During his presidential campaign in 2024, Donald Trump baselessly claimed that Joe Biden had brought the United States to “the brink of World War 3.” Yet with his reckless and unjustified attack on Iran, it’s Trump, the self-proclaimed “peace president,” who has brought the world a new war. Within hours of the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28, Iran retaliated with drones and ballistic missiles targeting Israel, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Israel opened a second front in Lebanon for the purpose of rooting out Hezbollah. Soon Iran struck Iraq, Cyprus, Jordan, and Oman with missiles or drones, and Iranian missiles were intercepted in the airspace of Turkey, a member of NATO. Some two thousand miles from Iran, off Sri Lanka, a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian frigate returning from multilateral exercises with eighteen other nations in India. After Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, thereby cutting off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, Trump was on social media imploring China, France, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea to send warships to escort tankers. Meanwhile, the administration brokered an agreement to release strategic oil reserves—in the process lifting sanctions on Russia and giving it a huge financial windfall as it continues its war against Ukraine. Now the Ukrainian government is providing personnel and antidrone technology to the United States so it can defend itself and its regional allies from the same kind of Iranian drones Russia has been using against Ukraine. More than two thousand people have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in twelve countries, including many civilians. The economic and humanitarian impacts of the war—from the soaring costs of fuel and fertilizer to shortages of food and electricity—are being felt globally, and Americans are on high alert against the threat of terrorist attacks at home orchestrated by the Iranian government or its sympathizers.
It is now apparent that Trump took the United States into war with minimal planning, no clear objective or timeline, and little thought for consequences. He didn’t consult with allies or try to build a coalition. He didn’t make the case to the American people or to Congress (which, in any event, voted largely on party lines against war-powers resolutions after the initial attacks—a dereliction of its constitutional role). The carelessness, cruelty, and incompetence that characterize everything this administration does—from DOGE to tariffs to immigration enforcement—are tragically on display in what Trump calls his “little excursion” in Iran. The U.S. strike that killed nearly two hundred schoolgirls on the first day of the war was likely the result of outdated intelligence, possibly provided by hastily implemented AI technology and unvetted by human beings. The hope that ordinary Iranians would rise up and overturn their government was never plausible. Trump’s notion that he could anoint a leader himself was delusional: if anything, the new regime—headed by the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war—is even more resolute in its opposition to the United States. Iran’s response in the Strait of Hormuz seems to have been foreseen by everyone but the commander in chief and his advisors. But it finally provided Trump with a well-defined objective for his war: to reopen the strait. His demands for help from U.S. allies were initially rebuffed before six countries offered a vague statement expressing “readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts.”
Meanwhile, as Trump’s FCC chairman threatens television networks for covering the war truthfully, the administration works to distract Americans with braggadocio and propaganda. The daily briefings of Pete Hegseth, the preening secretary of defense, are especially repugnant. Rather than provide clear information about what the U.S. military is doing, Hegseth celebrates the death and destruction he’s ordered. He has promised there will be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” Whether Hegseth knows it or not—a legitimate question, given his general lack of qualifications—to give “no quarter” means executing enemy soldiers instead of taking them prisoner. It is a war crime. The administration’s “gamification” of the war, as evidenced by its packaging live combat footage as social-media content, has been roundly condemned. Chicago cardinal Blase Cupich calls it a “profound moral failure.”
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Trump’s war is illicit on several grounds, violating the Constitution, international law, and the criteria of traditional just-war theory. U.S. intelligence assessments did not find Iran to be an immediate threat to national security. The originally stated aim of preventing a future threat from Iran by destroying its nuclear program does not provide sufficient justification—and at any rate, the United States is also targeting non-nuclear sites. Nor does the aim of rescuing Iranian citizens from a tyrannical government justify the war, because without a realistic plan for replacing that government, there is no way of ensuring that conditions inside the country won’t get worse. It’s also plain that military action was not a last resort: the administration’s efforts at diplomacy were haphazard, often disingenuous, and apparently subject to the dictates of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The benefits of the war are unknowable, while the harms, including noncombatant deaths and casualties, are real—and were foreseeable.
No one can confidently predict the trajectory of this war, let alone its outcome. Trump has said that the war is already won but also that it’s not over. He says that he’ll end the war when “I feel it in my bones.” He’s mused about sending ground troops to seize Iran’s nuclear fuel, which would likely require a large and long-term U.S. military presence in the country. There may be a new “plan” tomorrow—or an hour from now. All that’s certain is that, with his war of whim and impulse, Trump has made the world less safe and less stable, alienated our allies, and further degraded the moral standing of the United States.
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