When Donald J. Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign, the real estate mogul and reality television star presented himself as a vocal critic of previous American military adventures in the Middle East.
But in that same speech, long before he would start a war with Iran, Mr. Trump opened the door to future conflicts in the Middle East and raised the specter of Islamist terrorism as a national security threat. He pointed chiefly to the Islamic State — which at the time controlled about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq — and to Iran, which had gained significant influence in Iraq by arming militias who were then fighting against the Islamic State.
“Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump,” Mr. Trump vowed.
He warned that “Iran is going to take over the Middle East,” and vowed, “I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons,” even as he denounced an agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama aimed at reining in the country’s nuclear weapons program.
This week, Mr. Trump pointed to those decade-old campaign promises as a foundation for his decision to go to war with Iran.
“All I’m doing is keeping my promise,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, adding that Iran “was a threat then and a much bigger threat now.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks, which portrayed victory as just around the corner but vacillated on when and how the war would end, touched on the president’s yearslong campaign of aggression toward Iran’s theocratic government, characterized by escalating military strikes against Iranian forces and their proxies.
His aggressive stance toward Iran, both during his first term and since returning to office last year, is vital to understanding the current regional conflict.
Here are some of the key moments:
Trump dismantled the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018
One of Mr. Trump’s first major actions against Iran was to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a signature foreign policy achievement of former President Barack Obama that tightly restricted Iran’s ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon in return for ending sanctions that had crippled its economy.
To comply with the agreement, Iran had traded away most of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, shipping it to Russia, and agreed to regular inspections of its facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization tasked with nuclear arms control. Three close U.S. allies — France, Germany and Britain, as well as two rival powers, Russia and China — had signed the agreement.
Mr. Trump had made tearing up the nuclear deal a bedrock promise of his 2016 campaign. From his very first campaign speech, Mr. Trump called it a disaster and a capitulation to a hostile nation, remarking that “Israel maybe won’t exist very long” once it went into effect.
Once in office, Mr. Trump’s aides repeatedly urged him not to dismantle the nuclear deal, but Mr. Trump pushed ahead in May 2018 and reimposed the stringent sanctions the United States had placed on Iran to try to strangle its nuclear program. The sanctions helped push Iran into a severe economic crisis, as international companies pulled their businesses out of the country.
Just days before the U.S.-Israeli attacks that sparked a new war with Iran this year, American and Iranian officials were striving to negotiate a new deal that would once more rein in Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Mr. Trump, dissatisfied by the talks, gave the order for a sustained attack that would begin with the killing of Iran’s supreme leader.
Trump approved, then called off, strikes on Iran in 2019
In June 2019, Mr. Trump approved attacks on military targets in Iran in response to the downing of an American surveillance drone, but abruptly reversed himself and called off the strikes as planes were in the air and ships were readying their missiles.
In Mr. Trump’s words, he called it off with 10 minutes to spare when a general told him that 150 people would probably die in the attack. The decision left many of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Iran hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, then the national security adviser, stunned and incredulous.
An assassination order of a top Iranian general in 2020
President Trump then authorized a drone strike in January 2020 that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, who was seen as a potential future leader of Iran. The attack triggered retaliatory strikes against U.S. military bases in the Middle East and brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war just weeks before the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
One of the most perilous chapters of Mr. Trump’s first term appeared to have been the result of a miscalculation. A rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia killed an American civilian contractor and wounded several U.S. troops at an Iraqi military base. Kataib Hezbollah, the group held responsible, had routinely fired on bases with Americans without deadly results and did not intend to escalate, according to intelligence officials.
Presented with options for retaliation, Mr. Trump chose the most extreme: killing General Suleimani. More than 100 American troops suffered traumatic brain injuries amid Iran’s retaliatory strikes after General Suleimani’s killing. Mr. Trump downplayed the injuries as “not very serious.”
Bombed Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025
The United States intervened in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel last summer, striking and badly damaging three key nuclear sites in Iran: Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan.
Mr. Trump, who said the goal of the attack was to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, portrayed the attack as a success, claiming the nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.”
Military officials and international weapons inspectors confirmed that the nuclear facilities were badly damaged, though not destroyed, and that the strikes had effectively buried Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium at the Isfahan facility. Without that stockpile, it is nearly impossible for the Iranian military to produce a nuclear weapon. American intelligence agencies have determined that Iran or another group could attempt to retrieve the stockpile.
Despite that, President Trump and his aides falsely claimed in the days leading up to the current war that Iran could build a bomb “within days.” They used the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program as a justification for attacking the country, once more setting the goal of eliminating its ability to build a nuclear weapon.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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