Operation Epic Fury and the Architecture of Borrowed Legitimacy:How the US–Israeli War on Iran Manufactured Coalition Consent

Abstract

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a coordinated air campaign targeting Iran's nuclear infrastructure, military command structures, and political leadership. Within 48 hours, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had publicly acknowledged that the operation was predicated not on an imminent Iranian threat to the United States, but on the anticipated consequences of Israeli military action that Washington knew in advance would trigger Iranian retaliation against American forces. This admission is significant. It does not merely complicate the legal justification for the operation; it effectively removes it. And yet the operation proceeded, escalated, and, through a combination of structural pressure, alliance politics and manufactured consequence, succeeded in drawing in partners who had explicitly refused to participate at the outset.

This paper examines that process. It asks how a war of choice, launched without UN Security Council authorisation and predicated on a retroactively constructed casus belli, managed to manufacture the appearance of coalition legitimacy within days of its opening strikes. The paper draws on primary sources, namely Rubio's State Department testimony, parliamentary records, the E3 joint statement, and Arabic-language analytical commentary on Iran's Gulf strategy, together with Patricia Weitsman’s scholarship on coalition warfare and legitimacy. The central argument is that the mechanisms of coalition drag visible in Operation Epic Fury are not accidental or sui generis; they represent a mature institutional logic for converting unilateral wars of choice into legitimised multilateral interventions.