Trump's War and Pax Israeliana
Trump has given multiple justification for embarking in a costly and dangerous military mission in Iran.
First, he said that Iran had not agreed to destroy its nuclear program. That's interesting because in June 2025 Trump bombed Iran and reassured the US nation that he had "obliterated" and "annihilated" Iran's nuclear program. When reporters investigated and suggested that Iran still had nuclear capabilities, Trump insulted them. But now Trump himself says that Iran's nuclear program poses a threat, hence it still exists. Either he lied in June 2025 or he lied in February 2026. (For what it's worth, in March 2025 Trump was told by the US intelligence community that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon” at all, so there is a chance tthat Iran's program to build a nuclear bomb never existed anyway).
His second justification for attacking Iran was to destroy Iran's missile capabilities and Iran's navy. Only a Republican who didn't study geography can think that Iran could attack the USA with intercontinental ballistic missiles or with its navy.
Before the attack, Trump also mentioned repeatedly something that could indeed resonate with many people inside and outside Iran: regime change. While the USA has a terrible record of "regime change", Iran's dictatorship was obviously hated by its own people and had just recently killed thousands of protesters in something that looked very much like the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989 in China. Trump has repeatedly said that decapitating Iran's leadership offers the Iranian people a chance to stage a revolution. However, that is not what he has done in Venezuela, where he simply replaced a hostile dictator with a friendly dictator. And it sounds a little hypocritical, coming from Trump who is best friend with the
dictator of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.
Iran’s theocratic regime is not any worse than Saudi Arabia's
theocratic regime. In fact, Jews and Christians are free to worship their gods
in Iran, but banned in Saudi Arabia, where a mere display of a Bible can get you in jail for life.
In 2025 Saudi Arabia broke its own world record of execution, killing 347 people.
Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud was personally found responsible for the gruesome murder of a Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in Istanbul.
Thousands of political dissidents have disappeared in Saudi prisons.
Trump deposes one dictator but does business with another one. It's easy to suspect that it all depends on how much money he makes, not on how much he cares for democracy and freedom.
There is no doubt that Iran is a dictatorship and Israel is a democracy, but, following Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the whole world thinks that
Iran's regime is not much worse than Israel's. The number of civilians killed by Israel in Gaza could be higher than the number of protesters killed by Iran.
So the case for "liberating" the Iranian people is weak: how about liberating the
the Palestinians first, and the Saudi people next?
Triump has claimed that Iran constituted an "immediate threat" to the USA. Even for the dumbest Republican, it should be hard to see how Iran (located ten thousands kms from the USA) constitutes an "immediate threat" to the USA and instead North Korea does not: North Korea is much closer to the USA (there is only an ocean in between), it does possess nuclear weapons, it has been testing missiles that can reach the USA, and it repeatedly stated that the USA is its main enemy.
Finally, Trump justified the attack claiming that Iran is the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism. This works only with Republicans who never studied history.
The world's biggest sponsor of terrorism, as far as anti-Western anti-Christian terrorism goes, has been Saudi Arabia: the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS received financial support from Saudi Arabia. All three organizations were hated by Iran and in turn hated Iran. Thousands of Americans and Europeans have been killed by terrorist organizations funded by Saudi Arabia. It is hard to name a European or an American killed by Hamas or by Hezbollah or by the Houthis (the three main "terrorist" organizations funded by Iran). US soldiers were killed by Iranian proxies when the USA invaded Iraq, but the Iraqis called it a "liberation war", not "terrorism". Incidentally, Iran, and not the USA, was the original enemy of Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein.
Republicans who don't study history are missing some important facts about Saudi Arabia while being fed exaggerations about Iran.
Bottom line: Trump's shifting justications for the war have only increased
skepticism and hostility among US public. Every poll so far shows scant support for the war, with huge numbers of people "strongly opposed" to it.
In fact, Trump's attacks on Iran has created an unlikely alliance between the
far left and the far right. The far left has always been opposed to US military
interventions. The far right (the MAGA movement) voted for Trump because he promised an "American first" policy, and now it feels betrayed: "regime change" (i.e. helping other countries solve their problems) is precisely what the MAGA movement objected to.
Far-right podcast host Megyn Kelly said (referring to the first four US soldiers killed in this attack): “I don’t think those four service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or for Israel.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on social media that: "This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be. Shame!”
The MAGA movement was already uncomfortable that Trump is trying so hard to hide
and to distract from the "Epstein Files". Now the MAGA base feels completely betrayed also by his focus on foreign affairs. This Iranian war is the last straw.
In just one year Trump has bombed these countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Nigeria and suspected narcotrafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea, and has supported Israel's genocide in Palestine. This is the president who complains that he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for ending seven or eight wars. This makes George W Bush (who invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq) look like a peacemaker.
It is always difficult to rally the USA around a war. Public opinion was opposed to entering World War II until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In order to lauch the war against North Vietnam, president Lyndon Johnson had to invent a Vietnamese attack on a US ship (which never happened). George W Bush attacked Afghanistan by claiming that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda was helped by Afghanistan (which was partially true). He then attacked Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction" that could be used against the USA.
Trump is the first president in modern times who starts a war without any evidence that there was an attack against the USA or an immediate attack coming.
He is likely to pay a huge political price for this at the next elections.
We can speculate that he will try to cancel those elections or interfere with
the counting of the votes, but this unprovoked attack against Iran means that he
just lost millions of MAGA and independent votes.
So what are the real reasons?
1. US taxpayers money is used to do something for Israel. This is a story that has been going on for half a century. The Israeli lobby in Washington is so powerful and so skilled that it always manages to convince the USA to do dirty work on behalf of Israel. At the same time, don't underestimate the Arab lobby and don't underestimate corruption in the Trump presidency. The Trump Crime Family does more business with the Arabs than with Israel. Iran has two big enemies: the Jewish state of Israel and the Sunni state of Saudi Arabia. Shiites historically have hated Sunnis more than Jews: the Sunnis are the ones who killed the grandson of the founder of Islam at the Battle of Karbala and usurped the leadership of Islam.
Israel and Saudi Arabia want to demilitarize Iran.
US taxpayers are paying for the two enemies of Iran to fight Iran and depose its regime.
2. Oil. Yet again, this is a war against a country that has a lot of oil, just like Venezuela, and just like Iraq 23 years ago. Ukraine has no oil, and therefore the USA has little interest in defending it. Even Taiwan gets less attention than the Middle East.
3. Only the most gullible Republicans can ignore that Trump has come up with one distraction after the other after the Epstein Files became such a hot topic. This is yet another distraction from the Epstein Files.
4. It was a unique opportunity to strike Iran when Iran is most vulnerable: Iran's regime had just been rocked by the biggest protests ever, and Iran's main ally Russia is distracted by its own war in Ukraine.
The consequences of this war will be visible only months or years from now (largely depending on what happens to the regime of Iran), but a few things are already visible:
1. Israel is now a threat to any country in the world. Its military power is probably second only to the USA and China. Furthermore, Israel does not feel bound to any international rules. Europeans take note. If Israel ever feels that it should take military action against a European country, it can and it will.
2. Why North Korea gets away with its nuclear weapons and with its intercontinental ballistic missiles? Because it does have nuclear weapons. Every country in the world must have seen what happens to regimes that don't have nuclear weapons: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Qaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Khamenei in Iran. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and was promptly invaded by its nuclear neighbor Russia. Whether you are a democracy like Japan and South Korea or a dictatorship like Myanmar and Saudi Arabia, the message should be clear.
3. This war also tells the world how weak Russia is today. Indirectly, this is happening because Putin attacked Ukraine. His friend Assad was thrown out of Syria by a group of Islamists and Putin couldn't protect him. Now his main ally Iran is being attacked and Russia is doing absolutely nothing to protect it. Russia can't even send weapons to Iran because it doesn't even have weapons to fight its own war in Ukraine. Russia is out of the Middle East.
4. This war has an impact also on China. China was by far the main customer of Iranian oil. China must be a little worried about what will happen to that supply. After Russia invaded Ukraine, we all thought that Russia was becoming dependent on China purchasing its oil. But now it looks like China has become dependent on Russia's oil because Russia has become the only reliable source of oil for China. Another big supplier of oil to China was and is Venezuela: another regime toppled by the USA. It could be that, in the long run, this war in Iran will be viewed as a war against China. Without a reliable supply of oil, China's navy and air force cannot venture into a war against Taiwan. Check the history of Japan in World War II, another power that was relying on imported oil.
5. Israel is enforcing a "Pax Israeliana" on the Middle East. It has been bullying Syria at will. It has bombed Hamas and Hezbollah into irrelevance. It is destroying the Iranian regime.
6. The European Union, Britain and Turkey are more irrelevant than ever. The region from Israel to the border with Iran used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Turks of Istanbul. All those Ottoman regions (Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) became European colonies and protectorates after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, but Turkey remained an influential player in the region. The influence of Turkey on the region has now hit an all-time low. Britain and France became the colonial powers after the Ottoman collapse, and for a long time continued to mess into the affairs of the Middle East. Britain also exerted a huge influence on Iranian politics, even engineering a coup in 1953. They now have zero influence in the region.
7. The "regime changes" in Venezuela and Iran also showed how weak China is. The USA could punish China any time because it controls the financial world, the trade routes and it is part of vast alliances (with Europe in NATO, with the Middle East, with the Asian tigers, with Australia and even partially with India). China is powerless to punish the USA for its actions because:
a. it doesn't control the financial world and therefore cannot impose sanctions on the USA;
b. it is a net exporter and therefore cannot punish the USA with trade boycotts (in fact, the other way around, China's economy depends on the USA);
c. it doesn't have alliances other than with North Korea (which is worth nothing) and with Russia (which is stuck in Ukraine).
8. Ukraine is the loser. The USA assembled an impressive "armada" to prepare for this attack on Iran. The USA has also shot thousands of rockets into Iran. This is all money, arms and attention that the USA is moving away from Ukraine. Unfortunately for the Ukrainian people, Ukraine has no oil, and Russia is not a threat to Israel. Therefore Ukraine is worth very little in a foreign policy dominated by Israeli and Arab lobbies.
9. Europe was already greatly disturbed by Trump's demented imperial ambitions on Greenland. Now it is also apprehensive that this war will create chaos in Iran like previous US-engineered "regime changes" created chaos in Syria and Libya. Europe is the one that had to pay for the millions of refugees caused by the collapse of Syria and for the civil war in Libya. European leaders must be wondering what mess the USA will leave behind in Iran, what the cost will be to the European taxpayer.
The verdict is still out whether this war will benefit the USA in the long run. It certainly greatly benefits Israel and Saudi Arabia. It certainly hurts Trump politically at home, where the anti-Trump alliance now includes his own MAGA movement.
