During the run-up to the Iraq War, one of the tropes that was passed around by the George W. Bush’s band of neoconservatives, who were at the height of their hubristic, premature victory celebration, was “Everybody wants to go to Bagdad, real men want to go to Tehran.” Twenty-three years later, at a time when he is reeling from collapsing poll numbers and a major economic and foreign policy setback from the Supreme Court, Donald Trump has taken the nation to the edge of war with Iran.
The U.S. has assembled a massive military force in the region. Two aircraft carriers are leading an armada of a dozen warships and what experts say is 40-50% of the country’s total global air power to threaten the Islamic Republic into — what we aren’t quite sure. The president, along with his Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with a casus belli. In fact, no one knows precisely why the administration is threatening military action or what it wants Iran to do to stop it.
Some days, they say it’s about destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, which conflicts a bit with Trump’s declaration that he had “obliterated” it when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes hit nuclear facilities last summer. Last week he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he would send B-2 bombers to Iran “to knock out their nuclear potential” if they refused to agree to a nuclear deal. A few days later at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, the president praised America’s “magnificent” B-2 bombers, saying they “went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear potential. When it decimated that, all of a sudden, we had peace in the Middle East.”
Only a few weeks ago, he was issuing bellicose threats to the regime that if they harmed any of the demonstrators who were taking to the streets in anti-government protests that he was willing to take military action. (So far, at least 7,000 have been verified dead by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, with other reports claiming upwards of 30,000 deaths.) Trump wrote on Truth Social that the government would “pay a big price” for the killings and urged people to “keep protesting.” He indicated that the U.S. was preparing to intervene on their behalf, bleating, “I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA [Make Iran Great Again]!!!”
The president’s envoys are no more forthcoming with a rationale for the threatened military strikes. Needless to say, it’s difficult for them to make the demands for a halt to nuclear capability since the U.S. supposedly obliterated it. Nonetheless, Witkoff gamely claimed over the weekend that Iran could produce nuclear weapons in “less than a week.” Trump’s empathy and support for the country’s protesters, while commendable, is likewise hard to defend when the administration’s agents are shooting down its own citizens in the streets, so he appears to have gone quiet about that in recent days.
The president has not explicitly put regime change on the table as a desired outcome. But he has dropped cryptic hints, including a Truth Social post in the aftermath of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in June 2025 that referred to knowing the whereabouts of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and claimed he “would not let Israel…terminate his life.” After the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, such threats likely have more salience now.
War has a funny way of creeping up, and since we’ve had two long wars in the region in the past 20 years — and one short one in the previous decade — it’s quite easy to imagine how this could all hurtle out of control.
The bottom line is that nobody knows exactly why Trump has decided to threaten Iran now or what he hopes to achieve. When he took office in 2017, he inherited a formidable nuclear agreement with the country, which included an intrusive weapons inspection program, and he ripped it up solely because it was negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. (Undoing everything his predecessors did was the only foreign policy he knew how to pursue, and he hasn’t learned much since then.) Whatever deal he might come up with will undoubtedly be much weaker.
The irony is that we find ourselves at this moment when Trump ran in 2016 as the anti-Iraq war crusader who blamed all the “stupid” leaders before him for getting the U.S. into the forever wars. His peacenik bonafides never seemed very believable considering his violent, hostile temperament, but they did become part of his brand. The neocons who promised that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq were demeaned as hopeless romantics by the new America First faction, yet today we have Trump telling Iranian protesters that “help is on the way” — heartlessly raising expectations that America will intervene on their behalf in their internal battle for freedom.
Back in 2003, when those arrogant neocons were saying “real men want to go to Tehran,” the U.S. was in the throes of the reaction against 9/11. The devastation and fear that attack had caused throughout American society and around the world was extreme. People who had been angling to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — followed by the Iranian regime, which was famously part of Bush’s “axis of evil” — saw an opening to remake the Middle East, and they used that emotional moment to push through their agenda. But at least they made an attempt, however fatuous, to persuade the American people and the country’s international allies that there was a reason for doing so.
Trump and his accomplices aren’t trying to persuade anyone. They don’t believe they need to.
Bush pushed hard for congressional support, which he got, and while he couldn’t get the United Nations to back his plan, he did manage to convince some European allies, mostly notably the United Kingdom, to join what he called “the coalition of the willing,” so he did go to war with a semblance of authorization and the support of the majority of the American people. But the administration had lied about Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability and its alleged ties to al Qaeda, and in the end that helped doom the war to failure.
Once again, we’re faced with a similar set of circumstances. As he has in the past, Trump may lose his nerve and back down by accepting some face-saving deal because he is pretty much out on a limb, serving only the interests of the Israeli government and a few Iran hawks in the GOP who are whispering furiously in his ear. Apparently, he didn’t think it would come to this.
The president apparently gambled that bringing in a massive military force would force the Iranians’ hands. As Witkoff told Fox News on Saturday:
I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated’… because [Trump] understands he’s got plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t… I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated’, but why they haven’t capitulated. Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power that we have over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do? And yet it’s hard to sort of get them to that place.
Trump doesn’t understand that some people don’t readily respond to violent threats and blackmail, which is, unfortunately, the only kind of “negotiation” he knows how to do. We may be about to learn, in living color, what a mistake it is to put someone like that in a position of power. At this point, all we can hope is that his inherent cowardice will win out over his monstrous ego one more time. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Salon
