Why the Iran war was inevitable
I was off by three days. I had formally predicted — if the time stamp on an email counts as formality — that the bombing of Iran would commence on Tuesday, with the first strikes scripted to occur just as Donald Trump was inflicting his State of the Union address on us. He could then pivot to a carefully choreographed off-script moment, bathing himself in glory to the thunderous seal-clapping of his Republican congressional courtiers.
I had assumed that the obvious theatricality of such timing would be irresistible. It might have been the first occasion that anyone has ever overestimated Trump’s capacity for vulgar showmanship. The precise timing of the attack, however, does not matter in the long run so much as why, and what happens next.
When the attack began, Trump, rather than being in Washington, was attending a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Only on the third day did he address the nation, spending most of the speech denouncing the Iranian regime as evil while veering between the objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program (despite claiming he had “obliterated” it in June, which would preclude the urgency of re-obliterating it, especially as negotiations to limit it were interrupted by the attack), and achieving Iranian regime change, a heretofore-taboo phrase in MAGA World.
How a bombing campaign can achieve regime change is unclear, especially as we have been told nothing about the size and military strength of Iranian opposition groups, their readiness to take power, whether a new government would be democratic and who might lead it. We heard much the same rhetoric from the Bush administration, circa 2003, about how Iraqis would rise up to liberate themselves, when these were mostly the fantasies of frauds like Ahmed Chalabi.
A notable feature of Trump’s speech was his call to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to drop their weapons in exchange for “immunity.” What that might mean and how it would be effectuated amid an air campaign was entirely unclear, and made even murkier by a statement the same day from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that “This is not a so-called regime-change war,” and there would be “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
Rules of engagement are typically in place to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, abide by international law, and prevent friendly-fire incidents. Given that the U.S. has already lost three aircraft to fratricide, it raises the question of whether Hegseth actually did alter the rules of engagement in a way that made such incidents more likely, and whether in that case the customarily supine Congress will attempt to hold him accountable.
Hegseth seems to have ordered unit commanders to tell their troops that the war was God’s plan and that Donald Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” That will go over well in the Middle East.
If Hegseth’s rules of engagement for Iran are anything like those that prevailed in the Caribbean, there will be a less-than-rigorous effort to distinguish between legitimate military targets and the general population — the same population that both Trump and Hegseth are exhorting to rise up and overthrow the theocracy running the country. Indeed, Trump announced in short order that U.S. and Israeli strikes had killed persons foreseen as possible successors to the mullahs. To complicate matters even more, Hegseth seems to have ordered unit commanders to tell their troops that the war was God’s plan and that Donald Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” That will go over well in the Middle East.
Then came the statement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the U.S. had gone to war because it faced an imminent threat since Israel was about to attack Iran. This was interpreted by some in the MAGA base as suggesting that Israel dragged the U.S. into the conflict.
Clarifying all of this was the lapidary statement of Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a former wrestler and mixed martial artist who has been selected as Kristi Noem’s replacement at DHS. When asked, “Did the president not run on not starting a war with Iran?” Mullin responded, “He ran on ending wars. He’s ended eight of them.” When the reporter interjected, “He started this one,” Mullin replied, “This isn’t a war.” This is reminiscent of the time, roughly a million casualties ago, when Kremlin spokesmen insisted that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine wasn’t a war.
To recapitulate, we have been told the attack on Iran is a war (a word used repeatedly by Hegseth), is not a war, is a war we were dragged into, and is a kick-starter for the end of the world. A week into the conflict, Trump further ratcheted up the mystification by demanding “unconditional surrender,” a démarche unprecedented since World War II. Even if we discount the obvious evasions, inconsistencies, and outright crazy talk of Trump and his allies, we need to clear up the misconceptions about Iran held by many hawkish Americans beyond Trump’s circle.
The first misconception derives from the fact that Iran is everyone’s poster child for a rogue state that routinely kills its domestic opponents and commits terrorism and sabotage abroad. That picture is true enough, as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that the same conditions apply to North Korea, and for that matter to Russia. No one is proposing, on humanitarian grounds, forcible regime change in Pyongyang or Moscow.
It’s not amoral to exercise exceptional prudence when considering an attack on another country, no matter how odious you may find its government. It encapsulates the well-founded belief that starting a war is likely to create unforeseen evils greater than the evil of the status quo. As Justice Robert H. Jackson stated at the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Likewise, nuclear proliferation is an evil. But Trump’s rhetorical invocation of it is deceitful and hypocritical. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were successfully constrained by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, agreed to in 2015, which provided for inspections; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was abiding by the terms. But Trump had to abrogate the agreement in 2018 because it had been concluded by Barack Obama. What would the world have expected Iran to do if the most important counterparty to the agreement pulled out? Obviously, it would not continue to comply. If Iran’s nuclear program is truly a threat, that was largely Trump’s responsibility. Furthermore, if he had “obliterated” its nuclear infrastructure in June 2025, as he has claimed, it would have been impossible for Iran to rebuild it as an “imminent” threat eight months later.
Most presidential administrations have claimed to operate according to a foreign policy doctrine of some kind: for instance, neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, isolationism, or realpolitik. These doctrines may have obvious flaws, and they may have failed in practice, as with the neocon fever-dream of invading Iraq, or realpolitiker Henry Kissinger’s tilt to Pakistan. That said, they can plausibly be presented as serving the national interest, either because they advance democracy (which America always favors, except when it doesn’t), or because they avoid foreign entanglements, or because they purport to see the world as it is and respond accordingly.
Most presidential administrations have claimed to operate according to a foreign policy doctrine of some kind: for instance, neoconservatism, liberal internationalism, isolationism, or realpolitik. Trump’s policy is none of these.
Trump’s policy is none of these. Why alienate longtime allies, why cultivate dictatorial adversaries, why say one thing to his Republican base (that he would “expel the warmongers from our government”) and do the opposite? Trump’s doctrine, if it can be dignified with the term, is not even unilateralism. Unilateral action can be rationalized as acting because it is too cumbersome to mobilize allies whose interests do not align with one’s own. And the attack on Iran, after all, was not unilateral but conducted in concert with Israel, which has been lobbying for such an action for years and may actually have been driving the policy.
In fact, there is no doctrinal term to describe what Trump and his paladins have been doing. Below are several distinct but non-mutually exclusive reasons why Trump might have ordered the attack on Iran. They make little sense in the context of traditional US foreign policy, but taken together they may help explain why, for a person of Trump’s psychology and moral character, war with Iran at this juncture was not only probable, but maybe nearly inevitable.
Distraction
Foreign policy analysts would normally consider distraction to be a lazy and unprofessional explanation for major actions like wars, if not a symptom of paranoid conspiracy thinking. In the case of Trump, however, we are in unprecedented territory. The Epstein files case has been a major scandal for the past year, and just when it has appeared to be overshadowed by another event (such as the media frenzy over the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the abduction of Nicolás Maduro), it comes roaring back into view with even more lurid revelations. The Epstein saga has even created a small, albeit potentially significant crack in the heretofore granite-like solidity of Trump’s base. Given his own media obsession and 24/7 focus on dominating the news cycle with his own preferred version of events, attacking Iran was one effective way of turning the page. Indeed, are the media talking about Epstein these days?
There are parallels to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Some observers have posited that sagging personal popularity, a belief among Russians that Putin had failed to deliver on economic growth, and dissatisfaction in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic were among the factors driving Putin’s 2022 decision to invade, while creating a rally-round-the-flag effect and changing the domestic mood. It is true that he had long dreamed of restoring the Russian empire, but falling domestic indicators may have dictated the timing.
Dictators may be faithless and brutal to their own people, but in the rarefied circle of fellow dictators, a kind of camaraderie flourishes.
Will such distraction work in Trump’s case? That question is almost irrelevant in the long run, because he does not think that way. In his world, dominating the news cycle for the next week or two with the narrative of Field Marshal Trump might be sufficient. Normal foreign policy considerations regarding conflict with a country of 90 million people situated astride the world’s oil jugular do not come into play.
Authoritarian quid pro quo
Dictators may be faithless and brutal to their own people, but in the rarefied circle of fellow dictators, a kind of camaraderie flourishes. Trump’s openly expressed admiration for Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong-un and others is too well known to require elaboration. It is the flip side of his disdain for democratic leaders.
Crypto deals, tech and media investments, brand licensing and real estate schemes in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states have been fantastically lucrative for Trump, his family and his inner circle. This includes extensive real estate and financial investment deals with the Saudis, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, as well as the “gift” from Qatar of a Boeing 747 worth $400 million. The New Yorker has estimated the family’s total profiteering to be worth around $4 billion, with the lion’s share coming from the Gulf monarchies. Any reasonable person can infer that these transactions are bribes.
It is a peculiarity of Trump’s psychological makeup that although his stateside business ventures are replete with cheating and defrauding his counterparties, from the “Trump University” scam to stiffing vendors and dodging debts via convenient bankruptcies, he has practiced a comradely reciprocity with other authoritarian leaders. Putin’s assistance during the 2016 presidential campaign has been duly recompensed with the American weapons cutoff to Ukraine and the effort to force Kyiv to accept unfavorable peace terms concocted in Moscow (as well as the decision, just announced, to lift sanctions on Russian oil, despite Russia’s reported intelligence assistance to Iran).
In this context, we should note this Washington Post report in the immediate aftermath of the attack: “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution . . .” This is the same Saudi royal whom Trump publicly preferred to believe rather than his own intelligence agencies when U.S. resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018.
It has been conventional wisdom ever since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that Netanyahu will stay out of jail as long as he remains prime minister, and will remain prime minister as long as there is a war. Trump appears to be returning a favor in his customary manner.
The Post article also referenced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “long-running public campaign for U.S. strikes against what he views as an existential enemy of his country.” This is hardly breaking news: when I was a congressional staffer responsible for national security issues, I witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War the beginning of a persistent Israeli campaign claiming that Iran was close to completing a nuclear weapon (which, for some reason, was always six months from completion). This campaign continued right through my retirement in 2011 and on to the present. Until Trump’s second term, every U.S. president resisted this pressure campaign.
Netanyahu, in addition to being the first openly authoritarian Israeli prime minister, also broke with the tradition of not openly intervening in US elections when he openly supported Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump typically demonstrates gratitude for favors rendered by authoritarians, as he has done with Putin, the House of Saud, and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, It has been conventional wisdom ever since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that Netanyahu will stay out of jail as long as he remains prime minister, and will remain prime minister as long as there is a war. Trump appears to be returning a favor in his customary manner.
As with the Gulf monarchs, there is also the potential for an enormous financial windfall. If Israel actually follows through on its various dire proposals to remove the two million Palestinians still in Gaza, Trump has fantasized that he can “take over’ the strip and construct a Levantine Las Vegas.
Dragging the base along
Except for the few “red-pill conservatives” like Pat Buchanan who constitute the purportedly intellectual segment of Trumpism, hardly any current MAGA voters were truly against war, or believed in noninterventionism, prior to Donald Trump’s first candidacy in 2015. On the contrary, they tended to be a pillar of support for the simple-minded American creed that equates knee-jerk cheerleading for U.S. wars from the sidelines with true patriotism. This was the core constituency of the “freedom fries” lunacy or Jerry Falwell’s claim that “God is pro-war” during the Iraq invasion, or, decades earlier, the belief that the My Lai war criminal, Lt. William Calley, was a scapegoat and an American hero.
The GOP base converted to an isolationist stance to get in line with candidate Trump’s assertion that he was against war and that recent disastrous overseas adventures were the fault of global elites like the Bushes and Clintons.
The GOP base converted to an isolationist stance to get in line with candidate Trump’s assertion that he was against war and that recent disastrous overseas adventures were the fault of global elites like the Bushes and Clintons. The point is that for right-wing voters, policy positions (which they reflect on seldom and understand even less, particularly when it comes to foreign policy) can be more fungible than political scientists think. What matters to many of these people is a candidate’s perceived charisma, relatability and ability to channel their fear and resentment.
It is a commonplace observation that MAGA’s attachment to Trump transcends that of even a highly popular politician and now more nearly resembles a cult. If that’s true, then MAGA followers’ reaction to policies that challenge their perception of Trump — for example, his imposition of tariffs after promising to reduce prices, or his stonewalling on the Epstein files — resembles the way religious fundamentalists respond when presented with evidence of evolution. For a few, doubt creeps in, but most overcome their cognitive dissonance and reinflate the bubble of credulity that constitutes their comfort zone. Contrary evidence, just as for the dogmatically religious, is a test of MAGA’s faith — and faith typically wins.
Trump’s intuition tells him that selling the Iran war to his base will work much the same way. Right-wing influencers have already gone to work concocting a narrative that blames the Democrats or invokes some familiar bogeyman, and the faith bubble will be reconstructed. As with every other issue, Trump does not care what Democrats or independents think, as long as his supporters have been “educated” to follow the current party line. Whether this will work or not is hard to say, particularly if gas prices hit $4 a gallon. But everything we know about Trump — the man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care — suggests that he believes it. And believing it, he acted on it, supreme in his confidence that he could drag his supporters along regardless of how flimsy his pretext.
The salted peanuts theory
For a candidate who campaigned on the position that America should stay out of wars, Trump has been remarkably flexible in his second term. He ordered a military intervention in Venezuela and the June 2025 bombing of Iran, along with smaller-scale military operations in Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia, all within his first year in office. Having ordered these operations, declaring victory and suffering no obvious blowback, either strategically or (more important for Trump) in terms of his own domestic popularity, it’s clear, in the words of the New York Times’ Peter Baker, that “Trump is far more comfortable using the instruments of power than he was the last time around, at home as well as abroad.”
That phrasing should set off alarm bells. No president should feel comfortable about starting a war, and all the presidents in my lifetime, starting with Lyndon Johnson, have made a public show of agonizing over the decision to send troops into battle, whatever their true feelings. But regardless of any president’s attitude, it is doubtful that any single individual should be entrusted with the decision to go to war, except in clear cases of enemy attack. That is why the framers gave the power to declare war to Congress, a deliberative body, even if that power has been watered down to the “authorization for the use of force,” a legal instrument that now, under congressional Republicans, is entirely in abeyance.
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In his first term, Trump’s aggressive instincts were softened by actual adults with relevant military experience, such as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or White House chief of staff John Kelly. In the second term, he is surrounded by a palace guard of the most abject sycophants, all of whom lack the most basic knowledge of the use of military force or of the countries and regions where that force might be applied. Their only qualification is their capacity for flattery.
Given the absence of truth-tellers in the White House, it is entirely possible that Trump, being ignorant of history, geography and military strategy, does not understand the risks of a major military operation in the Middle East. His previous military adventures worked out, so why not this one? Those who counsel caution on the outside are simply woke Panicans, or Democrats badmouthing him. In any case, a person with the psychology of a malignant adolescent is unlikely to think very far past the conviction that wielding awesome powers of destruction is cool.
It is even possible that Trump, cosseted as he is, is unaware of polls indicating that his war is not playing in Peoria. His existence inside a hermetically sealed information bubble may also help account for his declining political skills. His first presidential campaign in 2016 was marked by a feral but highly developed gut instinct for what the public wanted, or at least what it thought it wanted. Now that he is surrounded by yes-men and visibly diminished by age, Trump seems to have lost that instinct. He simply assumed the war would be popular, or that he could at least pull the entire base along to support it.
None of these rationales bears any relation to a traditional American national security strategy. Going to war with Iran is the most graphic example so far of the fact that Trump is merely a more extreme version of what the bulk of the Republican establishment has become in the last two decades.
If small-c conservatism is supposed to be characterized by prudence, caution, incrementalism and an aversion to wild experiments, the typical present-day Republican is the opposite. Planning is for weaklings, rational analysis is disdained, the amygdala and the gut replace the cerebral cortex. Chaos is his friend; things should be shaken up just to see what happens. Why shouldn’t that work in the Middle East, even if he can’t distinguish Sunni from Shia and doesn’t understand the basic geography of the region? This is a variant of the tech-bro philosophy: Move fast and break things, and the pieces will magically arrange themselves to suit Trump’s view of the world. Plus there’s a lot of money to be made, particularly if he and his inner circle have placed their bets on the prediction markets or oil futures.
If small-c conservatism is supposed to be characterized by prudence, caution, incrementalism and an aversion to wild experiments, the typical present-day Republican is the opposite.
The chaos that Trump and Republicans thrive on threatens to spill far beyond the Middle East, and not just with the price of gasoline. The prices of aluminum, fertilizer (just ahead of the planting season in the Northern Hemisphere) and anything that’s made of petrochemicals or requires fossil-fuel energy will all climb. The cost of air and sea freight has already spiked in a manner reminiscent of the COVID pandemic. According to a report by the National Intelligence Council, the war may not end soon, and is not likely to topple Iran’s current regime. If the chaos is not confined to the economy and takes the form of lethal retaliation here at home, don’t count on any help from Trump and the Republicans: the White House has also blocked an intelligence report warning of war-related terrorist threats.
Seventy-seven million Americans are now receiving exactly what they voted for. It’s a pity that the rest of us have to be along for the ride.
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from Mike Lofgren