The U.S. military was once a tool of last resort for American presidents.
The tough decision to deploy armed troops for conflict in another country came after diplomacy, political pressure and other peaceful options were exhausted. This clearly doesn’t hold true in the second Trump administration.
In a short video posted on Saturday morning, President Trump stood in a darkened room at a lectern in a white “U.S.A.” hat and announced that the United States military had begun “major combat operations in Iran” and called for the overthrow of its government. He warned that this could be a costly fight, and that American lives could be lost.
In his attempt to project power to all corners of the globe during his second term, Mr. Trump has routinely relied on both the threat and the use of military action to coerce opponents and allies alike into giving him what he wants. Warnings of American military involvement — traditionally viewed by commanders in chief as “break glass in case of emergency” — have now become a weekly, if not daily, occurrence.
The world has watched Mr. Trump launch military operations in Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq and Syria; capture and remove Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power; threaten to use military force to take control of Greenland; pressure Mexico to allow U.S. troops in the country to target fentanyl labs; and direct an air campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers at sea.
If you asked average Americans what the mission in Iran is for, you’d likely get conflicting answers. And you couldn’t blame them: The president himself has given several reasons to justify the historic attack now underway.
“The United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”
In January, Mr. Trump hinted that he might take U.S. military action on behalf of the Iranian protesters who flooded the streets in outrage over their government’s handling of its failing economy, deploying an armada of warships and fleets of attack aircraft throughout the Middle East. Not long after, Trump administration officials began ringing alarm bells about Tehran’s nuclear weapons program — the same one that was supposedly obliterated during the last American military strike in Iran, way back in June. Diplomatic talks were hastily arranged, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spent weeks goading Mr. Trump to launch the offensive.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump listed the threats Iran has posed over the past four decades: taking American hostages during the Carter administration, supporting militant proxies in the region, the government’s bloody crackdown on protesters last month, its nuclear ambitions.
If the varied, head-scratching explanations as to why the U.S. military is dropping bombs on a far-flung country feel familiar, it’s because they are. The administration also gave vague and conflicting reasons for its military intervention in Venezuela in the run-up to its raid to capture Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Trump is right to point out the Iranian regime’s horrific behavior. It has long conducted systemic human rights abuses against its own citizens and provided financial and military support for terror groups throughout the Middle East. But the president’s decision to launch an air campaign without a coherent explanation to the American public is unacceptable. He made no attempt to build an international coalition, nor to prepare the nation for war. Three minutes of his 108-minute State of the Union address — given four days before he launched one of the largest U.S. military operations in decades — were dedicated to Iran.
The effects of his decision are already being felt by the American people. Iran has launched retaliatory strikes on Israel, which joined the United States in Saturday’s air operation, as well as countries that host U.S. forces: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Images posted to social media show that the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was hit by a missile attack, and the Middle East is braced for wider retaliation.
Mr. Trump’s dangerous reliance on the military as the primary tool of foreign policy creates a perilous precedent. The American people must not become inured to their president using troops as an easy button to solve policy problems.
Worse, Mr. Trump’s strongman scheme to coerce or impose his will on opponents does not appear to be joined to any long-term strategy, nor has it compelled America’s allies to join his side. These strikes come some eight months after Mr. Trump bombarded the country’s nuclear facilities, which, though he declared the effort successful, failed to bring an end to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Badr Albusaidi, the Omani foreign minister who was mediating between the United States and Iran before Saturday’s attacks, criticized Mr. Trump’s decision to escalate. “Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined,” he said on social media. “I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”
Let us not forget that Mr. Trump, in his first administration, ripped up the multilateral nuclear agreement that constrained that very program. We should also be mindful that international weapons monitoring groups, as well as U.S. and European government officials, have been skeptical that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat.
The impulse to use force to solve intractable problems overseas may come naturally for an administration in the wake of the military mission in Venezuela, which was widely seen as a success. According to the Pentagon, it involved months of planning and intelligence coordination with spy agencies and took the orchestration of more than 150 aircraft launches from some 20 different bases, cyberattacks on energy infrastructure and a multifaceted Special Forces raid on Mr. Maduro.
That mission did not cost American lives — a fact that could be a result of chance as much as planning. When it comes to military action, accidental escalation is always a risk, and the bigger the operation, the greater the chance of something going wrong. Consider the potential costs in Venezuela if a plane had been shot down, a cyberweapon had debilitated a hospital’s lifesaving equipment or an American soldier had been killed. Would this require a secondary wave of military action? Would foreign nations feel compelled to intervene?
The same kinds of questions — and many more — apply to the sweeping and complex mission apparently underway in Iran in coordination with Israel. Mr. Trump has pledged to destroy Iran’s missile systems and navy, take out its regional proxies and ensure it does not acquire a nuclear weapon. He called on Iranian forces to lay down their weapons or “face certain death,” and told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and the government would be “yours to take” when the United States was finished with its mission.
Mr. Trump made it sound simple, but history shows that the United States’ confrontations with Iran are never so straightforward. His reliance on military action over diplomacy is costly and shortsighted. The cycle of violence can’t become an accepted standard.
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