Latest news with #MarkoMilanovic
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
How Olivia Smith became a £1m player: ‘You didn't have to be a soccer person to understand'
Marko Milanovic was ambling the familiar path home between grassroots pitches after his local boys team's match in 2014 when it happened: a perfect diagonal switch from the right wing from a girl no taller than his waist. And there went the then North Toronto Nitros coach's bag from his shoulder along with his obligations for the day. 'I stood there, watching her whole game,' Milanovic, tells The Athletic. The girl: a 10-year-old Olivia Smith, who this week became the most expensive transfer in women's football with her £1million move from Liverpool to Arsenal in the Women's Super League. Milanovic, who now leads AFC Toronto in the Northern Super League, would later coach Smith at the youth level. Former Florida State University women's football coach Mark Krikorian can't recall the date, but he remembers Smith. A glimpse of a video, a blur of feet and then, instant omniscience. 'At the earliest possible date we were allowed to by college rules, we had Olivia visit us at Florida State,' he says. 'She ended up coming to a camp where she blew my entire staff away by her level of play, her quality. Even at that time – and she was still quite young – I said to our staff she may end up being the most talented player we ever have.' And there is Joey Lombardi, then a youth development scout with Canada Soccer, who caught the Whitby-born winger flitting down the right wing sometime in 2016, slicing past a handful of opponents two years her senior, cutting inside on her left foot. 'She hit the ball top corner,' Lombardi recalls. And before he could qualify where the 12-year-old's left foot ranked among contemporaries, Smith struck a perfect cross with her right. 'Two-footed,' he says, laughing. 'She definitely caught my attention.' Capturing attention is something Smith has found a knack for. And that Smith is now the world's most lucrative women's signing is destiny's worst-kept secret. 'As soon as she joined the pro game, I knew,' says Milanovic. 'We all knew.' In the past three years, she has gone from North Toronto Nitros in the semi-professional League1 Ontario, to the youngest member of Canada's 2023 Women's World Cup squad (18 years old, having already broken the record for youngest senior debutante four years earlier at 15 years and 94 days) to Sporting CP, to Liverpool as the women's team's record signing and now to Arsenal. Reaching into her roots is to discover a small but ferocious girl regularly outgrowing her contexts. 'She was playing two years up when I saw her,' says Milanovic, who coached North Toronto's girls team in 2015, initially coaching against Smith before she joined his team a year later. 'We man-marked her… at under-13s! We had to man-mark her. She wasn't happy about that, obviously, but that's how dominant she was at the time.' In her first year with Milanovic, Smith was the youngest player in a team brimming with multiple Canada youth internationals. Not that it meant anything. 'That first season she scored something like 40 or 45 goals in 15 games,' he says. 'You didn't have to be a soccer person to understand how good she was.' Since the beginning, those who have known Smith describe an amalgamation of grace and brawn, the instinctive swivel of hips, her ability to transform a small space into a stage of perpetual motion, aided by her taekwondo. There was also her fury: to defend, to give chase, to win back possession. As she matured, so did her versatility. Lombardi points to her ability not only to play as a wide winger, but a No 10, a centre forward, across the front line as key to her move to Arsenal. 'Her quality on the field is very different from many,' Krikorian says, who met Smith as a young teenager when she and her father, Sean, reached out for training tips. 'The thing that separated her was that she really does make all of her team-mates, everyone around her, better. That's a rare quality.' There was also love. Smith would put herself in front of the television with her dad, watching re-runs of Brazilian Ronaldo, of Pele, of sultry dancing feet, doodling manifestations in her diary: to play for Canada, to be a Ballon d'Or winner, to become a legend. 'I would go to a local field to watch some games,' says Lombardi. 'Olivia would be there, playing pickup soccer.' 'She would be so excited before games,' adds Milanovic. 'She would be dancing. She couldn't even wait for the game to get started. 'Every time I coached the boys' teams, she'd train with my teams. She always asked for more. Even later on, when she went to the National Development Centre, she would always come back, train with the boys. We worried about over-training, because she just wanted to be on the ball all the time. We had to stop her so many times, because she would play all the time.' Stopping her was easier said than done. That is not to say people didn't try. As early as six, Smith was told repeatedly by a local club that she could not play at a higher age group. In elementary school, she returned home with bruised legs and black eyes from boys refusing to let her play. After Lombardi's initial Smith experience, he kept tabs on the winger, eventually bringing her into the newly-launched Ontario Development Centre in 2018, run by the Canadian Soccer Association as part of the development pathway. However, after Lombardi's departure, Smith said, while speaking to The Athletic in November, that she was suspended multiple times for soliciting additional training opportunities during the program's 'off season', when the coach permitted only fitness training. Not until Lombardi's return in 2021, when he 'made it my objective to get Olivia and her family back involved' did Smith return to the setup. A year later, after dissolving her initial commitment to Florida State University following Krikorian's departure, Smith committed to playing for Penn State. However, she sustained a medial cruciate ligament injury while away with Canada's under-20s, leading to her arriving in her freshman year of college with a knee brace. The road to recovery was arduous. The battle to reinstate herself in Penn State's starting XI proved even more so. 'I only went to university to play football. So the fact I couldn't…' Smith told The Athletic last November. 'It's a miracle that someone saw me within those couple of games.' That's when Joao Almeida Rosa arrived. The Sporting CP's head of women's football scouting sat in the bleachers of Penn State's Beaver Stadium, barely believing what he was seeing. 'It was not one quality,' he tells The Athletic over the telephone. 'It was the amount of qualities that we usually don't see in the same player.' Even as Smith's statistics at Penn State betrayed this, a player operating from the bench, a lone goal and assist to her name, Rosa believed he had stumbled upon a diamond. His remit as a scout for Sporting — the first for the club's women's department — was to hunt for the less-obvious talents, a consequence of the club's inability to compete with top European and NWSL clubs. Rosa reached out to Smith's agent, learning about the injury and her slow integration back into the squad under head coach Erica Dambach. With a scouting video and a sense of certainty, Rosa flew to Portugal. Thirty seconds of Smith's scouting video was enough for then-Sporting head coach Mariana Cabral (now assistant coach at Utah Royals). When Smith sat before them in an office at Sporting, they knew their faith was justified. How do you see me as a player? What formation do you play in? What position do you think I can do? What are the positions you don't think I can do? Do you have a nutritionist department? Will you teach me Portuguese? I want to know Portuguese. Where do you see me in five years? How can you get me there? 'Even today,' Rosa says, 'there has never been a player who asked me so many questions — especially not an 18-year-old.' Cabral knew, deep down, that Smith was a phenomenon passing through. To watch her set off a run down the wing was to be forced to acknowledge she would not stay long in any space. This was the same young girl who was determined to return to taekwondo, despite the 'torture' of being harnessed into a strap and forced to do kick jumps for an entire class while her peers watched because her instructor (an 18-year-old female fifth Dan Master) did not like her technique. It is the same girl who urged her dad to turn the family basement into a pseudo-technical skill batcave so she could train during Toronto's cold, winter slogs: ladders and cones on the floor to perfect her footwork, a table with its legs removed pushed against the wall to perfect her touch. The same girl who, on the advice of Krikorian, attended Aaron Byrd's Next Level Training program (U.S. players Naomi Girma and Catarina Macario were both developed there) in Michigan, describing enervating training sessions that brought her to the point of being sick with a wide smile. The same girl who missed birthday parties, sleepovers, and even her own graduation. 'She's a very ambitious player,' says Cabral, who watched Smith score 13 goals and provide nine assists in 18 league appearances as Sporting finished runners-up behind Benfica. 'Sometimes she could be doing something really well, then the next minute she'd make a mistake. She'd get really mad at herself. Sometimes she was really demanding. Sporting was a good learning curve for her. 'But I think that's very important to be a great player and to be one of the best. Talent is not enough. You need to be demanding, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you, every year, want more. You want to know more, do more, make my team win more. You want new challenges, new clubs, new countries. 'Liv is that kind of player. She won't be at all bothered by being a million-pound player; she probably doesn't care. She's so focused, not on the end results but on the process of getting better, of growing.' Rosa, Milanovic, Krikorian and Lombardi greet the news that, after just two seasons of professional football, Smith is now the women's game's record signing as a practicality. There were areas of improvement, of course. Rosa and Cabral both point to decision-making, albeit they put that down to North American soccer's style — more direct and vertical, and more physical in nature – as caveats. 'Probably her understanding of space,' Milanovic offers, admitting that he changed 'the whole system' of his under-14s team to allow Smith to play more centrally to learn to read space and play off her team-mates better. Almost instantly, Milanovic is laughing at the attempt to excavate bones from the performances of a 13-year-old. 'All of us coaches have very little to do with where she is right now,' he says. 'You could see it kind of happening, step by step,' adds Lombardi. But you could also see the girl, bright-eyed, dancing with anticipation on the touchlines. 'I remember a pre-game team meeting, I left my phone in the room,' says Cabral. 'When I went back after lunch, I had about 10 selfies of Liv on it when I opened it. Just Liv, looking funny, doing faces.' 'For me, remembering Liv is just the joy and happiness she brought into the office every time she came in,' says Krikorian. 'Wide-eyed, wanting to learn, wanting to get better, wanting to be the best.' This article originally appeared in The Athletic. Arsenal, Liverpool, Canada, Premier League, Soccer, NWSL, Women's Soccer 2025 The Athletic Media Company
New York Times
19-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How Olivia Smith became a £1m player: ‘You didn't have to be a soccer person to understand'
Marko Milanovic was ambling the familiar path home between grassroots pitches after his local boys team's match in 2014 when it happened: a perfect diagonal switch from the right wing from a girl no taller than his waist. And there went the then North Toronto Nitros coach's bag from his shoulder along with his obligations for the day. 'I stood there, watching her whole game,' Milanovic, tells The Athletic. Advertisement The girl: a 10-year-old Olivia Smith, who this week became the most expensive transfer in women's football with her £1million move from Liverpool to Arsenal in the Women's Super League. Milanovic, who now leads AFC Toronto in the Northern Super League, would later coach Smith at the youth level. Former Florida State University women's football coach Mark Krikorian can't recall the date, but he remembers Smith. A glimpse of a video, a blur of feet and then, instant omniscience. 'At the earliest possible date we were allowed to by college rules, we had Olivia visit us at Florida State,' he says. 'She ended up coming to a camp where she blew my entire staff away by her level of play, her quality. Even at that time – and she was still quite young – I said to our staff she may end up being the most talented player we ever have.' And there is Joey Lombardi, then a youth development scout with Canada Soccer, who caught the Whitby-born winger flitting down the right wing sometime in 2016, slicing past a handful of opponents two years her senior, cutting inside on her left foot. 'She hit the ball top corner,' Lombardi recalls. And before he could qualify where the 12-year-old's left foot ranked among contemporaries, Smith struck a perfect cross with her right. 'Two-footed,' he says, laughing. 'She definitely caught my attention.' Capturing attention is something Smith has found a knack for. And that Smith is now the world's most lucrative women's signing is destiny's worst-kept secret. 'As soon as she joined the pro game, I knew,' says Milanovic. 'We all knew.' In the past three years, she has gone from North Toronto Nitros in the semi-professional League1 Ontario, to the youngest member of Canada's 2023 Women's World Cup squad (18 years old, having already broken the record for youngest senior debutante four years earlier at 15 years and 94 days) to Sporting CP, to Liverpool as the women's team's record signing and now to Arsenal. Advertisement Reaching into her roots is to discover a small but ferocious girl regularly outgrowing her contexts. 'She was playing two years up when I saw her,' says Milanovic, who coached North Toronto's girls team in 2015, initially coaching against Smith before she joined his team a year later. 'We man-marked her… at under-13s! We had to man-mark her. She wasn't happy about that, obviously, but that's how dominant she was at the time.' In her first year with Milanovic, Smith was the youngest player in a team brimming with multiple Canada youth internationals. Not that it meant anything. 'That first season she scored something like 40 or 45 goals in 15 games,' he says. 'You didn't have to be a soccer person to understand how good she was.' Since the beginning, those who have known Smith describe an amalgamation of grace and brawn, the instinctive swivel of hips, her ability to transform a small space into a stage of perpetual motion, aided by her taekwondo. There was also her fury: to defend, to give chase, to win back possession. As she matured, so did her versatility. Lombardi points to her ability not only to play as a wide winger, but a No 10, a centre forward, across the front line as key to her move to Arsenal. 'Her quality on the field is very different from many,' Krikorian says, who met Smith as a young teenager when she and her father, Sean, reached out for training tips. 'The thing that separated her was that she really does make all of her team-mates, everyone around her, better. That's a rare quality.' There was also love. Smith would put herself in front of the television with her dad, watching re-runs of Brazilian Ronaldo, of Pele, of sultry dancing feet, doodling manifestations in her diary: to play for Canada, to be a Ballon d'Or winner, to become a legend. 'I would go to a local field to watch some games,' says Lombardi. 'Olivia would be there, playing pickup soccer.' 'She would be so excited before games,' adds Milanovic. 'She would be dancing. She couldn't even wait for the game to get started. 'Every time I coached the boys' teams, she'd train with my teams. She always asked for more. Even later on, when she went to the National Development Centre, she would always come back, train with the boys. We worried about over-training, because she just wanted to be on the ball all the time. We had to stop her so many times, because she would play all the time.' Advertisement Stopping her was easier said than done. That is not to say people didn't try. As early as six, Smith was told repeatedly by a local club that she could not play at a higher age group. In elementary school, she returned home with bruised legs and black eyes from boys refusing to let her play. After Lombardi's initial Smith experience, he kept tabs on the winger, eventually bringing her into the newly-launched Ontario Development Centre in 2018, run by the Canadian Soccer Association as part of the development pathway. However, after Lombardi's departure, Smith said, while speaking to The Athletic in November, that she was suspended multiple times for soliciting additional training opportunities during the program's 'off season', when the coach permitted only fitness training. Not until Lombardi's return in 2021, when he 'made it my objective to get Olivia and her family back involved' did Smith return to the setup. A year later, after dissolving her initial commitment to Florida State University following Krikorian's departure, Smith committed to playing for Penn State. However, she sustained a medial cruciate ligament injury while away with Canada's under-20s, leading to her arriving in her freshman year of college with a knee brace. The road to recovery was arduous. The battle to reinstate herself in Penn State's starting XI proved even more so. 'I only went to university to play football. So the fact I couldn't…' Smith told The Athletic last November. 'It's a miracle that someone saw me within those couple of games.' That's when Joao Almeida Rosa arrived. The Sporting CP's head of women's football scouting sat in the bleachers of Penn State's Beaver Stadium, barely believing what he was seeing. 'It was not one quality,' he tells The Athletic over the telephone. 'It was the amount of qualities that we usually don't see in the same player.' Advertisement Even as Smith's statistics at Penn State betrayed this, a player operating from the bench, a lone goal and assist to her name, Rosa believed he had stumbled upon a diamond. His remit as a scout for Sporting — the first for the club's women's department — was to hunt for the less-obvious talents, a consequence of the club's inability to compete with top European and NWSL clubs. Rosa reached out to Smith's agent, learning about the injury and her slow integration back into the squad under head coach Erica Dambach. With a scouting video and a sense of certainty, Rosa flew to Portugal. Thirty seconds of Smith's scouting video was enough for then-Sporting head coach Mariana Cabral (now assistant coach at Utah Royals). When Smith sat before them in an office at Sporting, they knew their faith was justified. How do you see me as a player? What formation do you play in? What position do you think I can do? What are the positions you don't think I can do? Do you have a nutritionist department? Will you teach me Portuguese? I want to know Portuguese. Where do you see me in five years? How can you get me there? 'Even today,' Rosa says, 'there has never been a player who asked me so many questions — especially not an 18-year-old.' Cabral knew, deep down, that Smith was a phenomenon passing through. To watch her set off a run down the wing was to be forced to acknowledge she would not stay long in any space. This was the same young girl who was determined to return to taekwondo, despite the 'torture' of being harnessed into a strap and forced to do kick jumps for an entire class while her peers watched because her instructor (an 18-year-old female fifth Dan Master) did not like her technique. It is the same girl who urged her dad to turn the family basement into a pseudo-technical skill batcave so she could train during Toronto's cold, winter slogs: ladders and cones on the floor to perfect her footwork, a table with its legs removed pushed against the wall to perfect her touch. Advertisement The same girl who, on the advice of Krikorian, attended Aaron Byrd's Next Level Training program (U.S. players Naomi Girma and Catarina Macario were both developed there) in Michigan, describing enervating training sessions that brought her to the point of being sick with a wide smile. The same girl who missed birthday parties, sleepovers, and even her own graduation. 'She's a very ambitious player,' says Cabral, who watched Smith score 13 goals and provide nine assists in 18 league appearances as Sporting finished runners-up behind Benfica. 'Sometimes she could be doing something really well, then the next minute she'd make a mistake. She'd get really mad at herself. Sometimes she was really demanding. Sporting was a good learning curve for her. 'But I think that's very important to be a great player and to be one of the best. Talent is not enough. You need to be demanding, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you, every year, want more. You want to know more, do more, make my team win more. You want new challenges, new clubs, new countries. 'Liv is that kind of player. She won't be at all bothered by being a million-pound player; she probably doesn't care. She's so focused, not on the end results but on the process of getting better, of growing.' Rosa, Milanovic, Krikorian and Lombardi greet the news that, after just two seasons of professional football, Smith is now the women's game's record signing as a practicality. There were areas of improvement, of course. Rosa and Cabral both point to decision-making, albeit they put that down to North American soccer's style — more direct and vertical, and more physical in nature – as caveats. 'Probably her understanding of space,' Milanovic offers, admitting that he changed 'the whole system' of his under-14s team to allow Smith to play more centrally to learn to read space and play off her team-mates better. Advertisement Almost instantly, Milanovic is laughing at the attempt to excavate bones from the performances of a 13-year-old. 'All of us coaches have very little to do with where she is right now,' he says. 'You could see it kind of happening, step by step,' adds Lombardi. But you could also see the girl, bright-eyed, dancing with anticipation on the touchlines. 'I remember a pre-game team meeting, I left my phone in the room,' says Cabral. 'When I went back after lunch, I had about 10 selfies of Liv on it when I opened it. Just Liv, looking funny, doing faces.' 'For me, remembering Liv is just the joy and happiness she brought into the office every time she came in,' says Krikorian. 'Wide-eyed, wanting to learn, wanting to get better, wanting to be the best.'
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Rowe's late goal lifts Toronto to 1-0 NSL road win over Halifax
HALIFAX — Lauren Rowe's goal in the 79th minute snapped a scoreless tie and lifted the visiting AFC Toronto to a 1-0 Northern Super League victory over the Halifax Tides on Tuesday at Wanderers Grounds. Eight minutes earlier Toronto's Victoria Pickett drilled a shot off the goalpost as the first-place visitors applied pressure on the last-place hosts. Advertisement Toronto, which had 17 shot attempts compared to 11 for Halifax, finished with four on-target shots. They improved to eights wins, three losses and one draw for 25 points. The visitors became the first NSL team to five win straight matches. 'It (the goal) honestly didn't feel real at first — being away, I didn't hear much of a cheer, but when my teammates came over to celebrate, it hit me. It was such a special moment," said Rowe. The Tides, who also had four on-target shots, received two of the match's four yellow cards and slipped to three wins, seven losses and one draw for 10 points. 'We played against a very organized and motivated team in front of a great home crowd,' said Toronto head coach Marko Milanovic. 'We knew it was going to be a tough game, but I'm proud of how we stayed patient and kept doing the right things. Even when the goals didn't come early, we trusted the process and we got rewarded for it.' Advertisement Toronto goalkeeper Sofia Manner recorded the clean sheet. Midfielder Nikki Small added an assist, moving her into a tie for the NSL lead with five helpers. Attendance was announced as 4,051. UP NEXT AFC Toronto: Hosts the Montreal Roses on Friday. Halifax Tides: Host the Vancouver Rise on Saturday. This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 15, 2025. The Canadian Press
CBC
25-06-2025
- Sport
- CBC
Canadian international Sarah Stratigakis signs with NSL's AFC Toronto
Social Sharing Canadian midfielder Sarah Stratigakis tells a familiar story in signing with AFC Toronto. "I'm very excited. Finally, to have a chance to play professionally in Canada," said the 26-year-old from Woodbridge, Ont. "Playing in front of my family, my friends, my hometown, it means the world to me." Stratigakis was also sold by the pitch from Toronto sporting director Billy Wilson and head coach Marko Milanovic. "I really align with their values and their vision for the team," she said in an interview. "I just see it as a place where I can get better as well. I really want to [put] my stamp on that team." Stratigakis can start training with Toronto in July, but can't play until after July 20 when the transfer window opens. Her last game was in May. After a stellar collegiate career at Michigan, Stratigakis played overseas in Sweden (Vittsjö GIK), England (Bristol City) and France (Saint-Etienne). "Playing abroad was probably one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career," she said. "I've been all over. Each country offered new challenges, new expectations and style of play. I've definitely learned a lot from my time there." The league in Sweden was "incredibly challenging," and her teammates were "high quality," she said. "I was improving all the time," she added. "It was just an environment I enjoyed." Delaney Baie Pridham's hat trick powers Ottawa Rapid FC past AFC Toronto 18 days ago Duration 3:40 Tough 2024 season with Bristol City She counted Canadians Sabrina D'Angelo and Sura Yekka, a childhood friend and fellow former Wolverine, among her teammates in Sweden. Stratigakis signed with Bristol City in January 2024, arriving midway through a difficult campaign that saw the club relegated after a 1-18-3 debut season in the English top tier. "I'd always wanted to play in the Women's Super League," she said. "Being a new promoted team is obviously a hard situation, but it was really cool playing against the Man Cities, the Arsenals of the world," she added. "That was really cool to grow my game." She joined Saint-Etienne in August 2024. The club went on to finish 10th in the 12-team French league at 5-15-2. "It seemed like a good fit for me," she said. "I played loads of minutes. And it was cool that we made the Coupe de France semifinals. It was the first time, I think, in a decade that the team had accomplished that. So we had some highs, but of course in a football career, there's some lows as well. And it's how you overcome those moments." At Michigan, she was named Big Ten Midfielder of the Year in 2019 and won the Big Ten tournament in 2021. She started 92 of 95 games for the Wolverines from 2017 to 2021, scoring 20 goals and adding 28 assists. An attacking midfielder, Stratigakis likes to be in the centre of the action. "I like to be on the ball. I can make things happen," she said when asked about her style of play. Made senior debut for Canada at 17 Stratigakis has won five caps for Canada, including two starts, with one goal. At youth level, she represented Canada at three FIFA tournaments — U-17 World Cup in 2014 in Costa Rica and 2016 in Jordan and the U-20 World Cup in 2016 in Papua New Guinea. She was 17 when she made her senior debut for Canada in February 2017 in a 3-2 win over Mexico in Vancouver. Stratigakis came off the bench to score in stoppage time to give Canada a 1-0 win over Argentina at the SheBelieves Cup in Orlando in February 2021. Her last senior appearance was against Wales in April 2021. Stratigakis knows Toronto teammates include Victoria Pickett, Emma Regan, Kaela Hansen and Ashley Cathro from her time with the national team. At Michigan, she graduated from the school of kinesiology with a major in sport management. Stratigakis has also started her coaching badges, having already obtained her UEFA 'C' licence. Returning to Canada opens the door for her to continue those passions. "Being in Europe, it's really hard to do anything but play for your team, because of language barriers and certain rules," she said. "The fact that I can come home and maybe start other parts of my life is another reason why it's great to have a Canadian league, so I can start thinking of things after football as well.: AFC Toronto currently tops the six-team Northern Super League at 6-3-1 and, with 15 goals is second only to Ottawa Rapid FC (with 16) in scoring.
Indian Express
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Are Israel's airstrikes on Iran within legal bounds?
Is Israel's latest attack on Iran's military and nuclear facilities legal under international law? And would it be legal for the United States to intervene on Israel's behalf? The answer to those questions gets to the heart of the most basic principles of international law, which draw on hundreds of years of precedents to lay out when countries can justifiably use force against each other. Some experts say that if Israel is launching airstrikes on Iran solely to prevent a possible future attack, it would probably be illegal — and so would an effort by the United States to come to Israel's aid, as President Donald Trump considers whether to attack Iran's buried Fordo nuclear site. Other experts argue that the current military operation is part of a continuing conflict that began when Iran's proxies attacked Israel in 2023. That could strengthen Israel's argument that its actions are part of the defensive measures that followed those prior attacks, and thus legal. That same argument would apply to the United States if it attacks Iran at Israel's request. Jus ad Bellum and the Caroline Test The rules governing when states can use military force are known as the law of jus ad bellum, or 'right to war.' Jus ad bellum centers on the simple principle that states are prohibited from using force against each other, except in self-defense or if authorized by the UN Security Council. And even when the self-defense exception applies, the force must be limited to what is necessary and proportional. It is not a carte blanche for military conquest. Although those principles are set forth in the UN Charter, the law behind them is far older. The Caroline test — a rule of customary international law that says states can use force only when absolutely necessary, to address an imminent, overwhelming threat — stems from 1837, when British forces crossed into the United States to destroy the American ship Caroline, to prevent rebels from attacking Canada. (Precedents in international law often involve ships.) The principle still holds today that it is illegal to use military force to prevent a future attack that is not imminent. Israel's current bombing campaign appears to fall afoul of that rule, some experts say. 'There is simply no plausible way of arguing that Iran was about to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon, which it doesn't even have,' Marko Milanovic, a law professor at Reading University in England, argued in a recent blog post. In his speech announcing the military operation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to describe the country's actions as preemptive. He said Israel was acting 'to thwart a danger before it is fully materialized,' and that Iran had enough material to produce nuclear weapons 'within a few months.' Several days later, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council, the Israeli government said the operation 'aimed to neutralize the existential and imminent threat from Iran's nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.' Iranian leaders have called for Israel's destruction in the past, and Israel's small size makes it especially vulnerable to nuclear strikes. However, US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear weapon. Proxies and the Nicaragua Test Other legal scholars see it differently, arguing that Israel's military operation in Iran is part of a defensive response to armed attacks by Iran and its proxies, including Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. In that framing, Israel's attacks are not preventive, but rather part of an ongoing, justified self-defense operation. 'We are of the view that if the proxy war and the direct Israeli-Iranian hostilities are intertwined,' Amichai Cohen, a law professor at Ono Academic College in Israel, and Yuval Shany, a law professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued in a recent essay for the website Just Security, 'Israel is entitled to take self-defense measures against Iran, since some of its proxies — Hamas and the Houthis — continue to launch rockets against Israel almost on a daily basis with Iran's substantial involvement.' For that to be true, Iran's influence over its proxies would need to meet a legal standard that is sometimes called the 'Nicaragua test,' which arose from a case involving the U.S. backing of the Contra militia in Nicaragua. If a state has 'effective control' over a militia, it can be held legally responsible for the militia's actions. And if it has 'substantial involvement' in a particular attack, it shares in the legal consequences of that attack too. It appears unlikely that the 'effective control' standard would be met in this case, however. The members of Iran's so-called axis of resistance appear to have their own interests and to not be completely controlled by Iran. The New York Times has reported that Hamas failed to convince Iran to back its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, for example. And while experts have long believed that Iran had considerable involvement in the military operations of Hezbollah, which began firing rockets on Israeli positions on Oct. 8, 2023, that group signed a ceasefire agreement with Israel last year, and for now appears to be staying out of the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. Iran does not appear to have effective control over the Houthis. However, the United States has accused Iran of being directly involved in the Houthi rebels' attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which began later in October 2023, by providing targeting assistance. And the Houthis' attacks on Israel are still going on. Iran and Israel also traded direct strikes against each other's territory and personnel last year. In April, Iran fired hundreds of missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, Syria. Days later, Israel retaliated with strikes of its own against Iranian territory. Then, in October, Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel killing Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas. But those strikes were relatively limited in both scope and time, so it is unlikely that they would be enough, on their own, to constitute an ongoing conflict. And even if there were such a conflict, Israel's escalation would still need to be necessary and proportional to its defensive needs, Shany said. What about the United States? The legality of a possible US intervention in the conflict would most likely turn on the legality of Israel's actions, Shany said. International law does allow collective self-defense, in which states provide assistance to victims of unlawful attacks, as long as the victim state requests it. That was why, for example, it was legal for the United States and other allies to assist Kuwait in repelling the Iraqi invasion in 1990. But if Israel's actions are illegal, then the United States' participation in them would be too, unless there was an independent justification such as a separate need for self-defense against Iran. International tribunals move slowly, so it is unlikely that Israel or the United States will answer for their decisions before a court soon, if ever. But the laws of war still matter. The shared expectations they create are part of the foundations of the international order, helping to preserve peace and stability. The rules have never been perfectly followed, and the international order never perfectly peaceful or stable. But every time the rules are violated, those shared expectations weaken, making the world more uncertain and dangerous.
