning strengthen certain pre-existing tendencies of thinking about ethics and war that function to push the experience of war, particularly for those subjected to it, to one side. The first of these is ethics as code, which in its most extreme form seeks to quantify ethics. The second is ethics as identity, in which we see the reduction of complex ethical debates to a simple belief that "we" are the ethical actors and the "other" is not. To combat the expansion of militarism that these narratives enable we must foreground the experience of war, both of those subject to it and of those creating the conditions for war.
The prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from the works of early just war theorists to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest to the contemporary moral injury discourse. In this article, I show how this history has contributed to the ongoing infliction of devastating harms on civilians, as evidenced in the case studies of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, and I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of noncombatant civilian perspectives in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I demonstrate, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.
