Understanding Iran’s Imminent Threat to America

When the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran in Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion on February 28, 2026, critics in the United States charged that there was no imminent threat to the United States, questioning the underlying assumption of the American military campaign. The Guardian called the attacks an illegal war. Brookings analysts dismissed them as a “war of choice.” On March 17, 2026, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, posted his resignation on X that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” suggesting the United States entered the war due to Israeli pressure.

Many critics define imminent threat, referencing the 1837 Caroline standard. This nineteenth-century point of reference defining imminent threat holds that anticipatory self-defense requires action only in cases where the threat is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”

These critics are mistaken. The Caroline standard does not apply today, especially when dealing with rogue states like the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxies. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its global proxy network have killed more than 1,000 Americans since 1979. Iranian-backed forces conducted over 180 attacks on U.S. military bases in 2023–2024 alone. Iran’s stockpile of 440 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium reached a one-week breakout threshold for nuclear weapons before the June 2025 strikes. And just eleven days before Operation Epic Fury commenced, Iran’s Supreme Leader publicly threatened to send U.S. warships to the bottom of the sea. The question is not whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. The question is why it took 47 years to respond to its longstanding threats.

Imminence Is Not a Stopwatch

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who headed the CIA in the 1990s, determined that the Iranian nuclear program has constituted an imminent threat: “If their policy is to go to the threshold but not assemble a nuclear weapon, how do you tell that they have not assembled? I don’t actually know how you would verify that.” By the time the United States knows with certainty that Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold, it may be too late to act.

The Office of Legal Counsel has consistently recognized the president’s authority to deploy military force without prior congressional authorization when vital national interests demand it — as President Clinton did in Kosovo and President Obama in Libya, neither involving an imminent threat by the Caroline definition. Senator Tom Cotton has stated it plainly: Iran has posed an imminent threat to the United States not for months, but for forty-seven years.

Congress itself has codified this position. The Iran Sanctions Act, CISADA (2010), and the bipartisan Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2012 — signed by President Obama — each required Iran to verifiably dismantle its nuclear, ballistic missile, and terrorism infrastructure as a condition of sanctions relief. Iran refused every deadline. The proliferation threat Congress sought to address through these bipartisan laws has therefore remained, as a matter of binding legislative finding, imminent.

An Actively Hostile State

Iran’s primary institutional apparatus — the IRGC and its Quds Force — exists for the continuous planning and execution of violence against Americans and American interests. Harold Koh, Obama’s State Department Legal Adviser and former Dean of Yale Law School, who had called the Iraq War “illegal under international law,” later stated in 2010:

[T]he United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level leaders who are planning attacks… [T]his is a conflict with an organized terrorist enemy that does not have conventional forces, but that plans and executes its attacks against us and our allies while hiding among civilian populations. That behavior simultaneously makes the application of international law more difficult and more critical for the protection of innocent civilians.

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was equally explicit, speaking at Northwestern University on March 5, 2012:

There are people currently plotting to murder Americans, who reside in distant countries as well as within our own borders… [W]e must also recognize that there are instances where our government has the clear authority — and, I would argue, the responsibility — to defend the United States through the appropriate and lawful use of lethal force… The Constitution empowers the President to protect the nation from any imminent threat of violent attack… None of this is changed by the fact that we are not in a conventional war. Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan.

As Ambassador Alan Baker has argued regarding the U.S. killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Soleimani “was heavily involved in the planning and execution of massive acts of terror. That was his function within the Iranian military and terror infrastructure. His every move was related to the organizing and operation of ongoing acts of terror, and as such was well within the context of ‘active hostilities.’”

Evidence of the Iranian Regime’s Imminent Threat: 47 Years of Attacks on Americans

Ayatollah Khomeini’s designation of America as the “Great Satan” was not political rhetoric. It was a theological ruling encoding the elimination of American influence as a religious obligation of the revolutionary state. “Death to America” has been operational doctrine since 1979 — chanted at official rallies, printed on state banners, and repeated by Supreme Leader Khamenei at the close of diplomatic speeches, including during nuclear talks in February 2026, just days before the strikes.

Pre-9/11 (1979–2001): In November 1979, regime-backed operatives seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. In April 1983, an Iran-backed suicide bombing killed 17 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. In October 1983, Iran’s Hizbullah proxy killed 241 U.S. servicemen in the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut — the deadliest single attack on American military personnel since World War II. In 1984, CIA Station Chief William Buckley was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Hizbullah. In 1985, a U.S. Navy diver was killed in the TWA Flight 847 hijacking. In 1989, U.S. Marine Colonel William Higgins was executed by Hizbullah. In June 1996, 19 Americans were killed in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, carried out by IRGC-backed Hizbullah al-Hijaz. Iranian-backed Hamas suicide bombings between 1995 and 2001 killed multiple American citizens in Israel.

Iran Declares Offensive War (2011–2012): In November 2011, Supreme Leader Khamenei publicly declared a strategic shift from defense to offense, warning: “We will answer threats with threats. America, its regional puppets and its guard dog — the Zionist regime — should know that the response of the Iranian nation to any kind of aggression, attacks or even threats will be a response that will make them collapse from within.” Iran’s Defense Minister, deputy chief of the General Staff, and head of the Intelligence and Operations Division each publicly confirmed the new offensive doctrine. JCFA analyst Lt.-Col. Michael Segall documented at the time that top U.S. intelligence officials concluded the foiled 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. showed Iran’s leadership had “changed their calculus” and that “it is no longer clear that Iran sees carrying out an attack in the United States as crossing some sort of red line.” Iran had removed its own self-imposed restraint on attacking Americans on U.S. soil.

Ahmadinejad’s Direct Threats Against America: Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly acknowledged in a 2007 CBS interview that the IRGC had 52,000 trained suicide bombers ready to target American and British sites. In 2010, he warned that any U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would trigger a war “without boundaries” and “not just bombs.” In 2012, he pledged a “crushing response” to any American aggression. These were not empty slogans. They were explicit operational threats against the United States.

Iran’s Iraqi Front (2003–2011): The IRGC Quds Force smuggled precision-engineered explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) — copper-plate bombs capable of punching through armored vehicles — to Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq. At least 603 U.S. troops were killed through this sustained Iranian-directed campaign. In the 2007 Karbala attack, IRGC Quds Force operatives directly killed five American soldiers. In January 2020, Iran fired ballistic missiles directly at the Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq, causing traumatic brain injuries in over 100 U.S. troops — the largest direct Iranian ballistic missile strike against Americans in history.

October 7 and other Iranian Proxy Attacks: The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre — planned and supported by Iran — killed at least 48 Americans and left 12 kidnapped. In the months that followed, Iranian-backed militias launched over 180 attacks on U.S. military bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Three American soldiers were killed, and over 180 were wounded in a January 2024 drone strike in Jordan. Houthi forces, armed and directed by Iran, conducted over 190 attacks on U.S. Navy vessels and commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Iranian Regime Assassination Plots Against U.S. Officials and on U.S. Soil: Iran directed active plots to assassinate former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and President Donald Trump. The 2011 Washington D.C. plot to bomb a restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador — an operation that would have killed American civilians on American soil — was assessed by U.S. intelligence as evidence that Iran had abandoned its prior restraint against striking inside the United States.

In total, Iranian proxies are responsible for well over 1,000 American deaths since 1979. The State Department estimated Iran funneled over $700 million annually to Hizbullah alone, and more than $16 billion to regional proxies between 2012 and 2020.

Khamenei’s Final Warning

On February 17, 2026 — 11 days before Operation Epic Fury — Supreme Leader Khamenei delivered a series of direct threats against the United States during nuclear talks in Geneva, as a U.S. naval buildup was already underway in the region. He declared: “The U.S. president says their army is the world’s strongest, but the strongest army in the world can sometimes be slapped so hard it cannot get up.”

On U.S. warships: “A warship is a dangerous piece of military hardware. However, more dangerous than that warship is the weapon that can send that warship to the bottom of the sea.”

On America’s 47-year effort to neutralize the Islamic Republic: “For 47 years, America has been unable to eliminate the Islamic Republic…You will fail too.”

Iran followed these statements with live-fire missile drills and a partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz. These were not abstract declarations. They were explicit military threats against U.S. forces, made during active diplomatic negotiations, accompanied by immediate military demonstrations. Those who argue that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States on February 28, 2026, must explain what threshold Khamenei’s statements and actions did not meet.

Iran’s Imminent Nuclear Threat

The attack record alone establishes Iran’s sustained hostility toward the United States. The nuclear program transforms that hostility into an existential and irreversible threat.

According to the last verified IAEA inventory before the June 2025 strikes, Iran held approximately 9,875 kilograms of enriched uranium, including 440 kilograms enriched to 60% purity — nearly seventeen times the JCPOA’s 3.67% cap and far beyond any civilian energy requirement. That stockpile alone, if further enriched to 90% weapons grade, represented sufficient material for eight to ten nuclear weapons. The IAEA Director General warned in April 2025 that Iran was months, not years, from potential weaponization. By February 2026, Iran’s breakout time had contracted to approximately one week or less.

Critics note that U.S. intelligence and the IAEA assessed Iran had not yet assembled an operational nuclear weapon before the 2026 strikes. This concedes the point rather than refuting it. As former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned years earlier, once Iran reaches the assembly threshold, there is no reliable way to verify it has not already crossed it. The window for preventive action closes permanently the moment a hostile regime achieves a deliverable nuclear capability. This is precisely why the United States acted.

As I wrote in December 2024, the evidence of Iran’s nuclear intent was no longer ambiguous. Iran’s Supreme Council of National Security had called to re-evaluate the Supreme Leader’s religious ruling against nuclear weapons because “circumstances have changed.” The editor-in-chief of the IRGC’s own affiliated newspaper publicly called for Iran to “go nuclear.” An Iranian member of parliament explicitly cited North Korea: “The West does not mess with North Korea because it has atomic bombs.” Israel’s 2018 intelligence operation had already extracted Iran’s actual bomb plans — photographs and blueprints of the nuclear weapon core — confirming that weaponization was a real and active program, not a theoretical concern.

Since the 2025–2026 strikes, the IAEA has had no access to affected facilities for over eight months and cannot confirm the current size, location, or security of the surviving uranium stockpile — including an estimated 200-plus kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium assessed to remain deep underground at Isfahan. The IRGC’s stated operational priority in 2024–2025 was to close the window of opportunity for the United States and Israel to act before Iran achieved deliverable nuclear capability. The strikes closed that window first.

Iran’s War in America’s Backyard

Iran’s threat to the United States is not confined to the Middle East. Hizbullah — created, funded, and directed by the IRGC Quds Force — operates a global narco-terrorism enterprise that delivers cocaine directly to American communities. Through its Business Affairs Component, Hizbullah has partnered with Latin American cartels including Mexico’s Zetas. One DEA-documented network alone laundered over $200 million per month and was connected to more than 85 tons of U.S.-bound cocaine. These operations historically generated up to $200 million annually for Hizbullah from Latin America — funding the same weapons and rockets used against American forces and allies.

Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro served as the Iranian regime’s operational hub in Latin America: issuing fraudulent passports to Iranian and Hizbullah operatives, hosting IRGC training facilities, and providing diplomatic cover for narco-trafficking networks exploiting America’s southern border. This is the twenty-first-century version of the threat President Monroe declared the United States would not tolerate in its hemisphere.

Iran’s Threat to American Strategic and Economic Interests

Iran’s nuclear and terror campaigns are a direct threat to the American-led economic and security order that underpins Western prosperity. U.S. partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States — rooted in the Roosevelt-Ibn Saud agreement of 1945 — anchor global energy stability. Iranian proxy attacks on Red Sea shipping via the Houthis constitute direct economic warfare against the United States and its allies. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), endorsed by the G20 in 2023, is a multimodal trade route linking India through the Gulf, Israel, and Europe — the most significant Western strategic infrastructure initiative of the coming generation and a direct alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Iran’s regional destabilization campaign is designed to strangle IMEC, displace American leadership, and deliver strategic primacy in the world’s most critical trade corridor to Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow.

A Regime That Devours Its Own

Intent is an essential component of imminent threat. Iran’s record of internal repression removes all ambiguity about its willingness to use lethal force without hesitation. After 1979, the Islamic Republic executed thousands of political opponents and drove tens of thousands into exile. During the Iran-Iraq War, the regime deployed Basij child soldiers — some barely twelve years old — as human minesweepers, wearing the “keys to heaven” around their necks. In 2019, it killed more than 1,500 protesters in a single crackdown. In 2022, Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody for improperly wearing her hijab; the regime killed more than 1,500 people in the resulting protests. Between December 2025 and January 2026, as military defeats mounted, the regime killed upwards of 35,000 and wounded a third of a million of its own citizens to remain in power. A government that massacres tens of thousands of its own people is not deterred by diplomatic engagement. It understands only force.

The Iranian Octopus’s Imminent Threat to Iran, the Middle East, and the West

The Islamic Republic of Iran built the Middle East’s largest ballistic missile arsenal, an advanced drone program, a five-country proxy network that has killed more than 1,000 Americans, a narco-terror enterprise operating inside the United States, and a uranium stockpile assessed at one week from nuclear weapons-grade breakout. Its Supreme Leader threatened to sink U.S. warships 11 days before the strikes. Its own leadership publicly moved to revoke the religious prohibition on nuclear weapons. Its IRGC was seeking weaponization assistance from Russia and North Korea.

Obama’s own legal counsel — Harold Koh and Eric Holder — established the authority to use lethal force against those continuously planning attacks on Americans, regardless of whether a conventional armed attack is actively underway. Congress legislated, with bipartisan majorities, that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs required verifiable dismantlement as a condition of any diplomatic normalization. Iran refused every offer and every deadline for 47 years.

Measured against any serious standard — 47 years of continuous armed activity against Americans, explicit military threats against U.S. forces 11 days before the strikes, a verified nuclear stockpile one week from breakout, declared intent to weaponize, the irreversibility of nuclear proliferation once achieved, and a closing window of opportunity — Iran did not merely qualify as an imminent threat at the moment of Operation Epic Fury. It has been an imminent threat to regional and global security and stability since the day Khomeini’s forces seized the American embassy in 1979.

The authors thank Dr. Irwin Mansdorf for his insights and assistance in the preparation of this article.