US President Donald Trump greets Mark Carney at the West Wing entrance of the White House, May 6, 2025. Photo courtesy the White House/Flickr.

Prime Minister Mark Carney supports the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran. He’s right. He says the war against Iran was “worth it.” He’s wrong.

The US had four reasons for going to war against Iran: regime change, eliminating Iran’s missile program, severing the ties between Iran and its proxies, and ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. The regime has survived; Iran retains the majority of its drones, missiles, and missile launchers, as well as the capacity to use them effectively; and the relationship between Iran and its partners has strengthened, with each showing an enhanced willingness to defend the other.

The cost of the war has been enormous. Some 3,468 Iranians have been killed. Twenty schools, 240 medical facilities, and dozens of cultural heritage sites have been damaged. The environment has been devastated. International law has been weakened by the attack of a Security Council member on a sovereign nation that had neither attacked nor threatened to attack it, without Security Council approval. By failing to protect a signatory that has the “inalienable right to a civilian [nuclear] program,” the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been discredited. By applying international law when it suits its interests and discarding it when it does not, the US has pushed away the very middle powers and Global South that Carney has argued must build a better world by standing up to the US and its selective application of international........

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