Iran and the Contradictions of “Humanitarian Intervention”: A Philosophical Perspective
The following is an edited version of a speech delivered by an Iranian community member at a recent teach-in on Iran. The teach-in emphasized popular struggle against clerical tyranny in Iran while resisting the right-wing, monarchist call for imperialist intervention.
From a fringe far-right position, Iranian monarchism has grown in its relative popularity over the past two decades. It has become one of the main ideological forces shaping the political mentality of the Iranian diaspora in North America, especially after the recent round of street protests starting in Tehran and brutal repression in January 2026.
Exclusivity and impulsive hostility toward anyone who does not identify with their far-right agenda have become characteristic features of their political activities. The situation has become so dire that most Iranian dissidents who oppose both the Islamist government and the US-Israeli war machine fear for their safety and reputation. Those who support the monarchy openly and clearly prosecute, stigmatize, and silence other voices using vulgar language, including “death to the leftists.” The goal is to intimidate progressive and anti-intervention Iranian voices into silence and fear.
The responsibility of progressive intellectuals is to refuse to be intimidated.
I won’t discuss the roots and dangers of the rise of monarchism in the Iranian diaspora (See a discussion of this in “Nightmares and Dreams of Iranian republicanism”). Instead, I will focus on one of the main ongoing ideological debates in the Iranian diaspora: the concept of “humanitarian intervention” by the US and Israel in Iran.
The monarchist far-right has appropriated and shifted the spectrum of acceptable and reasonable opinion in a way that renders it apparently preposterous to question the desirability of the US and Israeli invasion of Iran. One term that is being thrown around to manufacture consent for an imperialist invasion in the right-wing propaganda is “humanitarian intervention.” In this talk, I will focus on this term and its contradictions.
I am a philosopher by training. One of the main jobs of philosophers is clarifying concepts and arguments, so I want to do just that for the concept of “humanitarian intervention” and arguments for “humanitarian interventions” by the US in Iran.
There are at least 3 questions that need to be answered about “humanitarian interventions” (HI):
1) The conceptual question: Does the concept exist? Or is it an imaginary concept like a unicorn, where the concept is vivid but lacks any reference in reality?
2) The second is the empirical or historical question: How, when, and for what political goals has the term been used?
3) Finally, there is the normative question: In principle and in an ideal world, what general criteria would make an intervention or an agent of intervention appropriate or legitimate? Does the Iranian case meet those criteria?
The conceptual question
Let’s start with the conceptual question. Is governmental HI more than a rhetorical, deceptive tool? Two considerations already cast serious doubt.
First, from the philosophies of Machiavelli through Adam Smith and into contemporary political theory, there is a long tradition of skepticism about treating states as if they act from moral concern. States act primarily on behalf of the elite interests and strive to preserve domestic power, wealth, and order. These are what Smith called the “principal architects of policy” – merchants and manufacturers, or in our modern language, big corporations and banks.
Updating Adam Smith’s view, two distinguished American political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), empirically tested theories about which actors and concerns shape the US federal state’s policies. Analyzing almost 1800 policy cases (where associated public polls about them were available) from 1981 to 2002, they concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” States are not moral agents. They don’t have moral or humanitarian concerns, despite their rhetoric.
Secondly, if states had humanitarian concerns, why do they not direct attention towards improving child mortality globally? The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, has studies showing that the mortality rate of children under the age of 5 (typically from preventable disease and malnutrition) has ranged from 5 to 9 million a year globally in the past 3 decades. Medical experts argue that six million children could be saved if $5.1 billion for preventative and therapeutic interventions were provided each year. A minor fraction of the big states’ military budgets would make this humanitarian goal possible.
Let’s take a look at the numbers. In 2023, the military budget of the US was $916 billion, China at $296 billion, and Russia at $109 billion. Each has only to spare half a percent, 2 percent, and 4 percent of their military budget, respectively, to stop this humanitarian crisis and save 6 million children under 5 from death. For context, the US budget is so large that even if a single child’s life cost an estimate of $887, the required ~5 billion is only ~0.5% of it; at $4,500 per life (~$23.4 B total), it is still just ~2.6%. This contrast suggests that humanitarian concern is not what actually guides state priorities. No humanitarian intervention when there are no geopolitical motives.
To further contextualize this, we can look at a 2025 UN study titled “Under-five mortality”. The under-five mortality rate tracks the prospects for future development, economic and medical infrastructure in a country. This rate is noticeably high in low-income countries and also in countries that have experienced sanctions and invasion by the West. For example, the numbers, for every thousand births, are 114 children in Niger, 22 children in Iraq, 55 children in Afghanistan, and 30 children in Libya. Compare this with Iran, which is at 11 children, closer to high income countries like Canada’s rate of 6 children and France’s rate of 4 children, or countries with publicly subsidized health infrastructure like Cuba at 8. These are important numbers to keep in mind, especially when we discuss the prospects of infrastructure loss that could deteriorate Iran’s rate closer to Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s after potential military intervention.
The empirical-historical question
The second question is historical: how has the term HI been used, by whom, and in what political conjunctures?
During the Cold War, the United States did not invoke the term “humanitarian intervention”. Interventions — from the 1953 coup in Iran to the 1971 coup in Chile — were justified openly as defending the “free world” against the “communist or Soviet threat.” NATO’s explicit purpose was containment, not humanitarianism.
After the Cold War, this justification disappeared — but the interventions did not. What changed was the rhetoric. Humanitarian language increasingly filled the vacuum.
Take a few brief examples:
1) Iraq in the 1990s: “Humanitarian” sanctions devastated civilian life, strengthened Saddam Hussein’s control, and destroyed independent civic capacity. The humanitarian situation worsened precisely because of external intervention.
2) Kosovo in 1999 was often described as the “jewel of the crown” of humanitarian intervention. Yet extensive documentation shows that NATO’s bombing in late March 1999 only worsened the situation, and NATO’s campaign escalated atrocities on the ground. There was no UN Security Council authorization, and all the charges against Milošević in the Hague were for crimes he committed after NATO’s bombing began. Much of the Global South condemned the intervention.
3) Libya in 2011: what began as a UN-mandated no-fly zone was reinterpreted by NATO into “humanitarian” regime change by bombing. The result was mass death, state collapse, and enduring civil war.
Furthermore, states who congratulate themselves as “moral”, “humanitarian”, “anti-terrosism” agents have shown double standards and they have been contributing instead of mitigating humanitarian crises and terrorism. Take the following examples:
1) Turkish government atrocities against Kurds in the 1990s: Turkish abuses of Kurdish basic human rights, including their right to identify as Kurds and not “mountain Turks”, created a humanitarian crisis. The Turkish government called it a “counter-insurgency operation” and killed around 10 thousand and destroyed 3500 Kurdish villages. Throughout this time, Turkey was a respected member of NATO, and the US arms shipments to Turkey continued to set new records in the decade in the Clinton administration, peaking in 1997 in tandem with Turkey’s atrocities.
2) Most notably, a clear unfinished example is the genocide in Gaza, where Western states did not even stop one dollar of weapons or one bullet; if anything, they increased them. The UN independent commission in September 2025 concluded the bombardments of Gaza constitute a genocide, following the resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed in August 2025.
Historically, this pattern is not new. Mussolini claimed to “civilize” Ethiopia. Japan claimed to “build a paradise” in Manchuria and China. Hitler claimed to pacify ethnic conflict in Czechoslovakia and endow them with the technology and civilization of the “superior” German race and culture. Moral elevation of violence is an old imperial move.
To be fair, there are only two cases where the state interventions in humanitarian crises have not had disastrous results for the civilian populations and elevated the sufferings. In 1971, India intervened (for its own interests) to stop Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh; in 1979, Vietnam intervened to stop the atrocities in Cambodia.
Incidentally, both cases were condemned and punished by the US. In the case of India, Kissinger was outraged and proposed to use atomic bombs against India so that it would not dare to intervene in the US grand plans for the region. Nixon disagreed and instead just sent some US Navy vessels to scare India away. In the second case, Vietnam was harshly punished, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely harsh sanctions (See Chomsky 1999 and Gary Bass 2013 book on the atrocities in Bangladesh, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide)
The normative question
Now, suppose we take the moral question seriously: what would count as a legitimate humanitarian intervention in principle?
At a minimum, we would need these conditions to be met:
1) Intervention must be the last resort by well-meaning foreign agents. They should have exhausted the non-violent methods. The burden of proof for interventions is on the shoulders of those advocating for it; you don’t need an argument for non-intervention.
2) The agents should have impartial motivation.
3) The agents should have multilateral legitimacy and recognition by well-organized international bodies and international legal traditions.
4) Crucially, the agent should have causal innocence — the agent must not have materially contributed to the crisis.
Even in an ideal world, these judgments would have to be made case by case. But in the real world, there is a deeper problem: the concept of “humanitarian intervention” does not have a reference. Imperialist interventions exist but governmental humanitarian intervention does not. If an agent has exacerbated a crisis, then the most we can reasonably demand of it is non-interference, not further coercion.
The case of Iran
The United States is not even close to qualifying as an appropriate humanitarian agent.
First, the United States bears direct responsibility for decades of illegal geopolitically-driven unilateral secondary sanctions against Iran, its 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA (aka ‘Iran nuclear deal’) in violation of the UN charter and UN Security Council resolution 2231, and even military attacks carried out during periods of negotiation.
As in the case of Iraq, these policies have weakened civic independence while strengthening authoritarian state structures. This is supported by an October 2022 UN report by Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights in Iran. Following an official visit to Iran, Douhan prepared the report for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She concludes that “the use of unilateral sanctions, secondary sanctions, and overcompliance has an overall adverse effect on a broad spectrum of human rights—civil, political, economic, social, and cultural—including the right to life and the right to development.” Accordingly, she recommends “lifting unilateral sanctions to avoid de-risking policies and overcompliance, in accordance with international legal norms.”
Second, the United States shows open contempt for international norms. The Trump administration openly embraced international gangsterism, illegal sanctions, oil seizures, abductions, and threats against sovereign states. This eliminates even the pretense of humanitarian legitimacy.
Third, the United States has explicit strategic intent. The recent 2025 US National Security Strategy abandoned the language of democracy promotion altogether. The goal is not liberation but strategic incapacitation — stripping Iran of self-defense and leaving it exposed to Israel for aggression at will (exactly as we have seen for decades in Lebanon and Syria).
Under these conditions, the only ethically defensible role for the US is to stop sanctions, stop threats, and stop militarization. For those who have any regard for democracy, follow the advice of the Tehran bus driver union’s recent statement: We will fight if you let us breathe.
Fallacious arguments to resist
Let me end by addressing some common fallacies used by the far-right to justify the US invasion of Iran.
1) The “no other way” argument: This argument normally goes like this: “people have tried every other way. This government is just too inflexible and repressive to be changed or overthrown in any other way; there is no other way except for foreign intervention.” Firstly, this argument implies that the US-Israeli intervention is a way (not a dead end or a suicide for the prospects of democracy in Iran), and also that it is the way (the last remaining one). Even on the weaker claim that it is a way, the argument absolutely disregards the historical facts and is grossly empirically weak. Even a glance at the history of the foreign interventions in the Middle East shows that one cannot bomb one’s way into democracy and secularism (especially not with US-Israeli bombs) unless one is delusional.
2) The “at any price” argument: This argument states that too many people have been killed by the government, so it has to go at any price, even disastrous foreign intervention by biased and ill-meaning foreign agents like the US. Obviously, the antecedent of the argument is tragically true. The death toll estimates by the UN and HRANA (a US-based Iranian human rights organization) range from 7 to 20 thousand killed in the protests. Most of the killings were carried out on the nights of January 8 and 9, which is an unprecedented slaughter for such a short period of time. Still, the argument does not follow: it follows that such an illegitimate and dysfunctional government has to go, but not by any agency and not at any price. The “at any price argument” is self-contradictory. If humanitarianism justifies any price (that is, unlimited civilian death), it has abandoned its own moral core. There is an anger-driven moral absolutism that rejects cost-benefit reasoning with concrete metrics (e.g., mortality, infrastructure loss). Like all mass-based anti-repression popular resistance in the global South, an Iranian democratic movement needs to organize the agency of the Iranian people against internal repression and the US and Israeli war machines. It should take tactical and realistic steps and avoid premature confrontation with the repressive forces that could set back the popular movements for decades.
4) “Give me your alternative right now, or shut up” fallacy: This fallacy presents an urge to jump to easy solutions or even outsourcing solutions and agency to foreign agents. Unlike coups, popular political alternatives are not cooked up overnight or by voluntaristic acts of violence and short-term heroism. They are built by moral, conscious individual sacrifices and sober leadership. Some monarchists and others on the far-right who call for war on Iran also claim to love Iran selflessly: they claim that “they love Iran,” or “they will die for Iran.” In response, one should ask: we don’t need your heroism, but would you see the historical facts for Iran? Would you listen for Iran? Would you read a book, stop being impulsive, and communicate rationally for Iran? Would you respect the intellectual authority of respected historians of modern Iran like Ervand Abrahamian, who has warned against intervention, instead of dismissing his academically renowned work as a “Bolshevik historiography”?
All these arguments are impulsive, desperate, and detached from reality. What is needed instead is rationality, communication, modest steps, and public pressure — not faith in Western capitalist states as moral saviors.
The last thing one should do in such a critical time is to be intimidated by the intimidation and stigmatization campaign of the Iranian far-right and monarchists. Their vulgarity and intimidation are by design to overpower all the other voices and present themselves as the only voice.
Notes:
For historical details, I have drawn substantially from Chomsky’s speeches, such as “Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention,” and books like “Failed States,” and “The World Order, Old and New” unless otherwise sourced.
