Recent US and Israeli attacks on Iran were a brazen violation of international law and a betrayal of ongoing diplomatic efforts.

This “war” was unleashed upon a nation already burdened by hardship. The reasoning for the conflict is vague justifications and a carefully crafted media narrative. Many nations view the crisis as a profound injustice and a dangerous escalation of geopolitical tensions.

This is not a response to aggression. It is a calculated assault on diplomacy and sovereignty - a war waged against a civilian population and a stark reminder of the consequences of unchecked power. That Trump has since been forced to rebrand it a “military action” to sidestep congressional oversight changes nothing. This war was declared by the American commander-in-chief and the Israeli leadership, and the Iranian people are paying the price.

Negotiations Sabotaged by Force

For months, Iran and the United States engaged in a serious, structured diplomatic process. Beginning on April 12, 2025, the two sides held talks in Oman led by US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Both governments are describing the initial discussions as constructive. By all appearances, the mediators were working toward a framework that could have resolved decades of nuclear impasse. This substantive statecraft, seemingly endorsed by a Trump administration, could have led to a mutually beneficial accord. As we see now, this was not to be.

What ended these talks was not total discord between the US and Iran but Israel’s strong opposition to the negotiations, lobbying against diplomatic efforts and threatening unilateral military action, a position critics warned could endanger diplomacy and heighten regional tensions. Trump had himself asked Israel to hold off strikes while talks proceeded, but the window Netanyahu was prepared to offer proved narrower than any agreement could survive. The sixth round of talks, scheduled in Oman for June 15, was indefinitely suspended after Israel launched its strikes on April 13, the day after the Trump-imposed negotiating deadline formally expired. The timing was not incidental.

In early 2026, the pattern repeated with even less ambiguity. Missile and air strikes came just two days after high-stakes US-Iran nuclear negotiations in Geneva, mediated by Oman, ended without a breakthrough. Among those killed in the assault was Ali Larijani, a central figure in the talks. Oman expressed disappointment that the “active and serious negotiations” were abandoned. Diplomacy was not merely interrupted - its architects were eliminated.

The logic this pattern reveals is difficult to dismiss. Given Iran’s weakened position, the United States and Israel calculated that they had a greater opportunity to advance their objectives through military means than by diplomatic means. That is a frank admission, buried in the strategic literature, that the choice was deliberate. The machinery of war was not a last resort deployed when diplomacy failed; it was a competing option, selected precisely when diplomacy appeared to be working.

We need not romanticize Iran’s government to reckon honestly with this. Its domestic repression and nuclear opacity are not fictions. But a government’s flaws have never, under any coherent reading of international law, constituted a license for preemptive war. The IAEA noted there was no evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program. The force case rested on projections and possibilities, basically the same architecture of anticipatory justification that preceded Iraq in 2003. The promise of negotiation was not abandoned in exhaustion. It was crushed at the moment it came closest to mattering.

A Modern-Day Pearl Harbor

The attacks on Iran, unfolding across multiple locations, bear a chilling resemblance to the events of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Like the surprise attack on the US naval base, the strikes on Iran were unexpected and devastating, targetting civilian infrastructure and resulting in significant casualties. Reports indicate that an estimated 30,000 bombs and missiles have rained down upon Iranian cities, a staggering figure that underscores the sheer magnitude of the destruction. The targeting of an amusement park, a place of leisure and joy, and a school, a sanctuary for learning and growth, speaks volumes about the callous disregard for human life displayed by the aggressors.

The reported use of a “triple tap” methodology - repeatedly striking a target to ensure complete elimination - further reveals the brutal and calculated nature of the operation. This tactic, designed to leave no survivors, is a chilling testament to an intent not merely to inflict damage but to eradicate potential opposition. The rhetoric emanating from Washington and Jerusalem, particularly the pronouncements of figures like Donald Trump, who vowed to “return them to the Stone Age” and “obliterate a civilization,” foreshadowed the scale and ferocity of the attacks. These statements, far from being mere hyperbole, appear to have served as a roadmap for a campaign of unprecedented destruction.

What is most alarming is that the logic animating this campaign shows no sign of exhausting itself at Iran’s borders. The same framework of anticipatory justification - the pre-emptive strike dressed as self-defense, the negotiating table abandoned in favour of the targeting list - is a replicable template, not a one-time exception. Whispers in Washington’s foreign policy circles have already turned to Cuba, where the administration’s hostility has been sharpening for months, raising the spectre of a hemisphere brought under the same doctrine that reduced Iranian cities to rubble. If the international community cannot name what happened to Iran for what it was, it will find itself without the language or the institutions to stop the next iteration - wherever it lands.

The Media Narrative: Obfuscation and Distortion

The story of the war on Iran has not been told so much as it has been managed. What reaches Western audiences is not the raw, discomfiting reality of strikes on a sovereign nation but a carefully curated product - filtered, framed, and delivered through a media infrastructure that is narrowing precisely when it should be widening.

The numbers are stark. According to a twelve-month analysis by the media watchdog FAIR, more than half of all visits to major US news websites, or nearly 25.5 billion out of 45.6 billion, went to outlets controlled by just seven families or corporate entities. This is not pluralism. It is an oligopoly dressed in the language of a free press. And increasingly, the owners of that oligopoly are not disinterested stewards of the public record. They are political actors with skin in the game.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the transformation of the Paramount empire. Federal regulators approved Skydance’s merger with Paramount in July 2025 after Skydance agreed to additional concessions related to editorial policies, and days before that approval, Paramount settled a lawsuit with President Trump over a 60 Minutes interview, prompting widespread concern that political leverage had shaped the outcome.

The editorial consequences followed swiftly: Bari Weiss was appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News, The Late Show was cancelled, and progressive anchors were demoted or pushed out. Now, Paramount Skydance is in the process of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery (parent of CNN) as part of what critics describe as an expanding empire built around the Ellison family, with Larry Ellison a prominent Trump ally.

This concentration has direct consequences for how wars are narrated. When ownership consolidates in families whose political allegiances are intertwined with the state, the space for genuinely adversarial reporting shrinks. The RSF’s 2025 World Press Freedom Index found that growing ownership concentration restricts editorial diversity and raises serious concerns about newsroom independence from economic and political interests.

Into this environment steps the think tank apparatus. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has become the default source for outlets that no longer employ enough foreign correspondents to report on the ground. What CSIS consistently offers is the language of strategic management rather than moral reckoning, assessing which side is “winning” in military terms while humanitarian dimensions are relegated to subordinate clauses. The effect is to normalize what should be contested.

The result is a media ecosystem that can report extensively on the Iran conflict while fundamentally failing to interrogate it. Audiences receive granular detail about munitions counts and missile intercept rates. Still, the foundational questions about legal basis, civilian costs, and long-term destabilization are couched in the reassuring language of strategic necessity. The press is supposed to make power uncomfortable. What we have instead is power being made comfortable, one editorial decision at a time.

War Crimes and the Erosion of International Law

The actions taken against Iran represent a blatant violation of international humanitarian law. The deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including schools and amusement parks, constitutes a grave war crime. The reported targetting of key Iranian leaders, even if confirmed, would be a violation of fundamental principles of sovereignty and the right to due process. These actions erode the foundations of international law and undermine the principles of peaceful conflict resolution. The United States and Israel must be held accountable for these violations, and those responsible must face justice for their crimes against humanity. The international community has a moral obligation to condemn these actions and demand an end to the violence.

The unlawful war on Iran is a tragedy of immense proportions, a betrayal of diplomacy, and a stain on the conscience of the international community. The United States and Israel have demonstrated a reckless disregard for human life and a profound disrespect for international law. An independent investigation must be launched to uncover the full extent of these crimes and to hold those responsible accountable. The path forward lies not in further violence and escalation, but in a renewed commitment to diplomacy, justice, and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The Iranian people deserve nothing less.

Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2026/05/09/bombs-instead-of-negotiations-how-diplomacy-around-iran-gave-way-to-force/