War Needs More Than a Reason to Start
On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched what they called Operation Epic Fury - nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours, B-2 bombers and stealth fighters targeting Iranian military infrastructure, leadership, and nuclear sites. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed along with several senior officials. A girl’s school in Minab was struck, killing more than 160 people. Iran retaliated with missiles and drones hitting U.S. embassies, military installations, and oil infrastructure across at least 10 countries.
President Trump announced the onset of this operation in an eight-minute video on Truth Social at 2:30 AM ET.
There was no address to Congress. No prime-time address to the nation. No formal request for authorization to use military force. Just a social media post beginning the most significant U.S. military operation in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
If you’ve been following the news, you already know this. If you haven’t been, I want to make sure we all understand the weight of this before we go any further: the United States has centered itself in another war in the Middle East.
This comes from the same president who ran on “no new wars.” Who accepted the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize for his efforts “to promote peace and unity around the world.” Who created an international “Board of Peace” and convened the Board’s inaugural meeting to declare plans for peace and reconstruction in Gaza - only to watch bombs fall on Iran ten days later, pausing disarmament talks in Gaza. Who has since posted on Truth Social that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited” supply of weapons and that wars can be fought “forever.”
The president who built his re-election bid around ending forever wars is now openly describing his own war in those terms.
The shifting story
Since the strikes began, administration officials have offered several explanations for why we are at war - sometimes within the same news cycle, sometimes contradicting each other before the day was out. I want to focus on the ones that tell you the most about how this administration governs.
“It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon…Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
- President Donald Trump, Truth Social address, February 28
This was the opening justification and the most defensible one on its face.
But it collapsed almost immediately under the weight of the administration’s own record and asserted achievements. The White House had already declared that after last summer’s strikes that the Iranian nuclear program was “totally obliterated” and “suggestions otherwise are fake news.” The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that Iran had no structured program to build nuclear weapons.
If that was all true then, what changed? If that wasn’t true then, why should we believe the assessments now? In the same initial announcement of the strikes, another argument for the war came from the president.
“To the great people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand…When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
- President Donald Trump, Truth Social address, February 28
This may be the most dangerous point - and the most historically ignorant one.
In the month prior to these strikes, Iranian security forces killed tens of thousands of protestors during the largest protests since the Islamic Revolution. That is the baseline reality of how dissent is handled inside Iran. That is what the regime does to its own people under normal circumstances - before there’s a war, before soldiers fill the streets, before the Islamic Revolutionary Guard has every reason to treat any act of resistance as collaboration with an enemy actively bombing the country.
Telling Iranians to “rise up” under those conditions isn’t inspiration. It’s asking people to die for an outcome they may not even want.
And here’s the part this administration doesn’t seem to have thought through at all: even if a popular uprising succeeded, there is no guarantee or historical basis suggesting that what replaces this regime would be friendlier to the United States or Israel.
We’ve seen this before. In 1953, the CIA helped orchestrate a coup that reinstated Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch and expanded U.S. influence over Iran. For a generation, Washington congratulated itself on the arrangement. Then in 1979, the revolution came, fueled by resentment of foreign influence and the Shah’s dependence on the United States. The government the U.S. had propped up was swept away, replaced not by something friendlier to American interests, but by the clerical regime we’ve been in conflict with ever since.
I’m not offering a history lecture. I’m pointing out this is a lesson this administration is actively refusing to learn. A country that has defined its identity in opposition to American interference for decades does not become a reliable partner because we bombed its government into collapse. History suggests the opposite.
And even this argument did not last long. The next day, President Trump had already retreated from the liberation rationale anyway, saying to the New York Times “I don’t make a commitment one way or the other; it’s too early” when asked if the U.S. would defend the Iranian people who he said should overthrow the current government.
The rationale from the administration didn’t carry forward consistently from there. It kept shifting.
“We knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Remarks to press, March 2
In an effort to find an imminent threat that justified bypassing congressional approval, Secretary of State Marco Rubio implied that Israel forced the United States’ hand. House Speaker Mike Johnson even reiterated this point that same day, saying “Israel was determined to act with or without the U.S.” and the administration had a “difficult decision” to make.
But within 24 hours, President Trump contradicted this assessment, saying to reporters in the Oval Office “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.” Secretary Rubio then walked back his own remarks in briefings with Congress.
“The president…had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike the United States assets and our personnel in the region.”
- Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Briefing, March 4
On day four of the most significant American military operation since the Iraq War, the White House’s explanation for the imminent threat that justified bypassing Congress, skipping making a case to the nation, and launching nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours was that the president had a hunch.
Pentagon officials told congressional staff on March 1st that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first.
The president went to war on a feeling his own Pentagon couldn’t confirm.
What makes all of this even harder to accept is that there was another path - one that was closer to working than this administration has been willing to acknowledge. Because the chaos since this war began isn’t just a failure of messaging. It’s the visible surface of something that runs much deeper: a strategy that was never coherent, built on a diplomatic foundation that this administration has been dismantling for years.
Deal-making never had the chance to succeed
The story of how we got here doesn’t begin on February 28, 2026. It doesn’t even begin with last summer’s strikes. It begins in 2018, when the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal - an agreement that had, for three years verifiably constrained Iran’s nuclear program under international inspection.
The Iran nuclear deal was imperfect - it didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies. But the deal did what it was designed to do: verifiably constrain Iran’s nuclear program under international inspection. Even President Trump’s own Secretary of Defense at the time, James Mattis said remaining in it was in America’s national security interest. Leaving it didn’t just end an agreement. It removed the one diplomatic framework that had actually worked, and set in motion a chain of events that ran in one direction. Maximum pressure sanctions. The assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020. The first strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 - Operation Midnight Hammer - which targeted Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan with bunker-buster bombs and Tomahawk missiles, after which President Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program “totally obliterated.” And then eight months later, he now claims Iran has remained enough of a threat to justify another round of military action, despite there being numerous expert accounts that Iran would take years to rebuild its enrichment efforts, let alone fashion a nuclear weapon.
What happened in the months between Operation Midnight Hammer and now Operation Epic Fury matters enormously. The United States and Iran were engaged in indirect nuclear negotiations brokered by Oman, hosting three rounds of talks with real progress by multiple accounts. Just two days before Operation Epic Fury began, Oman’s Foreign Minister hailed what he called substantial progress after the third round of talks, saying Iran had agreed it would never stockpile nuclear material capable of producing a weapon with full IAEA verification. “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” he said, “I think we have cracked that problem.” He asked for more time to close the remaining gaps.
The next day, President Trump said he was “not thrilled” with the pace of the negotiations. The day after that, the bombs fell.
I want to sit with that a moment. Not to be naive about Iran - this is a regime with a long and real record of bad faith, a history of supporting proxies that have killed Americans and our allies, and a nuclear program that poses genuine risks. All of that is true. But there is a deeper problem with what happened here that goes beyond the timing of one interrupted negotiation.
Bombing Iran twice in the middle of nuclear talks hasn’t just failed to solve the nuclear problem. It has made it harder to solve. Whatever comes next in Iran will have watched the United States bomb a country it was actively negotiating with. Twice. No future Iranian government - whether a remnant of this regime or something that replaces it - will forget that. Any Iranian leader who sits across the table from an American envoy and is told that a deal is possible will have every reason not to believe it. We have demonstrated, through action, that American commitments don’t hold and that diplomacy can be abandoned the moment a president loses patience with it.
And there is a larger consequence that the administration appears not to have considered at all. Every country watching this is drawing the same lesson: Iran had a nuclear deal, complied with it, and got bombed anyway. North Korea has nuclear weapons and hasn’t been touched. The conclusion that any rational government will draw from that comparison is not that diplomacy works. It’s that the only real security guarantee is a nuclear arsenal of your own.
In this administration’s view, there will always be another justification to strike. And the already-narrow window for future diplomacy closes a little more each time we do.
What a serious approach actually looks like
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Iran deserved no response. I’m not arguing that nuclear proliferation isn’t a serious threat. I’m not arguing that the United States should have done nothing.
I’m arguing that this administration has once again mistaken aggression for strategy - that it has confused the shock of action with the discipline of governing. We’ve seen this pattern before.
When I wrote about immigration, I argued that raids aren’t a plan. That a strategy built on spectacle, fear, and escalating force - untethered from due process, without a functional system underneath it - doesn’t solve the problem. It performs solving the problem while destabilizing the entire situation.
The same critique applies here, at far greater stakes.
A serious approach would have started with a defined objective - not a rotating list of justifications, but clear answers to the questions: what does success look like, and how do we know when we’ve achieved it? It would have required congressional authorization - not an announcement post in the middle of the night. It would have treated diplomacy as a genuine tool rather than a clock to run out. And it would have had a plan for what comes next, not a vague invocation of “unconditional surrender” and a call for popular revolution in a country where the government just killed tens of thousands of its own protestors.
It also would have been honest about what air strikes alone can and cannot achieve. Even the most successful air campaign cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear knowledge. Iran knows the nuclear fuel cycle. It has the technical capability to rebuild. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in 2025 that it would be a decade before Iran could develop missiles capable of reaching the United States, and that estimation hadn’t changed in the lead up to these strikes. Bombing a country’s facilities sets back a program. It does not end one.
And then there is the question of what comes after, which this administration appears to have given almost no serious thought. “Four to five weeks,” the White House initially estimated this would take. President Trump himself has acknowledged the war could go “far longer” and was not willing to rule out sending ground troops - “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground - like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.” That is not a strategy. That is a president keeping his options open while hoping the problem resolves itself.
On March 10, President Trump spoke to reporters and described the war as a “short-term excursion.” Around this same time, the Department of War Rapid Response account tweeted “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.” No one in the administration is reading from the same playbook and no one has offered a clear vision of what the endgame is in Iran.
A war needs more than a reason to start. It needs a strategy for what comes next. This one doesn’t have one.
Why this matters beyond Iran
To think about the broader implications of this attack, we have to look also at what happened in Venezuela because it was a rehearsal.
On January 3, 2026, U.S. Delta Force commandos captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his residence in Caracas and transported him to New York City to stand trial for federal drug charges. The administration called it a law enforcement action. But the justifications for getting there had shifted over the preceding months - from countering drug trafficking, to reclaiming oil resources Venezuela purportedly stolen from U.S. companies, to deposing an authoritarian government in the name of democracy - all without a clear plan for what came next. President Trump made clear at his press conference that the operation was largely about oil and that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for a time and maintain “a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.”
Sound familiar? Shifting justifications. No congressional authorization. No defined endgame. Regime change sold as something else. The Venezuela playbook and the Iran playbook were written by the same hand. On the future of Iran’s leadership, President Trump told reporters “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” adding that he refuses to accept a new Iranian leader who would continue Khamenei’s policies, which he said would force the U.S. “to go back every five years and do this again and again.”
That last phrase “so we don’t have to go back every five years” is worth reading carefully. It is the clearest statement of what this doctrine actually is: it’s not a response to a specific threat, but a standing posture of permanent intervention. And the administration has been explicit in wanting to apply it more broadly, with Cuba drawing a lot of attention as a potential next target.
The pattern here is not foreign policy. It is a pattern of power wielded recklessly without fear of consequences - fueled by the same instincts that send ICE into Minneapolis neighborhoods at night, applied now to sovereign nations.
Iran is not a small country. Its population sits at roughly 92 million people - dramatically larger than previous Middle Eastern conflicts that produced massive refugee waves. If even 10 percent of Iran’s population were displaced, the world will be dealing with nearly nine million refugees. The European Union Agency for Asylum has already warned that a displacement of just 10 percent of Iran’s population “would rival the largest refugee flows of recent decades,” and early reports from the UN already show hundreds of thousands already displaced internally in Iran and neighboring countries as a result of this escalating conflict.
Iran’s economy was already in free fall before the bombs fell - inflation surpassed 46% compared with January of last year, and the Iranian currency lost half its value in less than a year. Iran was also already facing ethnic separatist movements in Kurdish, Baloch, and Arab regions. This was a country teetering on a civil collapse, and the major countries around Iran - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Turkey - are fragile states in their own right that have struggled to absorb refugees from other conflicts.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said at a press conference that there were no plans to admit refugees to the United States and that there are a lot of countries in the Middle East who “would be capable” of sheltering displaced people “if need be.” That answer - from a secretary of a country that just destabilized a nation of 90 million people - is not a plan. It is an abdication.
The cost of abandoning restraint
The consequences extend beyond the humanitarian. When powerful states act unilaterally, weaponizing claims of prevention, they undermine the collective security mechanisms that constrain everyone, including countries we fear. Russia condemned the strikes as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” That condemnation is ironic coming from Vladimir Putin. But we must be honest with ourselves: if the United States operates outside international law when it suits us, we forfeit the moral authority to demand others don’t. Our long-term allies understand this. France has said it cannot approve of strikes conducted “outside of international law” while Germany’s chancellor acknowledged this is a “dilemma.” These are not the words of a unified alliance. These are the words of partners being asked to absorb consequences they didn’t choose.
The United States is the most powerful military force in the history of civilization. That is not an exaggeration - it is simply true. And precisely because it is true, the way we choose to use that power is the most consequential moral and strategic question we face. A nation with this much capability that operates without restraint, without authorization, and without accountability doesn’t just risk getting individual conflicts wrong. It erodes the thing that makes American power legitimate in the eyes of the world - the belief that we are governed by rules we actually follow, that our strength is paired with principle, and that when we act, we act for reasons that go beyond what we want in the moment. When that belief erodes, we don’t just lose allies. We lose the moral authority that has historically made it possible to build coalitions, hold international institutions together, and ask other nations to follow our lead.
A United States that bombs first and explains later is not a superpower. It’s just a bully with a bigger arsenal. And history is unambiguous about what happens to nations that confuse the two: they lose their ability to lead on a global stage.
We can and must demand better - not just for the people of Iran or Venezuela caught in the middle of something they didn’t choose, but for the countries next on the list. And for the kind of nation we are still capable of being.
