Libertarians have been among the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump’s Iran war, denouncing it as unconstitutional, immoral, and another instance of American overreach abroad. In this two-part op-ed series, however, the Washington Examiner partnered with two leading libertarian voices to present a different perspective: a principled libertarian case in support of the military campaign. This is Part 1, click here to read Part 2.
Since the United States and Israel began their campaign against the Iranian government — they first targeted nuclear facilities in the summer of 2025, and then pursued the broader removal of the regime this year — libertarian opposition has been nearly universal: The war is unconstitutional, unpopular, immoral, and another chapter in a long story of American military overreach.
These objections are serious, but they do not tell the whole story. Libertarianism holds that the only legitimate purpose of political power is to protect individual rights, the right to freedom and property. The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades doing the opposite, forcing 90 million people to live under an oppressive, murderous government. Those 90 million have no peaceful means of removing their oppressors, no free elections, no independent courts, and no protected right of dissent.
U.S. and Israeli actions to destroy Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities or to remove the regime entirely are causes that libertarians should support.
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The Iranian government has lost its sovereignty
Political legitimacy is not a birthright of states. It is earned, and it can be lost. The only legitimate use of political power is the protection of individual rights. A government that systematically murders, imprisons, and terrorizes its own citizens has thus lost its legitimacy as a sovereign state.
In January 2026, the regime’s crackdown on protesters resulted in the killing of up to 30,000 Iranians, men and women who took to the streets demanding the basic freedoms that much of the world takes for granted. It was the latest chapter in a decadeslong record of executions, torture, enforced disappearances, and the brutal suppression of women, religious minorities, and political dissidents.
By any serious application of libertarian political philosophy, this regime has no legitimate authority.
But this loss is hardly confined to domestic terrorism. In addition, the regime has supported, financed, encouraged, aided, and abetted its proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. These organizations have been visiting mayhem and murder on Israel, as well as several Arab states. Each massive rights violation, domestic as well as foreign, is a sufficient justification for loss of Iranian sovereignty.
Individual sovereignty trumps state sovereignty
A common objection to outside intervention is the principle of state sovereignty: The idea that what happens within a nation’s borders is that nation’s business alone.
State sovereignty is, at its core, collective sovereignty. It assigns rights to governments. to whoever happens to hold power, rather than to the individuals those governments are supposed to serve. When it is invoked to shield a dictatorship from accountability, it has lost its legitimacy.
The theory of state sovereignty implicitly assumes that citizens have, in some at least moderately meaningful sense, authorized their government to act on their behalf. But the Iranian people have never consented to rule by the mullahs. They cannot vote them out. They cannot protest without being shot. Unless a person explicitly renounces his citizenship — this is a right the regime does not freely grant — the state claims their tacit endorsement for whatever it does, including mass killing. That is not consent. That is captivity.
The sovereignty that matters is the sovereignty of the individual. Every Iranian citizen possesses natural rights that no government granted and no government can legitimately take away. Those rights do not stop at borders.
The UN has proven it cannot protect individuals
Since individual rights are universal, someone must be capable of enforcing them. For the past eighty years, the world has placed that hope in international institutions — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, etc. However, these institutions have no meaningful enforcement mechanism when a government turns on its own people.
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When the Iranian government killed thousands of protesters in January 2026, the international community’s response was what it has always been: condemnation without consequence.
In the absence of an international system capable of enforcing individual rights, the only enforcement that matters is the enforcement that actually occurs. By targeting the Iranian regime’s military and governmental infrastructure, the United States and Israel are doing what the UN could not and would not do: imposing real consequences on a government for the mass violation of its citizens’ rights.
James Delmore is an independent writer. Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans.