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We Americans have begun another Middle Eastern war based on dubious intelligence claims, and as in 2003 I fear we haven’t thought through the substantial risks and uncertain gains.

President Trump says that the aim of this “massive and ongoing” war is no less than regime change: He has vowed to devastate Iran’s military force, destroy its nuclear program (again) and topple the leadership. Lofty goals. But fundamental questions remain: How likely is it that he can achieve all of this, and at what cost and risk?

War is uncertain. Sometimes it goes as smoothly as the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and sometimes you find yourself mired in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. I’ve reported from Iran over the years, and I’ve seen the popular resentment against the government, so maybe the attacks will lead Iran’s government to collapse the way its allies in Syria did in 2024.

But air wars alone have a poor record of overthrowing leaders: The United States under Presidents Joe Biden and Trump spent more than $7 billion bombing Yemen and couldn’t dislodge even the weak, unpopular and poorly armed Houthis.

In general, American military interventions have a better record of success when they have a precise, limited objective — like the operation in Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro. This war with Iran appears the opposite, aiming for nothing less than the overthrow of a government of more than 90 million people.

The point of military action is to make us safer, but Iran didn’t appear to be in a position to pose a substantial threat to America in the coming years. By attacking Iran, I fear we increased risk rather than reduced it. Another cost of the war is that it will deplete munitions, such as Tomahawk missiles and various interceptors already in short supply, and divert us from America’s long-term strategic challenges in Asia. We will be degrading our military capacity to address the next crisis.

Like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran has a repressive and unpopular government that is a malign influence on the region. Iran just massacred thousands of protesters — at least 6,800 civilians and perhaps many more, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The regime is a pillar of misogyny, supports bad actors throughout the Middle East and holds back millions of well-educated people.

And as with Iraq in 2003, a war is not necessarily the best tool to deal with a brutal and hostile government. There are more problems in international relations than solutions, and in the past the illusion of an easy military answer has repeatedly caused tragedy for ourselves as well as others.

Some wars are necessary; by contrast, this is a war of choice. There was a diplomatic path that showed promise in addressing Iran’s nuclear program. It appeared that Iran was willing to offer a deal that suspended uranium enrichment for several years and after that limited enrichment to very low levels under rigorous inspections, while also diluting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

That would have been an unsatisfying solution, for it would not have addressed Iran’s missiles or its repression; diplomatic solutions often are unsatisfying, because they are the result of compromise. But Trump created a nuclear crisis with Iran in part by tearing up the imperfect nuclear accord that President Barack Obama had reached with the ayatollahs; if we had remained in the deal, it seems to me we would be in a safer place today — and at peace.

To undermine the Iranian government and bring about change, we had other approaches that would not have involved war. The United States could have tried to knit together the fragmented opposition and worked to destabilize the militias. It could have smuggled in many more Starlink terminals so that Iranians could communicate. The intelligence community could have prioritized investigations of the corruption of the leadership; I’d love to see leaks illuminating the wealth of top Iranian officials or reports of their children and grandchildren enjoying their sybaritic lifestyles at home and abroad. The United States can still do these things.

Arguably one of the factors that undermined the Iranian leaders the most last year was not a bomb but a video showing the lavish wedding of an Iranian hard-liner’s daughter, as she wore a strapless, low-cut dress; it went viral in Iran and underscored the hypocrisy and double standards of leaders who inflict on the public rules that they don’t follow themselves. We need more of those videos leaked.

All this is less dramatic than blowing up naval stations or oil refineries. But remember that in 1979 it was not machine guns and bombs that toppled the shah, but rather smuggled cassette tapes of sermons and songs. I question whether a bombing campaign can topple the ayatollahs, but they are so unpopular that I believe that at some point they can and will be ousted by a more organized and better-funded opposition.

Look, we all need some humility about what lies ahead. Doves like me have been right about some uses of force (such as the Iraq war) but wrong about others (such as the Iraq war surge). As I weigh the benefits and costs of this new war with Iran, I fear that we have sleepwalked into yet another perilous folly in the Middle East.

When you’ve witnessed the horror of war, you believe it should be a last resort — not an abyss we tumble into without legal basis or clear objectives, pushing us all unnecessarily into a riskier world in which the only certainty is bloodshed.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/opinion/trump-iran-war.html