March 26, 2026
War is the most horrific series of events upon which any government can engage. It is systematic, industrialized, indiscriminate killing. It kills innocent adults and little girls. It often ruins the post-war lives of the killers. It is young men violently fighting old men's power games. It is the health of the state.
The war President Donald Trump is waging against the people and the government of Iran is immoral, unconstitutional and unlawful. Yet, because Congress is not doing its job, there appears to be no relief in sight until Trump finds a face-saving way to erase his grave mistake from the public's long memory.
An act of a person or a government is moral when it conforms to a universal set of principles designed to induce good over evil and justice over injustice. These principles are discoverable by all unimpaired adults exercising reason. Adults should comply with them. Children often know them.
To address this, we start with the primacy of the individual over the state. The individual is morally superior to the state because all persons have natural rights, consciences and free wills; and because in the U.S., "We the people" created the state. We are, of course, free to obey our consciences or to violate them; free to respect the natural rights of others or to transgress them.
When we transgress the natural rights of others, our behavior - whether lawful or unlawful - is immoral. When laws enforce natural rights, laws are valid and moral. When laws themselves transgress natural rights - by, for example, punishing speech or seizing property or restraining free movement or invading personal privacy - the laws themselves are immoral.
The government - which is an artificial creation based on a monopoly of force in a defined geographical area - does not have a conscience or a free will. In a liberal democracy, the government can only morally do what the governed have affirmatively authorized it to do.
Thomas Jefferson, writing in the Declaration of Independence, recognized that the government derives its "just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." From this it follows that if the government exercises powers to which the governed have not consented, then its powers are unjust and their exercise is immoral.
Can the governed give immoral powers to the government ? Yes, they can. Suppose the governed consented to a war against another country not based on self-defense but based on their collective hatred of the race or ethnicity or religious beliefs of the inhabitants of that country. Such a war would be immoral, not just because killing not in self-defense is always wrong but because killing based on hatred of immutable characteristics is immoral, even if consented to.
I offer this brief philosophical roadmap to address the morality of Trump's war. When using deadly force, the government has a heavy burden to overcome. It can only overcome that burden by offering publicly scrutinizable facts to demonstrate its claim of the immediate necessity of killing others who are not engaged in violence against us.
The government has not done so.
In the case of war, the bad to be corrected must be clear and obvious and the good to be achieved must be morally superior to that which impelled the war and one that can reasonably be expected to come about from the war.
The war must be initiated by a lawful authority; its objective must be clearly stated and winnable. And the means - the damage produced - must be proportionate to the evil to be eradicated.
None of these is the case in Trump's war on Iran. He has not stated a moral goal. Ridding the Iran government of nuclear weapons cannot be considered a moral goal as the mere possession and nonuse of these weapons - which last June Trump stated did not exist - is not immoral. Only their use is.
The mere possession alone of these weapons cannot be a moral basis for invasion as both invading nations - the U.S. and Israel - have nuclear weapons, which the U.S. has used and Israel has not.
At the start of the war, Trump told the Iranian people he would help them to "take over your government. It will be yours to take." If that is Trump's purpose, this is a war of aggression, not defense.
Was the war commenced by a legitimate authority to which consent was given by the governed in America ? It was not. Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can define an enemy and decide to attack it by declaring war. This war was commenced by the president alone, with no definition or declaration by Congress.
Neither the president, nor his secretary of state, his secretary of defense or his director of national intelligence have articulated the existence of an imminent threat posed by Iran to the U.S.
What could it be ? Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Its missiles cannot reach the United States. North Korea, on the other hand, does have nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach Hawaii and California, and its leader is an erratic megalomaniac. Is North Korea next?
Two weeks ago, Trump's senior counterterrorism official, who saw the same classified data that Trump's advisers saw, stated affirmatively in his resignation letter that Iran poses no imminent threat to America. His boss, the director of national intelligence, refused to state under oath if Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S.
What's going on here?
What's going on is what James Madison feared. He argued that it is vital for the war making and the war waging powers to be separated - as they are in the Constitution - because, if a president could both declare and wage war, he'd be a prince; like the one from whom the colonists seceded. Of what value is a Constitution that is directly dishonored by those sworn to uphold it?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit JudgeNap.com.
Reprinted with the author's permission.