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How Washington’s Iran Groupthink Led to a Global War

And why accountability matters.

The war now engulfing the Middle East is already making Americans less safe and less prosperous, yet it is exactly where Washington’s approach to Iran has led.

What makes this moment so troubling is not just the scale of the conflict, but how it grew out of years of distorted debate, where Iran was reduced to simplistic, fear-driven narratives and serious warnings were brushed aside.

Americans were not calling for a war with Iran. Polling showed clear opposition, including among many Republican voters. Yet for years, Washington’s foreign policy establishment—the officials, think tanks, and media voices that shape US policy toward other countries—moved in the opposite direction. This was not a misunderstanding of public will. It reflected the kind of debate Americans were given, one that had already been narrowed to favor confrontation over restraint. At its core, the question was not simply which policy to pursue, but whether diplomacy would be allowed to work at all.

On one side were those trying to make it succeed. On the other were those determined to unravel it, leaving pressure and ultimately war as the only path forward. The 2015 nuclear deal, negotiated under Barack Obama, was the clearest example of what diplomacy could achieve. It placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program, rolled back uranium enrichment, and subjected it to the most intrusive inspections regime ever negotiated, effectively closing off its pathways to a nuclear weapon and significantly reducing the risk of war.

That framework was dismantled in 2018 when Donald Trump scrapped the deal, dismissing it as “the worst deal ever negotiated” and replacing it with sweeping sanctions, isolation, and the constant threat of war.

This was not simply a change in strategy. It reflected years of sustained pro-Israel political pressure and the influence of powerful donors, most notably Sheldon Adelson, the late gambling magnate who was the largest financial backer of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a fierce opponent of the deal, closely aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline stance on Iran.

The collapse of the agreement was, in many ways, the culmination of Netanyahu’s long-running campaign to kill it. He broke with diplomatic norms to address Congress in 2015 in an effort to undermine the deal, continued pressing aggressively once Trump took office, and in a leaked 2018 video later claimed credit outright, saying that “we convinced the US........

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