Abstract: The US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites during the so-called 12-Day War is part of a long history of preemptive military interventions that use the Indian Wars as a legal precedent. This essay explores how an anti-imperialist framing within American Indian studies sheds light on the legal underpinnings of US ‘forever wars’ in West Asia and beyond. More than two centuries of imperialist warmaking relies on the United States’ longest series of military campaigns, the Indian Wars, as a legal justification of presidential war powers to wage undeclared aggressions against any nation or group deemed an enemy of the United States.