They were brief but unmistakable allusions in President Trump’s uncharacteristically disciplined speech at the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
At moments in his remarks at the Pentagon on Friday morning, Mr. Trump justified his decision to attack Iran this year by invoking the lessons of a quarter-century ago, casting it as an extension of the war on terrorism that began in the hours after the World Trade Center towers fell.
“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago: We will never, ever forget,” Mr. Trump said of those killed in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. “That’s why we fight today.”
“We don’t have a choice,” he continued. “There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.” At another moment, he added: “On days like 9/11, we learn what a country is truly made of. We’re learning right now what we’re made of, and we have to be strong and we have to be smart.”
At no point did Mr. Trump suggest that Iran was itself involved in the terrorist attacks that day, though for a quarter-century Tehran’s still-murky links to a small number of Qaeda leaders has prompted debate, and fueled conspiracy theories.
The president instead appeared to be asserting that after 9/11, no risk can be tolerated — a head-spinning turn toward the same line of reasoning used by previous American officials in the “forever wars” that Mr. Trump has long denounced.
Mr. Trump made the case more explicitly on “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News on Thursday evening, just before the anniversary, when he reiterated to the host, Laura Ingraham, that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. If “all of a sudden Iran has a nuclear weapon,” he said, “they would use it.”
Yet for Mr. Trump in particular, invoking that argument was a stretch.
He was elected in part because of his promise to avoid the kind of post-9/11 wars that he has long blamed on President George W. Bush. In Mr. Trump’s telling, getting bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq was a huge strategic error, as mission creep led Mr. Bush to change his objectives, at the cost of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billion dollars.
Mr. Trump’s distaste was so strong he moved portraits of Mr. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, out of conspicuous locations in White House, to the stairways leading up to the White House residence.
But Mr. Trump’s argument on Friday bore great similarity to Mr. Bush’s two decades ago: that in a post-9/11 world, Washington has both the right and the duty to wipe out potential risks. That was Mr. Bush’s case for invading Iraq in 2003, when he argued that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapon. (The Iraqi leader had pursued one years earlier, as inspectors discovered after the Persian Gulf War, but there was no active weapons program in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.)
In the case of Iran, of course, Mr. Trump had already declared that he had “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program. And when he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel launched their joint attack on Feb. 28, they made the case that the program had been revived, though he did not provide evidence. Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium appears to remain buried, under the rubble of nuclear facilities that the United States bombed in June 2025.
“The argument echoes the Bush-era pre-emption doctrine, in which America learned from 9/11 that it could not sit by while threats gathered,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive for the Center for a New American Security.
Mr. Fontaine, a former adviser to Senator John McCain, noted that the Bush administration argument was that “we couldn’t let the smoking gun in Iraq become a mushroom cloud, and had to attack first.”
“But then, as now, the specific circumstances matter,” he continued. “Iran is a terror state and has pursued a nuclear program, but it remains an open question at best whether Trump’s pre-emptive military action renders Tehran’s threat more or less acute.”
“It’s telling,” he concluded, “that the president has embraced the kind of rationale for Middle East war that he previously criticized so vociferously.”
But it is not just Mr. Trump who appears to have adopted the argument. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who preceded Mr. Trump on the podium, lumped the 9/11 plotters, who were largely from Saudi Arabia, together with the Iranian leadership, at least by implication. They are all “Islamic terrorists” in his telling.
“The struggle against evil continued, and it continues now,” Mr. Hegseth said, adding: “There are still enemies who hate us. Every day enemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home.”
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