President Donald Trump stood in front of regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of US foreign policy in the region, one that is not guided by trying to reshape it or change its governing systems.
“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” the US president said in rebuke of his hawkish predecessors.
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Less than a year later, Trump ordered an all-out assault on Iran with the stated goal of bringing “freedom” to the country, borrowing language from the playbook of interventionist neoconservatives, like former President George W Bush, whom he spent his political career criticising.
Analysts say the war with Iran does not fit with Trump’s stated political ideology, policy goals or campaign promises.
Instead, several Iran experts told Al Jazeera that Trump is waging a war, together with Israel, that only benefits Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is, once again, a war of choice launched by the US with [a] push from Israel,” said Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.
“This is another Israeli war that the US is launching. Israel has pushed the US to attack Iran for two decades, and they finally got it.”
Mortazavi highlighted Trump’s criticism of his predecessors, who had waged regime-change wars in the region.
“It is ironic, because this is a president who called himself the ‘president of peace‘,” she told Al Jazeera.
History of warnings of the Iranian ‘threat’
Netanyahu, who promoted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons.
Iran denies seeking a nuclear bomb, and even Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Washington has no evidence that Tehran is weaponising its uranium enrichment programme.
After the US bombed Iran’s main enrichment facilities in the 12-day war in June last year – an attack that Trump says “obliterated” the country’s nuclear programme – Netanyahu pivoted to a new supposed Iranian threat: Tehran’s ballistic missiles.
“Iran can blackmail any American city,” Netanyahu told pro-Israel podcaster Ben Shapiro in October.
“People don’t believe it. Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range of 8,000km [5,000 miles], add another 3,000 [1,800 miles], and they can get to the East Coast of the US.”
Trump repeated that claim, which Tehran has vehemently denied and has not been backed by any public evidence or testing, in his State of the Union address earlier this week.
“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said of the Iranians.
Trump has been building the case for a wider war with Iran since the June conflict, repeatedly threatening to bomb the country again.
But the US president’s own National Security Strategy last year called for de-prioritising the Middle East in Washington’s foreign policy and focusing on the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, the US public, wary of global conflict after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has also been largely opposed to new strikes against Iran, public opinion polls show.
Only 21 percent of respondents in a recent University of Maryland survey said they favoured a war with Iran.
The first day of the war saw Iran fire missiles against bases and cities that host US troops and assets across the Middle East in retaliation for the joint US-Israeli strikes, plunging the region into chaos.
Trump acknowledged that US troops may suffer casualties in the conflict. “That often happens in war,” he said on Saturday. “But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.”
‘Ignoring the vast majority of Americans’
The Trump administration had appeared to step back from the brink of conflict earlier this month by engaging in diplomacy with Tehran.
US and Iranian negotiators held three rounds of talks over the past week, with Tehran stressing that it is willing to agree to rigorous inspections of its nuclear programme.
Omani mediators and Iranian officials had described the last round of negotiations, which took place on Thursday, as positive, saying that it yielded significant progress.
The June 2025 war, initiated by Israel without provocation, also came in the middle of US-Iran talks.
“Netanyahu’s agenda has always been to prevent a diplomatic solution, and he feared Trump was actually serious about getting a deal, so the start of this war in the middle of negotiations is a success for him, just like it was last June,” Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Al Jazeera.
“Trump’s embrace of regime change rhetoric is a further victory for Netanyahu, and loss for the American people, as it suggests the US may be committed to a long and unpredictable military boondoggle.”
While announcing the strikes on Saturday, Trump said his aim is to prevent Iran from “threatening America and our core national security interests”.
But US critics, including some proponents of Trump’s “America first” movement, have argued that Iran – more than 10,000km (6,000 miles) away – does not pose a threat to the US.
Earlier this month, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “if it were not for Iran, there wouldn’t be Hezbollah; we wouldn’t have the problem on the border with Lebanon”.
Carlson said, “What problem on the border with Lebanon? I’m an American. I’m not having any problems on the border with Lebanon right now. I live in Maine.”
On Saturday, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib stressed that the US public does not want war with Iran.
“Trump is acting on the violent fantasies of the American political elite and the Israeli apartheid government, ignoring the vast majority of Americans who say loud and clear: No More Wars,” Tlaib said in a statement.