Donald Trump Launches a War of “Epic Fury” on Iran
President Donald Trump has launched a capricious and personal war on Iran that is more ambitious, politically and militarily, than any past U.S. campaign in the perpetually volatile Middle East. In an eight-minute video released in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while most Americans were still asleep, he announced that his goals are the abolishment of the theocratic regime, total capitulation by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—or else the death of its members at U.S. hands—and an end to the country’s controversial nuclear program.
Trump called for Iran’s ninety-two million people to rise up in popular resistance and form a new government. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it,” he told the Iranian people. “Now you have a President who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” It is an audacious gambit, undertaken in coördination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of Israel, that has no clear outcome. For a man who hungers for the Nobel Peace Prize, this war of choice borders on delusion.
Ali Vaez, who heads the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told me, “The idea in Washington and Tel Aviv that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy—it’s wishful thinking.” He noted that there is no modern precedent for forcing regime change by airpower alone. “Bombs can degrade infrastructure. They can weaken capabilities,” he said. “But they do not manufacture organized political alternatives.”
The U.S. and Israeli operations have reportedly targeted Iran’s leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and struck at least nine cities, from the northern mountains to the southern desert, and a port on the Persian Gulf. According to multiple news outlets, Israeli officials have said that Khamenei was killed. The war—dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the U.S. and Roaring Lion by Israel—has escalated quickly, sucking in seven other countries as Iran responded by firing on Israeli and American interests in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. U.S. officials have indicated that the war is likely to continue for days, even weeks. Trump acknowledged there may be American casualties as the conflict unfolds.
Recent polls have shown that Trump does not have broad support for this war, which arrives at a time when Americans are focussed most on their own economic woes. There are also growing questions about the war’s legality—whether it violates international laws, the U.N. Charter, or the U.S. Constitution. The founding document of the U.N. stipulates that its members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” And the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress has the power to declare war. In a statement on Saturday, the Arms Control Association said that American lawmakers and other countries around the world “have a solemn moral and legal duty to oppose this rogue aggression.”
This war on Iran need not have happened—at least not now. As was the case in the run-up to the Twelve-Day War, in June, when the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, the Trump Administration has been in the midst of diplomatic negotiations with the Islamic Republic. They were due to hold further talks, among their respective nuclear experts, early next week. Once again, diplomacy has been aborted in favor of violence. Just hours before the war erupted, the Omani Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, who has been the intermediary in the negotiations, reported that “substantial progress” had been made toward a lasting and verifiable deal. “Really, I can see that the peace deal is within our reach,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
This is also a war that could have been avoided if Trump had not abandoned the hard-won nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., in 2018, during his first term, which had taken two years of intense negotiations by the Obama Administration. Trump’s subsequent campaign of maximum pressure, including the imposition of fifteen hundred new economic sanctions on Iran and its business partners, led Tehran to respond with its own maximum pressure. It escalated the enrichment of uranium, the fuel that can be used for a nuclear weapon—and for nuclear energy—to far higher than the limits set under the J.C.P.O.A., and created more advanced centrifuges to do that. On Saturday, Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said, “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East? Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up during his first term?”
Trump recently claimed that a new nuclear deal could be reached if Iran only said the “magic words”—that it would not produce a nuclear weapon. Iran has used those magic words several times in recent years, including this past week. On Tuesday, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted on X, “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people.” Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which went into effect in 1970, Iran has the right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Like the war on Iraq, launched by the George W. Bush Administration in 2003, today’s war on Iran is based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. This week, President Trump claimed that Tehran posed “imminent threats” to American soil. Washington is rightly concerned about Iran’s ballistic missiles, many hidden underground in so-called missile cities. Their longest range is two thousand kilometres, far enough to hit Israel and U.S. personnel or facilities across the Middle East. That is, indeed, deeply worrisome. But Iran has no ability to hit anywhere close to the United States.
Alan Eyre, a longtime Iran watcher at the State Department, now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told me that Trump’s “stated objective for these attacks—imminent threat—is not believable, and his real objective—regime incapacitation if not regime change—is unlikely.” Operation Epic Fury, he went on, may not be able to destroy by air “the myriad interlinked institutions and infrastructures that constitute the basis of regime power. Even if that were to happen, it is even more unlikely there would be a spontaneous generation of new organic institutions that would underpin a viable alternative government. What is more likely once the guns stop is a degraded regime and an increasingly immiserated Iranian populace.” Eyre added that there’s no guarantee that the U.S. military can stifle an Iranian response, which could destabilize the region.
The war has triggered global alarm. The U.N. scheduled an emergency meeting for Saturday afternoon. Long-standing U.S. allies called for an end to the air campaign. On X, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, wrote that the “outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran carries grave consequences for international peace and security.” The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, said, “We cannot afford another prolonged and devastating war in the Middle East.” The Swiss government called for “full respect for international law.” In a joint statement, the top two leaders of the European Union urged against “any actions that could further escalate tensions or undermine the global nonproliferation regime.”
At home, many Democratic leaders and at least two Republicans challenged Trump’s decision—or right—to go to war. In a post on X, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, said, “This is not ‘America First.’ ” Senator Rand Paul, another Kentucky Republican, quoted James Madison, a Founding Father and the fourth U.S. President, who said that the executive branch was “most prone to war,” which is why declaring it is a right reserved for Congress.
Others noted Iranian support for extremist movements, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, that have killed hundreds of Americans in the past four decades, and the thousands of Iranians the regime has killed in recent protests. “No one will be sad to see them go,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted. But she said that Trump “has shown a disappointingly cavalier approach towards the use of force, even when it risks the lives of the tens of thousands of U.S. service members and diplomats in the region as well as our allies and partners, who are already under attack.”
The President has still not outlined the U.S. exit strategy. Will it be after a hypothetical uprising has held elections and formed a new government? The Bush Administration tried that in Afghanistan in 2001, and in Iraq in 2003—and was stuck in each country for years, at the cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Senator Andy Kim, of New Jersey, called Trump’s decision “foolish” for putting Americans in harm’s way without an imminent threat and putting Iranian dissidents in danger without a coalition to protect them. Trump has talked about both a limited mission against Iran and, overnight, a “massive” operation. The specifics of his calculations remain unclear—to other elected officials as well as to the rest of us. ♦
This article has been updated to include news developments.