Daniel Larison
Jun 23, 2025
Trump didn’t want to be left out of the action, so he has joined it with no thought for what it will mean for American military personnel or our national interests.
The U.S. launched an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iran on Saturday. The president had no authority to order this attack, and in ordering this act of criminal aggression against another country he has violated both the Constitution and the UN Charter. Trump followed through on his insane threat to bomb a country whose government had been trying to negotiate a reasonable compromise on the nuclear issue. Whatever else happens, Trump’s decision to attack will live in infamy.
There was no threat from Iran that even remotely warranted military action. There was no justification for bombing their nuclear facilities. This was a senseless act of aggression that does nothing to make the United States more secure. If anything, it will put Americans throughout the Middle East at greater risk. It will likely result in retaliatory strikes on U.S. forces on a large scale. There is good reason to think that it will encourage the Iranian government to rebuild its destroyed facilities and to begin making progress towards acquiring nuclear weapons. Far from “solving” the problem, Trump may have just given Iran the last push that it needs to cross that line.
It needs to be reemphasized that the U.S. and Israel had no just cause for using force. These two governments are rogue belligerents ganging up on a weaker target. The Iranian government may be guilty of many other things, but they did not precipiate this conflict and they were attempting to avoid it through negotiations.
The region is now much worse off than it was just a few weeks ago, and that is entirely the fault of the U.S. and Israeli governments. U.S. interests have been damaged, and the only question is how bad the damage will be. As if that weren’t bad enough, the president has done all this to benefit a reckless client state at the same time that it commits a genocide in Gaza.
As opponents of the attack have warned for more than a decade, the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran’s facilities have only managed to set back their nuclear program. Contrary to Trump’s self-serving and dishonest claims, much of Iran’s nuclear program has survived. The attacks have given them strong incentives to rebuild and expand their program. Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis wrote a lengthy thread detailing why the U.S. and Israeli strikes have not achieved their stated goals:
RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER have not slowed the Iranian program nearly as much as the JCPOA. We hold diplomacy to much higher standards than bombing. The same people who endlessly complained about the JCPOA “sunsetting” are now happy to delay Iran’s bomb by much less.
Trump and Netanyahu are to blame for all of this. Trump reneged on the original nuclear deal, and Netanyahu had been pressing him to do this. Trump adopted the maximalist “no enrichment” line that the Israeli government wanted, and thus guaranteed that his pseudo-engagement with Iran would go nowhere. It was Trump who set the arbitrary two-month deadline, and it was Netanyahu who then used that as the pretext to begin bombing to make sure that there could be no diplomatic solution. Trump didn’t want to be left out of the action, so he has joined it with no thought for what it will mean for American military personnel or our national interests. The mad king started an illegal war for fear of missing out.
JD Vance said that the U.S. isn’t at war with Iran, but with Iran’s nuclear program. This is deeply stupid and dishonest. The U.S. has committed multiple acts of war against Iran for no good reason. If another government did this to our country or to one of our allies, no one would take the distinction between the country and the nuclear program serioiusly. The fact that the U.S. targeted the infrastructure of a civilian nuclear program makes the aggression that much worse. The U.S. didn’t even strike legitimate military targets. A state of war exists between our countries, and Trump was the one who created it.
The vice president claimed that the difference between the attack on Iran and previous military interventions is that we had “dumb presidents” in the past and now we have “a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.” This is Vance’s desperate attempt at spin, and only Trump apologists will believe it. The ugly truth is that the U.S. has accomplished nothing by attacking Iran, and it has just made everything worse on the whim of a tyrannical president. If we had a properly functioning constitutional system, Trump would be impeached and removed from office right away.
All of the “dumb presidents” refused to attack Iran despite constant pressure to do, and then Trump was the one stupid enough to do it. As dumb as George W. Bush was, even he wasn’t foolish enough to listen to the fanatics and ideologues clamoring for war with Iran. If Trump’s predecessors were dumb when it came to advancing U.S. interests abroad (and they often were), he has just proven himself to be even worse.
Trump’s decision to attack is a betrayal of his oath of office. He has also shown his boundless contempt for the American people. The vast majority of Americans did not want the U.S. to attack, and there is no support for war with Iran. The president owns whatever follows, and if there is any justice he will pay a steep political price for it.
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