It was just a month ago that Donald Trump bombed Iran against the advice of his own intelligence services and claimed that the country’s nuclear enrichment sites had been “obliterated.”
The news cycle has moved on. Americans should not: the attack on Iran was one of the most reckless examples of a flailing U.S. foreign policy that promises severe consequences for the United States and for the world — sooner or later, no one can be sure. That the Iran attack so far does not appear to have triggered a catastrophic chain of events is sheer luck. We can be confident that Trump will do his best to try again—with unfortunately broad support from too many politicians of all stripes who are still, bizarrely, interested in more forever war.
As the administration attempts to spin the twelve-day-war narrative and move on from its spectacularly ill-advised and anti-American risk-taking, a world order based on rights and the rule of law is now circling the drain.
This moment of crisis, however, also presents an opportunity for new alliances. Trump’s adventurism has betrayed the expectations of a large swathe of his base, revealing common ground between pro-diplomacy progressives and the anti-interventionist caucus. This common ground can be the basis for a new and strategic movement for better foreign policy—and indeed must be, to head off Trump’s march toward regional chaos.
Expanding Israel’s War
It is worth refreshing the memory about how last month’s U.S. bombing campaign against Iran came about.
Firstly: this didn’t have to become America’s war. Initially, it was Israel’s alone.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been publicly calling for a campaign against the supposedly existential threat posed by Iran at least since a 1992 speech in the Knesset. But with Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance proxies menacing Israel from perches throughout the Middle East—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, later, the Houthis in Yemen—a direct war with Iran remained fairly far down on Netanyahu’s realistic wish list.
President Obama’s conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) in 2015 showed that a different reality was possible. Reaching that agreement without the use of force prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, achieving the international community’s primary security goal but frustrating the forever warriors who for decades have schemed to invade Iran and install a new regime.
The lesson of Obama’s negotiations was that Iran’s nuclear program could be defused through diplomacy, and its regional ambitions tempered with the right mix of engagement and pressure. (Had more progress been made on Palestinian rights and self-determination, Iran’s proxies might also have been deflated from another angle.)
But in 2017, Trump tore up the JCPOA, seemingly out of pure personal animus toward Obama. President Biden passed up the chance to reenter the deal when he took office because he didn’t want to tangle with Iran hawks. The Israeli right wing was all too happy to see diplomacy fail; Israeli hawks had long bemoaned American diplomacy with Iran as an impediment to what they billed as a necessary war with Iran and its proxies. The modus operandi of this strain of Israeli politics is forever war, and Netanyahu latched onto it because forever war meant that he was forever in political power.
Then, with the Israeli military’s string of stunning successes against the Axis in the wake of the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Netanyahu finally had a chance to open up a new front on Iran. The long shadow war between Iran and Israel accelerated, with the first open and direct Israeli strikes on Iran in October 2024. The recent, outright war broke out on June 13 and lasted twelve days. But Israel’s war plan, it turns out, relied on U.S. participation. Israel didn’t have the bunker-busting mega-bombs to go after Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment sites.
Trump decided to go back on his original promise to get the United States out of foreign wars rather than start new ones. He overruled his own intelligence services and some top advisers, who told him there was no need to go to war. U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran was far from being able to refine nuclear material to bomb-grade levels. Vice President JD Vance had campaigned on an anti-interventionist platform, which much of the MAGA base held as sacrosanct. Iran was even already engaging in fresh, low-profile negotiations with the United States to give up more of its nuclear ambitions. Despite Trump’s earlier opposition to the JCPOA, there was actually an opportunity to move toward a more peaceful and progressive resolution to the long-standing U.S.–Iranian tensions.
Without any explanation, at the hour of decision Trump joined Netanyahu’s reckless war on Iran. The U.S. strikes may or may not have severely damaged Iran’s short-term nuclear enrichment capabilities. But they undeniably undermined the remaining chances of reaching a diplomatic solution to U.S.–Iranian tension. And they set an important precedent of American involvement in Israel’s war in Iran—a war that, unfortunately, is probably far from over.
Consequences Yet Unfolding
An Iran hawk might respond, who cares? The bombing campaign didn’t unleash a wave of reprisals—at least, not yet. The defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah has already shown that the web of supposedly menacing militias that make up Iran’s regional network were nothing more than so many paper tigers. The Iranian regime is deeply unpopular at home; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is old, enfeebled, and hiding from public appearances much as Hassan Nasrallah was in the months before Israel killed him with a bomb last year. Israeli intelligence apparently has the ability to assassinate Iranian generals and scientists virtually at will. Triumphalist hawks argue that Iran is now cowering and will eventually return to the negotiating table prostrate and desperate.
Iran’s total defeat and submission is a slim but, in reality, most unlikely possibility. What the war on Iran has actually generated so far is a cornered and radicalized Iranian regime—still in control of a massive military infrastructure, some of the world’s largest oil reserves, and enough money and resources to survive and indefinitely cause trouble. On the forever-war track that Netanyahu proposed and Trump accepted, the best-case scenario in Iran right now is low-grade misery for an increasingly large swath of the Iranian population as Iranian progressives fall in line behind hardliners who will capitalize on the state of emergency. The needless American embrace of this war reeks of the hubristic thinking that drove the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, a humanitarian disaster that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
The worst case scenarios are numerous and far graver, though no one can do more than speculate. A smorgasbord of possible disasters is still on the table: State collapse in Iran. A multi-front regional war in the Middle East. Blowback in Israel. Attacks on American civilians and civilian infrastructure. A U.S. intervention in Iran even more destructive for all involved than the Iraq fiasco. An American military spread thin to the point of weakness by multiple engagements. Or perhaps a Middle East in the grip, for several more generations, of authoritarianism newly empowered by technology.
The idea that a democratic regime change in Iran would somehow follow from Trump and Netanyahu’s twelve-day war—and whatever additional attacks from Israel and the United States are yet to come—is perhaps the most offensive, and delusional. The Iraq and Afghanistan cases should have put to rest the notion that countries can be bombed into democracy. And Iran is far larger and more politically developed than either of those countries. Regime collapse in Iran behind the pressure of military assault would likely unleash a bloody and multidirectional civil war.
Yet the most tragic short-term cost of Trump’s bombing of Iran is the snuffing out of diplomacy, which is always a better option than war.
An Opportunity for Something Better
There is, perhaps, a slim silver lining to Trump’s war of choice in Iran: it reveals the ongoing fixation with endless war that still holds some decision-makers in its thrall. For those who understand that forever wars and reflexive military interventions harm the interests of all concerned—in the interventionist countries as well as the places they target—the Iran war creates an opportunity to forge common ground.
Some Israelis recognize that their country’s hypermilitarization makes them less safe—that Hamas’s hostages are, in effect, also Netanyahu’s; that the road of expanding wars on which he has set the country has no end; and that only diplomacy and political agreements can address nagging problems like Palestinian statehood, Israeli security, and Iran’s role as regional spoiler.
In the United States, a growing segment of the public and a small but expanding bipartisan cohort of elected officials oppose intervention. Not all anti-inverventionists self-define as progressives—the non-interventionist wing of the MAGA base has publicly questioned Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran. This is good news—it means that a growing spectrum of Americans at loggerheads on other issues have started to recognize the folly of hypermilitarization and forever war. They are coalescing around the idea that American foreign policy should involve more diplomacy and values, and less bombing.
There are still some differences of opinion in this growing consensus. Some Americans who oppose intervention are isolationists, and believe America can simply ignore what happens abroad. Other anti-inverventionists argue that America should engage diplomatically rather than militarily if it wants good results; they understand that American security, prosperity, and values are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and that the question is how to best engage. Despite these minor differences, American anti-interventionists from across the spectrum can still engage together against more forever war, whether in Iran or Gaza, even if they share few other political projects.
It was just such a dynamic that allowed a handful of Democratic lawmakers in July to sign on with none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene in an attempt to sanction Israel for its bombing of churches in Gaza. A left–right antiwar coalition poses its own dangers, including the risk of mainstreaming opponents of war who also propagate toxic anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic sentiment. But the point is not about individual lawmakers—it’s that Trump has just cast a light on a workable overlap between pro-peace progressives and segments of the MAGA base. At this point, with their power at such an ebb, progressives face little risk to their standing by investing in this overlap, but Trump stands to lose a lot if portions of his base start opening their minds to cooperation with the left.
The new war creates another, broader opportunity to address the long, troubling, bipartisan embrace of forever war. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran differed from the unilateral military interventions of previous administrations in narrow specifics, but not in its fundamental logic. The Iran intervention drew on a disturbing bedrock of systemic failures to reign in undeclared wars and international crimes. Since 9/11, it has become all too common for American presidents to launch air strikes or targeted assassinations without Congressional approval, ignore international law, sideline human rights commitments, and send weapons to foreign belligerents in direct contravention of international law. Trump’s transgressions when it comes to foreign wars draw on plenty of presidential precedents, from both parties.
Trump’s flagrant escalation highlights the hypocrisies at the core of American foreign policy dysfunction. America needs a completely fresh vision, like the blueprint for a progressive foreign policy in the Middle East that Century International proposed last year.
But first, the most pressing issue is to stop America’s involvement in another round of disastrous Middle Eastern wars. It’s never too late to reverse a bad course—today’s bad situation could yet devolve into something far worse.
Header Image Caption: JUNE 26: A man rides a scooter past a billboard depicting U.S. President Donald Trump on June 26, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Tags: foreign policy, iran, u.s. iran relations, iran and the us
America Can Still Escape Disaster in Iran
It was just a month ago that Donald Trump bombed Iran against the advice of his own intelligence services and claimed that the country’s nuclear enrichment sites had been “obliterated.”
The news cycle has moved on. Americans should not: the attack on Iran was one of the most reckless examples of a flailing U.S. foreign policy that promises severe consequences for the United States and for the world — sooner or later, no one can be sure. That the Iran attack so far does not appear to have triggered a catastrophic chain of events is sheer luck. We can be confident that Trump will do his best to try again—with unfortunately broad support from too many politicians of all stripes who are still, bizarrely, interested in more forever war.
As the administration attempts to spin the twelve-day-war narrative and move on from its spectacularly ill-advised and anti-American risk-taking, a world order based on rights and the rule of law is now circling the drain.
This moment of crisis, however, also presents an opportunity for new alliances. Trump’s adventurism has betrayed the expectations of a large swathe of his base, revealing common ground between pro-diplomacy progressives and the anti-interventionist caucus. This common ground can be the basis for a new and strategic movement for better foreign policy—and indeed must be, to head off Trump’s march toward regional chaos.
Expanding Israel’s War
It is worth refreshing the memory about how last month’s U.S. bombing campaign against Iran came about.
Firstly: this didn’t have to become America’s war. Initially, it was Israel’s alone.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been publicly calling for a campaign against the supposedly existential threat posed by Iran at least since a 1992 speech in the Knesset. But with Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance proxies menacing Israel from perches throughout the Middle East—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, later, the Houthis in Yemen—a direct war with Iran remained fairly far down on Netanyahu’s realistic wish list.
President Obama’s conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) in 2015 showed that a different reality was possible. Reaching that agreement without the use of force prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, achieving the international community’s primary security goal but frustrating the forever warriors who for decades have schemed to invade Iran and install a new regime.
The lesson of Obama’s negotiations was that Iran’s nuclear program could be defused through diplomacy, and its regional ambitions tempered with the right mix of engagement and pressure. (Had more progress been made on Palestinian rights and self-determination, Iran’s proxies might also have been deflated from another angle.)
But in 2017, Trump tore up the JCPOA, seemingly out of pure personal animus toward Obama. President Biden passed up the chance to reenter the deal when he took office because he didn’t want to tangle with Iran hawks. The Israeli right wing was all too happy to see diplomacy fail; Israeli hawks had long bemoaned American diplomacy with Iran as an impediment to what they billed as a necessary war with Iran and its proxies. The modus operandi of this strain of Israeli politics is forever war, and Netanyahu latched onto it because forever war meant that he was forever in political power.
Then, with the Israeli military’s string of stunning successes against the Axis in the wake of the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Netanyahu finally had a chance to open up a new front on Iran. The long shadow war between Iran and Israel accelerated, with the first open and direct Israeli strikes on Iran in October 2024. The recent, outright war broke out on June 13 and lasted twelve days. But Israel’s war plan, it turns out, relied on U.S. participation. Israel didn’t have the bunker-busting mega-bombs to go after Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment sites.
Trump decided to go back on his original promise to get the United States out of foreign wars rather than start new ones. He overruled his own intelligence services and some top advisers, who told him there was no need to go to war. U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran was far from being able to refine nuclear material to bomb-grade levels. Vice President JD Vance had campaigned on an anti-interventionist platform, which much of the MAGA base held as sacrosanct. Iran was even already engaging in fresh, low-profile negotiations with the United States to give up more of its nuclear ambitions. Despite Trump’s earlier opposition to the JCPOA, there was actually an opportunity to move toward a more peaceful and progressive resolution to the long-standing U.S.–Iranian tensions.
Without any explanation, at the hour of decision Trump joined Netanyahu’s reckless war on Iran. The U.S. strikes may or may not have severely damaged Iran’s short-term nuclear enrichment capabilities. But they undeniably undermined the remaining chances of reaching a diplomatic solution to U.S.–Iranian tension. And they set an important precedent of American involvement in Israel’s war in Iran—a war that, unfortunately, is probably far from over.
Consequences Yet Unfolding
An Iran hawk might respond, who cares? The bombing campaign didn’t unleash a wave of reprisals—at least, not yet. The defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah has already shown that the web of supposedly menacing militias that make up Iran’s regional network were nothing more than so many paper tigers. The Iranian regime is deeply unpopular at home; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is old, enfeebled, and hiding from public appearances much as Hassan Nasrallah was in the months before Israel killed him with a bomb last year. Israeli intelligence apparently has the ability to assassinate Iranian generals and scientists virtually at will. Triumphalist hawks argue that Iran is now cowering and will eventually return to the negotiating table prostrate and desperate.
Iran’s total defeat and submission is a slim but, in reality, most unlikely possibility. What the war on Iran has actually generated so far is a cornered and radicalized Iranian regime—still in control of a massive military infrastructure, some of the world’s largest oil reserves, and enough money and resources to survive and indefinitely cause trouble. On the forever-war track that Netanyahu proposed and Trump accepted, the best-case scenario in Iran right now is low-grade misery for an increasingly large swath of the Iranian population as Iranian progressives fall in line behind hardliners who will capitalize on the state of emergency. The needless American embrace of this war reeks of the hubristic thinking that drove the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, a humanitarian disaster that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
The worst case scenarios are numerous and far graver, though no one can do more than speculate. A smorgasbord of possible disasters is still on the table: State collapse in Iran. A multi-front regional war in the Middle East. Blowback in Israel. Attacks on American civilians and civilian infrastructure. A U.S. intervention in Iran even more destructive for all involved than the Iraq fiasco. An American military spread thin to the point of weakness by multiple engagements. Or perhaps a Middle East in the grip, for several more generations, of authoritarianism newly empowered by technology.
The idea that a democratic regime change in Iran would somehow follow from Trump and Netanyahu’s twelve-day war—and whatever additional attacks from Israel and the United States are yet to come—is perhaps the most offensive, and delusional. The Iraq and Afghanistan cases should have put to rest the notion that countries can be bombed into democracy. And Iran is far larger and more politically developed than either of those countries. Regime collapse in Iran behind the pressure of military assault would likely unleash a bloody and multidirectional civil war.
Yet the most tragic short-term cost of Trump’s bombing of Iran is the snuffing out of diplomacy, which is always a better option than war.
An Opportunity for Something Better
There is, perhaps, a slim silver lining to Trump’s war of choice in Iran: it reveals the ongoing fixation with endless war that still holds some decision-makers in its thrall. For those who understand that forever wars and reflexive military interventions harm the interests of all concerned—in the interventionist countries as well as the places they target—the Iran war creates an opportunity to forge common ground.
Some Israelis recognize that their country’s hypermilitarization makes them less safe—that Hamas’s hostages are, in effect, also Netanyahu’s; that the road of expanding wars on which he has set the country has no end; and that only diplomacy and political agreements can address nagging problems like Palestinian statehood, Israeli security, and Iran’s role as regional spoiler.
In the United States, a growing segment of the public and a small but expanding bipartisan cohort of elected officials oppose intervention. Not all anti-inverventionists self-define as progressives—the non-interventionist wing of the MAGA base has publicly questioned Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran. This is good news—it means that a growing spectrum of Americans at loggerheads on other issues have started to recognize the folly of hypermilitarization and forever war. They are coalescing around the idea that American foreign policy should involve more diplomacy and values, and less bombing.
There are still some differences of opinion in this growing consensus. Some Americans who oppose intervention are isolationists, and believe America can simply ignore what happens abroad. Other anti-inverventionists argue that America should engage diplomatically rather than militarily if it wants good results; they understand that American security, prosperity, and values are inextricably linked to the rest of the world, and that the question is how to best engage. Despite these minor differences, American anti-interventionists from across the spectrum can still engage together against more forever war, whether in Iran or Gaza, even if they share few other political projects.
It was just such a dynamic that allowed a handful of Democratic lawmakers in July to sign on with none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene in an attempt to sanction Israel for its bombing of churches in Gaza. A left–right antiwar coalition poses its own dangers, including the risk of mainstreaming opponents of war who also propagate toxic anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic sentiment. But the point is not about individual lawmakers—it’s that Trump has just cast a light on a workable overlap between pro-peace progressives and segments of the MAGA base. At this point, with their power at such an ebb, progressives face little risk to their standing by investing in this overlap, but Trump stands to lose a lot if portions of his base start opening their minds to cooperation with the left.
The new war creates another, broader opportunity to address the long, troubling, bipartisan embrace of forever war. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran differed from the unilateral military interventions of previous administrations in narrow specifics, but not in its fundamental logic. The Iran intervention drew on a disturbing bedrock of systemic failures to reign in undeclared wars and international crimes. Since 9/11, it has become all too common for American presidents to launch air strikes or targeted assassinations without Congressional approval, ignore international law, sideline human rights commitments, and send weapons to foreign belligerents in direct contravention of international law. Trump’s transgressions when it comes to foreign wars draw on plenty of presidential precedents, from both parties.
Trump’s flagrant escalation highlights the hypocrisies at the core of American foreign policy dysfunction. America needs a completely fresh vision, like the blueprint for a progressive foreign policy in the Middle East that Century International proposed last year.
But first, the most pressing issue is to stop America’s involvement in another round of disastrous Middle Eastern wars. It’s never too late to reverse a bad course—today’s bad situation could yet devolve into something far worse.
Header Image Caption: JUNE 26: A man rides a scooter past a billboard depicting U.S. President Donald Trump on June 26, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Tags: foreign policy, iran, u.s. iran relations, iran and the us