Eight months after Trump insisted that Operation Midnight Hammer "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, he has deployed the largest military presence in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
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President Trump has spent two months ordering a rapidly expanding and now-massive military buildup near Iran, with a focus on the Persian Gulf and nearby permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to Iran (Iran, of course, has no military bases anywhere near the U.S.). The deployment includes aircraft carriers and other assets that would enable, at a minimum, an extremely destructive air campaign against the whole country.
The U.S. under both parties has been insisting for two decades that it must abandon its heavy military involvement in the Middle East and instead “pivot to Asia” in light of a rapidly rising China. Yet in the midst of those vows, Trump has now assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East since 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq with overwhelming military force.
One of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump — outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S. invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.
In the weeks preceding the Venezuela operation, we heard a carousel of rationales. It was all necessary to stop the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. We needed to free the repressed Venezuelan peoples from their dictator. Trump’s embrace and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine — now dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — meant that we cannot tolerate communist regimes in “our region.”
But as soon as Maduro was removed, all of those claims disappeared. Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. left in place Maduro’s entire regime rather than replacing it with the pro-US opposition (a wise move of restraint in my view, but one that negates the “liberation” rhetoric). Discussions of the drug trade from Venezuela (a source of drugs for the U.S. that was always minor if not trivial, and did not include fentanyl) have completely disappeared. The only real outcome seems to be that the U.S. has more control over that nation’s oil supply, and barrels of it are now being shipped to Israel for the first time in many years.
In sum, we were given a low-effort smorgasbord to enable supporters of Trump’s actions toward Venezuela to mount arguments in favor of the operation, but there was no systematic attempt to convince the country at large. There was not even a live television address to the nation beforehand to explain it. And the role that Congress played was close to non-existent. All of that is similar to what we are seeing now concerning a far riskier, more dangerous, and complex war with Iran.
This massive build-up near Iran also signifies the U.S.’s complete inability — or lack of desire — to extricate itself from the Middle East and endless American wars there. In the first year of his second term — 2025 — Trump has already ordered sustained bombing of Yemen; extensive military deployments to support Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen; and Operation Midnight Hammer, which was sold to Trump’s base as a one-night-only bombing run that is now close to exploding into something far more protracted.
No matter how fast China’s power grows, the U.S. — despite emphasizing the vital importance of doing so over the last four administrations — simply cannot or will not reduce its massive military commitment to the Middle East. The real reasons why the U.S. does not sharply deprioritize the Middle East as a military focus deserve serious examination (oil is often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy).
In this regard, it is hard not to notice that Trump’s very rapid movement toward war with Iran comes in the midst of yet another visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not hyperbole to say that Netanyahu’s great dream for decades has been inducing the U.S. into a regime-change war with Iran to rid Tel Aviv of its most formidable adversary, and his dream is closer than ever to being realized.
There is no way to minimize the gravity of the moment. Trump himself has made clear that this huge armada on its way to Iran — far larger than the one deployed to Venezuela — is not for show. He has spent many weeks ratcheting up his war rhetoric. Trump’s public posture is ostensibly one of deterrence: he proclaims that his overarching desire is to strike “a deal” with Tehran in order to avoid the need for war, but he then quickly adds that the US will impose massive damage and violence on the country in the event that negotiations fail to produce the agreement he wants. In sum, he depicts threats of war as motivation for Iran to accept his terms.
That may seem to be a cogent theory of deterrence (or extortion) if one looks at it in isolation. Many world leaders, in general, and Trump, especially, believe that threats of war and military attack are often necessary for extracting the best diplomatic solution possible. But thus far, it has not averted wars.
One reason this tactic is losing efficacy is that it has lost its credibility. As I documented in my report last Tuesday, Trump’s words and actions about the current situation with Iran track almost completely his actions and words which preceded Israel’s surprise attack on Iran in June and the accompanying U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Up until the hours before Israel started a war with Iran by bombing Tehran in June, Trump was repeatedly trumpeting how great negotiations with Tehran were going, and he predicted with great confidence that all issues would be resolved without the need for military action against Iran. Central to this scheme was the Israeli “reporter” for Axios, Barak Ravid, who — before his overnight ascension to key reporter in the US for all matters Israel — served in Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 military intelligence unit as well as the IDF Reserves until 2024. This former IDF soldier, from his key perch at Axios and CNN, continuously circulated reports based on anonymous sources in both governments announcing a growing and virulent “rift” between the two leaders, all due to Trump’s refusal to allow Netanyahu to bomb Iran.
That public theater, by design, created the impression that a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran was highly unlikely because of how opposed Trump was to it. And that, in turn, manipulated Iran out of adopting a posture of maximum war readiness, given their belief in the sincerity of Trump’s assurances that a deal would be made.
But in the midst of all that, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on Iran, only to have the U.S. join in, with Trump eventually taking credit for all of it. This — quite understandably — created a global perception that Trump’s diplomatic conduct and statements, amplified by Ravid, were an obvious ruse to lure Iran into a false sense of security, so that Israel and the U.S. could attack Iran without much resistance.
When the Israeli attack on Iran was touted in Western media as a success, Trump instantly proclaimed that he and Netanyahu planned it together. He heralded Netanyahu (and implicitly himself) as a “war hero” and, on that basis, demanded that the Israeli president pardon Netanyahu on pending corruption charges.
When journalists asked Trump why the U.S. would not simply be in the exact same situation months from now, when Iran began rebuilding its nuclear program, Trump insisted that it would and never could happen. The U.S. “totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he insisted, and Iran learned its lesson and knows not to try to rebuild.
Yet here we are just eight months later, seemingly closer to a full-on war with Iran than ever before. “Trump appears ready to attack Iran as U.S. strike force takes shape,” reads the headline in The Washington Post on Friday morning. The paper cites “current and former U.S. officials” as saying that “the Trump administration appears ready to launch an extended military assault on Iran.” While such a war is not yet inevitable, it is clear that the probability increases each day with more and more military assets arriving. That the U.K. is thus far refusing to allow the U.S. to use its military base in Diego Garcia as a launching ground for air attacks is proof that the U.S. is, at the very least, in serious, high-level preparation stages.
The obvious, most pressing question — the key question for any war, but especially for this one — is why? In order to have the U.S. once again militarily attack a country and risk a major war, one expects that the American President would provide clear, consistent, and compelling evidence as to why this war is necessary to protect the interests of the U.S. and the security of the American people. The Bush 43 administration spent a full year starting in 2002 toward laying the groundwork to convince Americans of the need to invade Iraq, and though it was filled with falsehoods and deceit, that is the sort of campaign that generally accompanies an attempt to bring the country into a major new war.
But none of that is happening: at all. The U.S. has inexorably moved toward a war with Iran with stunningly little public debate or discussion. If you ask 10 different Trump supporters, or even 10 different Trump White House officials, why the U.S. should be aggressively menacing Iran with full-scale war, you will hear 10 different answers. There is not even a pretense of involving Congress, and the Democratic Party is in its usual state of worthless passivity. And the more one looks for such answers about why this war is even arguably necessary, the more difficult it is to find them.
The pretext used for the last U.S. bombing attack on Iran — namely, we have to stop their nuclear program — was never remotely persuasive for reasons we and others extensively documented. But whatever is true about the past, that pretext is less valid now than ever. Trump’s vehement insistence that the U.S. “completely obliterated” the only nuclear facilities Iran possesses renders that excuse inoperable. How could Iran possibly be close to developing a nuclear weapon if Trump’s boastful claims are even remotely true?
Then there is the “war justification” based on Iran’s recent, violent treatment of its domestic dissidents and protesters. I am almost reluctant to critically evaluate this claim, because it genuinely shocks me each time I learn that there really still are sentient human beings living on this planet who earnestly believe that U.S. foreign policy is based on a desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples and give them freedom and democracy. All presidents since the end of World War II have proven that “human rights concerns” or “a desire to liberate people” can often serve as the propagandistic pretext for war or a coup, but are never the actual motive for U.S. military action.
That many people continue to believe this self-serving fairy tale about U.S. foreign policy no matter how much negating proof they see — the U.S. propping up the world’s most savage and repressive tyrannies (such as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uganda); the fact that the CIA has far more often overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them with vicious dictatorships rather than the other way around; that “human rights concerns” find a mainstream platform in the U.S. only for countries that are adversaries but rarely for countries that are close U.S. allies — leads me to accept the futility of any efforts at dissuasion for people who somehow still believe in this mythology.
In fact, Trump’s own 2025 national security strategy released in December explicitly states that the U.S. is not going to attempt to stop repression in other countries or lecture them about the need for democratic and human rights reforms, but instead will deal with such countries as they are (that policy was designed to justify Trump’s close relationship with Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Egyptian and Jordanian tyrants but the principle applies to Iran as well, which is at most as repressive and in fact mildly less so than those close U.S. allies).
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The willingness of the U.S. to embrace and even support the world’s most savage regimes has, in fact, been the staple of U.S. foreign policy since at least the end of World War II; Trump, I guess to his credit, is the first to candidly admit and describe that reality.
Then we arrive at the final stated justification for a U.S. war against Iran: namely, Iran’s refusal to give up conventional weapons such as the ballistic missiles it used to impose serious damage to Israel in retaliation for Israel’s surprise attack on Iran. These ballistic missiles do not have the range to reach the U.S. Even if they did, Iran has never shown any propensity for militarily attacking the U.S. homeland, given its knowledge of what would ensue.
Moreover, every country has a legal right to build up a conventional arsenal: most countries in the world, including U.S. adversaries, do exactly that. And few countries have more justification for wanting such weapons than Iran, which has not only been repeatedly threatened with war by the most powerful country on earth, and the most powerful country in the region, but both of those countries have attacked Iran in multiple ways over the last two decades. Any minimally responsible leader of any country would, of course, want normal conventional weapons such as mid-range ballistic missiles to provide a deterrent threat against adversaries such as Israel from attacking it on a whim.
If the U.S. goes to war against Iran because of its refusal to destroy or severely limit its ballistic missiles — weapons that can threaten Israel and U.S. forces deployed near Iran to protect Israel, but not reach the U.S. homeland — then that will be one of the clearest signs yet (for those who still harbor doubts) that the U.S. is fighting wars and putting American soldiers at risk in order to advance Israel’s interests in the Middle East.
There is a reason that Netanyahu has visited Trump in the White House seven times in the last year, more than any other world leader by far. It is not because Netanyahu (or Trump’s fanatical top billionaire funder, the Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, whom Trump has suggested cares more about Israel than the U.S.) has suddenly developed a keen interest in building Trump’s “Board of Peace” to spread harmony in the world.
Each time Netanyahu visits, the U.S. finds itself in conflict, if not outright war, with Israel’s enemies. One can dismiss that as a coincidence if one likes, but I defy anyone to find a more likely reason as to why Trump — who built his movement on a vow to end Endless War as the defining dogma of the bipartisan DC swamp, yet is now clearly captive to powerful Israeli power centers — is on the verge of yet another new war with Israel’s enemies.
