Donald
Trump Launches a War of “Epic Fury” on Iran
The U.S. and Israel have
ignited a campaign to topple the Islamic Republic—with little thought to what
comes after.
By Robin Wright
February 28, 2026
A banner depicting President Donald
Trump hangs outside the Department of Justice building, on Saturday.Photograph by Kylie Cooper / Reuters
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.”
Smoke rises in the sky after blasts
were heard in Manama, Bahrain, on Saturday.Photograph
by stringer / Reuters
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. ♦
