Iran and the Persistence of US Failure in the Middle East
After ordering a massive military buildup in the Middle East, President Donald Trump appears intent on initiating war with Iran—a conflict the Pentagon anticipates could last weeks, if not months. The administration has provided no clear casus belli, instead grafting shifting narratives onto a largely predetermined course of action as war advocates steer Washington toward military action despite the lack of a discernible endgame. Proceeding down this path risks repeating the same failures of past US military interventions in the Middle East. Trump’s window to change course is closing fast—he should step back from the brink and avert another disastrous regional war.
There is a striking absence of concrete justifications for the US sprint to war with Iran. Advocates of military action keep moving the goalposts, hoping to generate support for a fixed agenda that seeks confrontation with Iran without congressional approval.
First was the need to target Iran’s nuclear program, which US intelligence has repeatedly assessed is not weapons-related despite frequent claims to the contrary. Last June, Trump ignored these assessments and bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, after which he immediately claimed the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program—a claim contradicted by both US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA).
Then, the narrative shifted to targeting Iran’s ballistic missile stockpiles before quickly pivoting to the need to protect Iranian protesters after the outbreak of a mass upheaval across the country, which the regime crushed through brutal violence. Now, Trump is again citing Iran’s nuclear program as justification for further military action—despite having claimed to destroy it—providing no evidence of an imminent threat to the United States.
These immediate attempts at justification are part of a much larger dynamic. Fueling these fluid rationales are decades of policy inertia and special interests pushing Washington in this direction. At the center of this momentum is Israel, particularly Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For more than three decades, Netanyahu has warned that an Iranian nuclear weapon is imminent, repeatedly pressing Washington to confront Tehran militarily. Israel has dealt a series of blows to Iran’s strategic position over the more than two years since Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel’s war in Gaza, and subsequent Israeli operations targeting Tehran’s regional partners and the Islamic Republic directly.
Netanyahu began urging Trump to deliver the final blow to the Islamic Republic as soon as Trump took office. After initially resisting, Trump’s negotiations with Iran stalled, primarily due to the administration adopting the Netanyahu-pushed poison-pill demand of zero domestic enrichment. With negotiations deadlocked, Netanyahu initiated the “12-day war” in June last year, hoping this would trigger deeper US military involvement and, leaked documents show, result in his longstanding objective of US-led regime change. He succeeded in pulling Trump into the fight by bombing the three nuclear facilities, but failed to convince him to dismantle the Islamic Republic.
Now, Netanyahu and his allies in Washington are pressuring Trump to go back in, citing the full range of justifications outlined above in pursuit of their ultimate aim of toppling the government in Tehran. Following Netanyahu’s lead risks locking the United States into escalation with Iran to facilitate his maximalist ambitions at the expense of American interests.
Proceeding with military action absent any credible justification or clear endgame is a reckless gamble and risks plunging the United States into another catastrophic Middle East war. It would constitute an unprovoked war largely on behalf of a foreign country—yet to what end? Airpower alone is not sufficient to collapse the regime, and those pushing the United States toward military action will likely press Trump to widen the conflict when quick results prove elusive.
Punitive measures are unlikely to make Tehran concede to Trump in negotiations over matters it has consistently stressed are nonnegotiable. Nor is there any evidence that strikes would revive the protest movement inside Iran, bolster it to the point of successfully toppling the regime, or lead to anything other than internal turmoil. By treating military action as an end in itself, Washington risks open-ended conflict with no clear exit strategy.
The push for war with Iran does not align with the actual level of danger Iran poses to the United States, which is minimal. The threat posed by Iran to American interests has been greatly inflated inside Washington for decades. Tehran’s limited military and economic capabilities constrain its ability to meaningfully harm US interests in the Middle East—let alone outside the region. This does not mean that Iran is defenseless—it retains the ability to inflict harm on the United States in the event of military confrontation, particularly against the roughly 40,000 US troops scattered across the region. But such confrontation is not necessary to safeguard US interests. Iran is only relevant to the United States because of its own counterproductive military presence, dysfunctional regional partnerships, and other perverse policies in the Middle East.
The position the United States finds itself in is a product of its own making. It is a crisis born of choice, not necessity. Trump must decide whether to commit the American people to another potential forever war in the Middle East or change course before it is too late.