Tripwire Editorial Part One: Trump and Netanyahu Plunge the World into Chaos
The Trump administration has gone to war with Iran having apparently no clue what they’re doing, what they hope to achieve, why they are there, or what the next steps are
The U.S. and Israel launched what they called a pre-emptive strike against Iran in the early hours of Saturday morning that was explicitly intended to collapse the country’s government. U.S. President Donald Trump clearly expected the government to collapse amid a popular uprising. Instead, Iran is fighting back hard, and the situation is devolving into a regional war.
There is absolutely no need to fight this war. Iran has done nothing to actively threaten the U.S., and the claims about it building a nuclear weapon are entirely unfounded, which even the CIA acknowledges. Iran even held back in its retaliation when the U.S. and Israel unleashed a massive assault against the country last summer. While it arms a local network of militant groups in the Middle East, it also generally exercises restraint on these groups—and more importantly, they do not operate outside the Middle East.
Even beyond the fact that there is as much truth to claims of Iranian nuclear weapons as there were Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the current war is entirely unnecessary. There are numerous indications that Iran was willing to make a deal with the U.S. that went far beyond the provisions of the former nuclear deal between the two countries, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Oman’s foreign minister announced that Iran was willing to accept provisions that went far beyond what former president Barack Obama achieved in the JCPOA, which would have allowed Trump to declare a major victory and say he had done far better than his hated rival, the former president. U.S. intelligence has repeatedly assessed that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb, much less that it was close to doing so.
But Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had decided on war no matter what and made demands they knew Iran would never accept. They knew Iran would never give up its ballistic missiles, which it views as fundamental to its defence. As far as the Iranian government is concerned, giving up these weapons would be inviting Israel and the U.S. to destroy the country. Israel and the U.S. understood that this was Iran’s position, which is why they insisted on the country giving up its missiles.
Iranian missiles do not have the ability to strike the U.S., only its bases that surround the country. They have only fired them at Israel and other targets in response to being attacked, so the best way to get Iran to not retaliate is to not fire on them. It has also not fired its weapons when Israel has gone to war with proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Ironically, by attacking Iran, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are creating an incentive structure that encourages every power centre in the world, including Iran, to pursue nuclear weapons as aggressively as possible. This is all they are going to achieve, along with creating a new chaotic disaster in the Middle East that is now probably going to drag the entire world down with it. On top of all that, energy prices are going to skyrocket, and when energy gets more expensive, so does everything else.
None of These People Seem to Know Why They Even Started the War
The idiots in the Trump administration cannot even articulate a concrete reason for attacking Iran. Sometimes they claim it was to stop Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which both American intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency say does not exist. Other times they say it was to target Iran’s ballistic weapons program or to support anti-government protestors who rose up in large numbers at the end of December and protested into January. Then sometimes it is about Iran’s support for the Axis of Resistance, the network of anti-American and anti-Israeli militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis).
That the administration’s argument for the war is so bad that it has people lamenting the complex web of lies told by the Bush administration about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is a humiliating disaster for Trump. He clearly thought this was going to be quick and easy, which there is no reason to have believed.
So far, what appears to be the most accurate explanation for attacking Iran was given (poorly) by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson: Israel was planning to attack Iran in order to destroy its military capabilities since it could potentially use these to protect the development of a nuclear weapon at some point in the future. This would have caused Iran to retaliate against the U.S., the Trump administration decided that it should declare war as well rather than simply rein in its rogue vassal and inform them that the U.S. would not support it in an unprovoked attack on a major military power.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told reporters in Washington Sunday. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Trump pushed back on Rubio’s comments when asked by a reporter and said that he had forced Israel’s hand, rather than the other way around. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press conference that Trump had a “feeling” that Iran would attack soon, and so he made the call.
“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” Leavitt said.
The attack comes in spite of the fact that Trump has dubbed himself the “president of peace” and explicitly ran in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections as an anti-war candidate. He said his opponents, such as Kamala Harris, would send Americans to war if they were elected.
“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump said in his victory speech in November. This sentiment was echoed by numerous members of his administration, such as advisor Stephen Miller, who posted this on X just days before the 2024 election:
“To anyone still gullible enough to fall for scummy media hoaxes: Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves. Liz Cheney is Kamala’s top advisor. Liz wants to invade the whole Middle East. Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
Trump won the 2016 primary in large part on his arguments against forever wars like the Iraq War and Afghanistan War. Trump was basically the only Republican candidate to aggressively attack former Republican President George W. Bush for the invasion and made those attacks a central feature of his campaign.
“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” he said during a 2016 primary debate. “We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq.”
Trump has now done such an about-face that on Monday he posted on Truth Social: “Wars can be fought “forever,”” in reference to reporting that the U.S. military does not have enough missile interceptors to maintain a long conflict with Iran or anyone else that can fire significant numbers of rockets and missiles. Trump is now reportedly considering deploying American ground forces, a move that has been considered politically unviable in almost any instance.
“I just want to say I am more fearful than ever, after this briefing, that we may be putting boots on the ground,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters after a classified briefing on the course of the war.
One thing that seems fairly clear is that the recent military actions the U.S. has taken made Trump overconfident about American military capabilities. Trump was on a sugar high following the immediate tactical successes of Midnight Hammer and the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which the U.S. military pulled off near-perfectly in terms of the actual mission. Whether they were good long-term plans or meaningfully accomplished their actual missions is unclear, but the bombs went boom in Iran and Maduro is now being held in a Brooklyn jail.
This seems to have led him to believe that a massive bombing campaign to topple the Iranian government would be just as successful and that the Iranians would buckle immediately. Instead, Iran is fighting back with everything it has and as far as anyone can tell, the core of the regime and military remains just as active and capable as ever.
Extremist Politicians Have Very Different Goals Than Trump
The only person involved in actively planning the war with a clear idea of what they are doing is Netanyahu. In a statement, the Israeli Prime Minister said that the attack “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years — to deliver a crushing blow to the terror regime”. Netanyahu is an aggressive warmonger who has always pushed for the most hawkish approach to regional politics, which is why Iran armed the Axis of Resistance in the first place.
A major problem for the Americans and Israelis is that both have fundamentally different ideas about what the ultimate goal of the war is. The U.S. would like to change the regime in Iran so a more compliant government can take over while limiting the chaos that will result from the war and replacing the government. Israel wants to Balkanize Iran and turn it into a chaotic mess of endless sectarian violence like Syria so it can control events on the ground and pick winners and losers while removing the main pole of resistance in the Middle East to Israeli authority.
“If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future… [or] the stability of Iran,” Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told the Financial Times to explain the Israeli government’s position. “That is a point of difference between us and the U.S. I think [Washington is] more concerned about nation-building and threats to their regional partners.”
On top of his own ambitions, Netanyahu leads a political coalition of far-right extremists whose goals go even further than his own. Itamar Ben-Gvir, his National Security Minister and the leader of the Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) Party and Bezalel Smotrich, his Finance Minister and head of the National Religious Party—Religious Zionism, are just two government ministers who publicly support the idea of “Greater Israel”. This ideology is built on a line in Genesis in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will rule all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. This encompasses much of the Middle East and would see all of Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon taken over by Israel, as well as large parts of Iraq, areas of Turkey and Egypt, and probably part of Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, made waves last week when he effectively endorsed the Greater Israel project in an interview with Tucker Carlson last week. Carlson is a skeptic of the war, and he pushed Huckabee on the issue, to which Huckabee said, “it would be fine if they took it all”, referring to the land in the Middle East. Huckabee is a Christian Zionist and former televangelist who believes that the Jews have to rule Israel in order to bring about the second coming of Jesus. His comments sparked a diplomatic crisis last week as American allies in the Middle East like Jordan and Lebanon blew up the White House’s phones demanding to know if American policy includes their total annexation by Israel.
Huckabee is far from the only Christian Zionist setting policy and fighting the war. The U.S. Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received over 200 complaints from service members in the Marines, Air Force, and Space Force about the unabashed religiosity being expressed by their officers.
“[Our commander] urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ,” one soldier said. “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote a book called “American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free” in which he describes Islam as the natural and historic enemy of the west and praises the Crusades. He also has multiple Crusade-related tattoos. But of course, it’s the Iranian government controlled by lunatic religious fundamentalists, and that’s why they all have to die.
In what could be an attempt to begin realizing this vision, Israel has begun aggressively attacking Lebanon, home of the militant group Lebanese Hezbollah, a major member of the Axis of Resistance. Hezbollah is a much stronger military force than other Iranian proxies like Hamas, but was devastated by Israeli attacks during 2024 and 2025. Hezbollah has played almost no role in the conflict since Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran but apparently recently fired six rockets into Israel. In response, Israel has bombed the Lebanese capital Beirut and other sites hundreds of times over the past few days. It is also apparently launching a ground invasion.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have authorised the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to advance and take control of additional strategic positions in Lebanon in order to prevent attacks on Israeli border communities,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
World leaders are clearly concerned about the possibility. French President Emmanuel Macron posted a message in multiple languages on social media that he had met Netanyahu and other leaders and that he was concerned about Israel seizing Lebanese territory.
“I reiterated the need for Hezbollah to immediately cease its attacks against Israel and beyond. This strategy of escalation is a major fault that is jeopardizing the entire region,” Macron posted. “Likewise, I urged the Israeli Prime Minister to preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity and to refrain from a ground offensive. It is important that the parties return to the ceasefire agreement.”
Israel also illegally expanded its occupation of the Golan Heights in Syria and does not appear to plan to give up the area anytime soon.
Netanyahu assembled this coalition so he could stay in power during the war and avoid corruption trials. He then probably kept the war going indefinitely in order to avoid charges and stay out of prison. Trump is now calling for his pardon and making light of his bribery charges. He called Israeli president Isaac Herzog “disgraceful” and said he should be “ashamed” for not pardoning Netanyahu.
“Cigars and champagne — who the hell cares about it?” Trump asked.
The consequences of this stupid conflict are so numerous and myriad that they need a whole other article to detail them all. Check out Part Two: The Immediate and Obvious Consequences of the Iran War here.