No matter how the US’s illegal military assault on Iran ultimately turns out, Trump’s war was lost before it even started. The war was justified by a flagrant lie and constitutes among the worst, most irresponsible misuses of American military power in modern history.
Trump’s claim that Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the US by building nuclear weapons was patently false. America’s former national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, which was corroborated by UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi who said in June 2025 that Iran had no plans to build nuclear weapons.
Trump had no legal justification for attacking a sovereign country under the UN charter’s Article 2 (4) prohibition.
Only one person bears responsibility for Iran beginning to enrich uranium in 2018 beyond the level needed for domestic energy use: Donald Trump. Iran had been enriching uranium at a maximum level of 3.67% for domestic energy production in keeping with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement negotiated in 2015. As president, Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA coalition in 2018 and renewed economic sanctions on Iran. Trump’s actions ostensibly blew up the agreement and Iran retaliated by beginning to enrich uranium at an increasingly higher level.
There is every reason to believe that had the US remained in the JCPOA, the agreement would still be in place today with Iran abiding by the nuclear restrictions, which were monitored and verified regularly by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) between 2015 and 2018. First, the nations involved formed a powerful coalition: Iranian allies Russia and China along with the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and the EU. If needed, they could put overwhelming pressure on Iran to abide by the agreement, both through the threat of reduced economic and military support from Russia and China and renewed economic sanctions from the other countries. The agreement was as close to ironclad as it could be.
Second, after the agreement was signed, Iran began enjoying an economic resurgence as decades-old sanctions that had crippled the country were removed. To remain sanction-free with the opportunity to continue improving its economy after decades of hardship, Iran’s abiding by the nuclear restrictions in the JCPOA agreement was a no-brainer.
Third, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there has been no credible evidence that Iran has decided to build or manufacture a nuclear weapon. Although critics remain skeptical, that fact flies in the face of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s claim in a Congressional hearing that the US must destroy Iran’s nuclear “ambitions.” Hegseth’s uncanny ability to peer into the black hearts of Iranian leaders is more reliable than any verifiable evidence.
Fourth, if Iran ever actually developed a nuclear weapon, do Iranian leaders really have a death wish for their country? If Iran attacked a country with nuclear weapons, it would be destroyed in short order by vastly more powerful nuclear forces. The one thing that has prevented every nuclear country from launching attacks for over 70 years is the most powerful evolutionary motivator in mankind: self-preservation. Iran would be no exception.
The 2015 coalition agreement is vastly superior to anything that Trump ultimately negotiates. Trump has scaled down his initial lofty goals to one: ensuring that Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons. First, there is no evidence that Iran ever planned to get nuclear weapons in the first place, and second, the 2015 agreement accomplished the same thing Trump is trying to negotiate with a much stronger international coalition to enforce it. By comparison, any Iranian nuclear agreement solely with the US helmed by an incompetent, capricious, and untrustworthy president couldn’t be more tenuous.
Beyond that, the 2015 agreement was accomplished diplomatically without bloodshed or destruction. Trump’s agreement will come following the US-Israeli bombing of Iran and the deaths of 2,000-to 3,000 Iranian civilians, including 250 to 500 children, 13 dead American soldiers and hundreds more injured. It will come with the destruction of Iranian schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and homes, the displacement of over 3 million Iranian civilians, a humanitarian crisis with a scarcity of food, drinkable water, and adequate health care, toxic clouds of pollution hanging over the cities, and the loss of thousands of jobs.
It will come with the war spreading across the Middle East, costing even more lives and increasing infrastructure damage. It will come with the international economic disaster brought on by extreme oil shortages and skyrocketing prices. It will come at a cost of $100 billion to American families between increased military spending and higher oil prices. It will take the world’s eyes off of the continued Russian onslaught in Ukraine and the killing of over 3,000 Lebanese civilians by Israeli forces.
Trump’s war is an unmitigated disaster, illegal, unnecessary, and bringing abject suffering and death to the Iranian people and economic hardship to the international community. It will bring Iran no farther from building nuclear weapons than it was in 2018 when Trump blew up the JCPOA agreement that was working successfully to restrict Iran’s level of uranium enrichment.
Trump started an illegal war against a country that the US intelligence community and the General Director of the IAEA concluded posed no nuclear threat, leaving behind a trail of death, misery, and wreckage in his wake. Trump could not have put America’s great military might to a more shameful, dishonorable, or unjustifiable purpose.
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