President Donald Trump stood before regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of American foreign policy in the region, one not guided by trying to reshape it or change its systems of government.
“In the end, the so-called nation builders destroyed many more nations than they built, and the interventionists intervened in complex societies that not even they themselves understood,” the US president said in a rebuke to his hardline predecessors.
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Less than a year later, Trump ordered an all-out attack on Iran with the stated goal of bringing “freedom” to the country, borrowing language from the playbook of interventionist neoconservatives such as former President George W. Bush, whom he spent his political career criticizing.
Analysts say 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, along with Israel, that only benefits Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is, once again, a war of choice launched by the United States with (a) push from Israel,” said Negar Mortazavi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.
“This is another Israeli war that the United States is launching. Israel has pressured the United States to attack Iran for two decades, and they finally succeeded.”
Mortazavi highlighted Trump’s criticism of his predecessors, who had waged wars for regime change in the region.
“It’s ironic, because this is a president who calls himself ‘president of peace,'” he told Al Jazeera.
History of Iranian ‘threat’ warnings
Netanyahu, who promoted the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is on the verge 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 building its uranium enrichment program.
After the United States bombed Iran’s main enrichment facilities in the 12-day war in June last year (an attack that Trump said “wiped out” the country’s nuclear program), Netanyahu pivoted to a new perceived Iranian threat: Tehran’s ballistic missiles.
“Iran can blackmail any American city,” Netanyahu told pro-Israel podcast host Ben Shapiro in October.
“People don’t believe it. Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), if they add another 3,000 (1,800 miles), they will be able to reach the east coast of the United States.”
Trump repeated that claim, which Tehran has vehemently denied and has not been supported by any public evidence or proof, in his State of the Union address earlier this week.
“They have already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases abroad, and they are working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said of the Iranians.
Trump has been making the case for a broader 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 deprioritizing the Middle East in Washington’s foreign policy and focusing on the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, the American public, wary of global conflict after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has also largely opposed further attacks on Iran, public opinion polls show.
Only 21 percent of respondents in a recent University of Maryland poll said they favored a war with Iran.
On the first day of the war, Iran fired missiles at bases and cities hosting US troops and assets across the Middle East in retaliation for joint US-Israeli attacks, plunging the region into chaos.
Trump acknowledged that American troops may suffer casualties in the conflict. “That happens often in war,” he said Saturday. “But we’re not doing it for now. We’re doing it for the future. And it’s a noble mission.”
‘Ignoring the vast majority of Americans’
The Trump administration appeared to step back from the brink of conflict earlier this month by establishing diplomatic relations with Tehran.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators held three rounds of talks over the past week, with Tehran emphasizing that it is willing to accept rigorous inspections of its nuclear program.
Omani mediators and Iranian officials called the latest round of talks, which took place Thursday, positive and said they produced significant progress.
The June 2025 war, launched by Israel without provocation, also occurred amid talks between the United States and Iran.
“Netanyahu’s agenda has always been to prevent a diplomatic solution, and he feared that Trump really wanted to make a deal, so starting this war in the middle of negotiations is a success for him, just as it was last June,” Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Al Jazeera.
“Trump’s embrace of regime change rhetoric is a new victory for Netanyahu and a loss for the American people, as it suggests that the United States may be committed to a long and unpredictable military waste.”
In announcing the attacks on Saturday, Trump said his goal was to prevent Iran from “threatening the United States and our core national security interests.”
But critics of the United States, including some defenders of Trump’s “America First” movement, have argued that Iran – more than 10,000 kilometers away – does not pose a threat to the United States.
Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “if it weren’t for Iran, there wouldn’t be Hezbollah; we wouldn’t have the problem on the border with Lebanon.”
Carlson said: “What problem is there on the border with Lebanon? I’m an American. I don’t have any problem on the border with Lebanon right now. I live in Maine.”
On Saturday, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib emphasized that the American public does not want a 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.
