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Is the war in Iran over? Within hours of secretary of state Marco Rubio’s assurance that “the operation is over” last week, Donald Trump used social media to declare that it most decidedly was not. Should Iran fail to accept the US peace plan, Trump warned that the bombing would resume and “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before”. No bombs have since fallen, but the standoff remains. If it is unclear when and how this war will end, can we at least agree on when it began?

Evidently not. That is the upshot of the state department’s document of 21 April, the administration’s first full effort to supply a legal justification for “Operation Epic Fury”. The document was notably tardy, coming nearly two months after the bombing campaign began. More remarkable still is how completely it rejects the justification offered by the president on 28 February in his prerecorded television address announcing the start of the assault: “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

Not so, the state department now insists. Presumably recognizing that the imminent threat argument failed the straight-face test, the state department’s legal assessment simply declares: “The United States does not rely on a theory of imminence to justify its actions in this case.” In its stead, the document insists that Epic Fury is simply the continuation “of an armed conflict with Iran that has been ongoing for years”.

Really? We may be rightfully surprised to learn that the US has long been at war with the Islamic Republic, and that the massive assault that began on 28 February was “only the latest round of an ongoing international armed conflict”. When did this war begin? Here the state department’s legal document turns cagey. At points, it suggests that hostilities started way back during the Iranian revolution of 1979 with the sacking of the US embassy and the taking of US hostages. At others, it points to 2019, when Iran-backed militias fired rockets at bases in Iraq where US personnel were located. Finally, it points to June 2025, when the US and Israel, to paraphrase the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities but not its ambition.

Never mind that dating the start of the present war to June 2025 raises the ticklish question of what justified that assault; moving the start of the conflict to that moment is simply to backdate the commencement of US aggression by eight months.

Bizarrely, the state department document appears less designed to answer the arguments of legal observers who have condemned the war as a transparent violation of the UN charter – which places a blanket prohibition on the use of military force in all cases except self-defense or armed interventions authorized by the security council – than to strengthen that critique.

In insisting that Epic Fury is simply another battle in an ongoing war, the document, deploys unassailable logic to conclude: “If a conflict has not ended, then it must be ongoing.” Unfortunately, this standard complicates any negotiations to end the war. By the terms of the broader timeline that state offers, the US would have been justified in attacking Iran at the very moment that Barack Obama negotiated the nuclear deal in 2015. Regardless of what one may think of the Islamic Republic, negotiations must be based on an element of trust that any settlement will end the conflict. This is precisely what the state department’s argument defeats.

Alas, we should hardly be surprised that an administration that offers the most specious arguments to defend its domestic abuses of the rule of law would muster equally pathetic efforts to rationalize its violations of international law. At least we can appreciate Hegseth’s promise of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality”. Tepid legality means illegality.

• Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice. He teaches at Amherst College