US President Donald Trump holds a meeting in the Oval Office on December 3, 2025. President Trump’s decision to attack Iran has been criticized for its lack of a just cause and clear objectives. (Shutterstock/Lucas Parker)

The Astonishingly Weak Case for War with Iran

Share this link on Facebook

Share this page on X (Twitter)

Share this link on LinkedIn

Share this page on Reddit

Email a link to this page

Operation Epic Fury will make it more difficult for the United States to conduct genuine diplomacy in the future.

A broad perspective toward the US attack on Iran and what led up to it yields three major impressions.

The first is how aggression—an offensive war of choice—seems to have become normalized in US policy discourse, as if it were no less innocent than a diplomatic demarche. Lest we forget, aggression is illegal. It violates Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 called aggression the “supreme international crime.” And that is in addition to the illegality under domestic law of the war that the administration just launched.

The Iraq War that the George W. Bush administration launched 23 years ago moved the Overton Window regarding aggression. That war was the first major offensive war that the United States had begun in over a century, since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Every overseas US military operation in the 20th century was either a minor intervention, such as those in Grenada and Panama, or, in larger operations, a response to another country’s aggression.

A second impression is how remarkably little effort the Trump administration has made to justify its war against Iran. In this respect, it is far different from the Iraq War. The Bush administration preceded that endeavor with a sustained sales campaign aimed at both domestic and international audiences, featuring multiple presidential speeches.

In contrast, President Donald Trump had offered, prior to the attack last weekend, only the most casual utterances about how awful he considered the Iranian regime to be. Four days before the attack, he delivered a State of the Union address that, despite its record-breaking length, included only a brief passage on Iran. That passage contained some of the usual Trumpian falsehoods, such as an assertion that Iran is building missiles “that will soon reach the United States of America.”

Despite repeating his earlier assertion that US airstrikes had “obliterated”........

© The National Interest