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Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country\u2019s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into \u201cWorld War III,\u201d he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.<\/p>\n
U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East\u2014going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya\u2014all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. The details were different in each case, but the pattern is unmistakable. And Trump, notwithstanding constantly shifting justifications for the war, is now well on track to repeat it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country\u2019s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into \u201cWorld War III,\u201d he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.<\/p>\n
U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East\u2014going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya\u2014all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. The details were different in each case, but the pattern is unmistakable. And Trump, notwithstanding constantly shifting justifications for the war, is now well on track to repeat it.<\/p>\n
Start with exaggerating the threat. In his Feb. 28 statement announcing the start of the war, Trump said he was acting to eliminate \u201cimminent threats\u201d from Iran, which he did not substantiate. Early claims of intelligence about Iranian preemptive attacks quickly proved to be false. When pressed to justify such claims a few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio came up with the notion that \u201cthe imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked\u2014and we believe they would be attacked\u2014that they would immediately come after us,\u201d oddly suggesting that an Israeli strike that the United States could somehow not prevent was the reason the country had to go to war.<\/p>\n
To further demonize the Iranian regime, Trump also said that Iran was \u201cprobably behind\u201d the 2000 attack on the USS Cole<\/em> and that it had missiles that could \u201csoon\u201d reach the U.S. homeland. He provided no evidence for the former claim, which experts believe is dubious, and the latter directly contradicts his own Defense Intelligence Agency\u2019s assessment<\/a> from last year, which found that Iran was a decade away from possessing such missiles.<\/p>\n As the war\u2019s costs started to rise, the Trump team turned to other and even more exaggerated justifications for military action. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff asserted that Iran was \u201ca week away from having industrial grade bomb-making material\u201d and \u201cthere was almost no stopping\u201d it from enrichment. Rubio claimed that Iran was a year away from a ballistic missile force that would give it \u201cimmunity\u201d from attack, adding that \u201cif we don\u2019t hit them now \u2026 they will be able to do whatever they want.\u201d White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly claimed that Iran was \u201cstockpiling near-weapons grade enriched uranium\u201d at the Tehran Research Reactor, an assertion Witkoff dubbed a \u201cPerry Mason\u201d moment.\u00a0And Trump, not to be outdone, cited his belief that if the United States \u201cdidn\u2019t hit within two weeks, they would\u2019ve had a nuclear weapon\u201d and that Iran had planned to \u201ctake over the entire Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, there is no evidence to back any of these claims, which are also hard to square with the White House\u2019s earlier statements that last summer\u2019s U.S. and Israeli strikes had \u201cobliterated\u201d Iran\u2019s nuclear program and removed the threat for at least several years. In fact, after three rounds of conflict with Israel and the United States since 2024\u2014which had decimated Iran\u2019s nuclear and missile programs, proxy forces, military leadership and air defenses\u2014the threat from Iran was probably less \u201cimminent\u201d than it had been for years. But that didn\u2019t stop the Trump administration from claiming the opposite.<\/p>\n Like some of its predecessors, the Trump administration has also begun exaggerating the likely benefits of military action (while downplaying its costs). If Trump were describing the operation merely as a way to further degrade Iran\u2019s nuclear and military capacities, then his claims would plausible. Instead, he and other officials are describing the war as one that will ultimately free the Iranian people, eliminate Iran\u2019s threat to the region and the West, end its support for terrorism, and bring down global oil prices. In his statement announcing the war, Trump told the Iranian people that \u201cthe hour of your freedom is at hand\u201d and the government will be \u201cyours to take.\u201d A week later, faced with rapidly rising oil prices, Trump insisted not only that \u201cthey\u2019ll come down very fast\u201d but that \u201cwe will have gotten rid of a major, major cancer on the face of the earth.\u201d Also downplaying the risk of higher oil prices, White House senior advisor Jarrod Agen insisted that, in the long run, \u201cwe\u2019re not going to have to worry about these issues in the Strait of Hormuz because we\u2019re going to get all of the oil out of the hands of terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n