Trump promised no wars. Now he’s a Bush-style regime change president | Mohamad Bazzi

3 hours ago 6

It turns out that Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “candidate of peace,” is just as eager to start new wars. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pitched himself as the antithesis of his Democratic opponents Joe Biden, and later, Kamala Harris. Trump insisted he would use his deal-making skills to end multiple global conflicts that started under the Biden administration, including Israel’s war on Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In his election night victory speech in November 2024, Trump told his supporters: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” Two months later, in his inaugural address, he went even further in trying to establish himself as a global peacemaker. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” he said.

Many of Trump’s top advisers and supporters made the same pitch to a war-weary American public. The national Republican Party portrayed Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, as the “pro-peace ticket.” In 2023, when Vance was still auditioning for the role as Trump’s running mate, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

And yet in his first year back in office, Trump bombed seven countries: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela. Early on Saturday, Trump launched his most extensive, and dangerous, military campaign so far: a war against Iran, which could spiral into a regional conflagration, especially as the Iranian regime sees this joint US-Israeli attack as a fight for its survival.

In an eight-minute video posted on his Truth Social site, shortly after the bombing began, Trump said the US had launched a “massive and ongoing” attack against Iran intended to destroy its military capabilities and overthrow the brutal Islamic regime that took power after Iran’s 1979 revolution. The “America First” president who built his political brand on opposing foreign military adventures has unleashed a war of choice aimed at regime change – and he announced it in a social media posting in the wee hours of the morning.

Over the past six weeks, as Trump ordered the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he made virtually no effort to explain to the American people or to Congress whether Iran poses a threat to US interests that would justify the risks of an open-ended war. Trump also largely ignored recent opinion polls which found that 70% of Americans oppose military action in Iran, including segments of his own Maga movement, who latched onto his repeated promises to end America’s legacy of forever wars.

In his video, Trump laid out his most extensive argument to date explaining why Iran is a threat. But he largely recycled decades of US complaints about Tehran’s malign activities in the Middle East, including its nuclear program; development of ballistic missiles; and support for regional militias like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,” Trump said, adding: “Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world.”

But the evidence Trump presented to explain how Iran poses “imminent threats” to the US is exaggerated and it doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny. He claimed that the theocratic regime is close to developing long-range missiles which “could soon reach the American homeland” – but US intelligence agencies concluded that Iran is years away from having missiles that can strike targets inside the US. (A 2025 report by Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency found that Iran does not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US, but it could potentially build up to 60 such weapons by 2035.)

In reality, Iran’s ballistic missiles – and the militias that Tehran supports across the Middle East, as part of its so-called “Axis of Resistance” – pose a far more direct threat to Israel than to the US. But it’s difficult for Trump to say the US has gone to war mainly to benefit Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, especially as American public support for Israel has reached a historic low.

Trump also argued that Tehran was trying to rebuild its nuclear program, which the president claimed he had “obliterated” when he ordered the US military to bomb three of Iran’s major nuclear facilities in June, toward the end of a 12-day war launched by Israel. Weeks after those airstrikes, leaked intelligence assessments showed that two of the nuclear sites were not as severely damaged as Trump had implied. In his State of the Union speech on 24 February, Trump claimed that Iran had restarted its efforts to enrich uranium. “We wiped it out and they want to start it all over again, and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he said.

On 21 February, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who was leading recent negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, told Fox News that Tehran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material.” Witkoff’s comment set off alarms that the Trump administration was hastily trying to build a false case to launch an attack against Iran – claiming that Tehran was much closer to developing a nuclear bomb than previously known.

US intelligence officials say Iran has not tried to rebuild its main nuclear sites since the US attack in June, and many experts argue Tehran would have had significant difficulty accessing its stockpiles of enriched uranium, which were buried deep under rubble after the US airstrikes. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, has also said his agency found no evidence that Iran resumed enriching uranium since June.

It’s hard not to see parallels between Trump’s deceitful case for waging war against Iran, and the lies and manipulated intelligence that George W Bush used to drag the US into invading Iraq in 2003. But two decades ago, Americans could claim not to know better – and that’s why they bought their president’s seductive rhetoric. The Bush administration and its neocon allies sold the invasion as a “cakewalk,” promising that US troops would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad. They pushed relentlessly to depose Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, ignoring disputes over intelligence and US officials who warned that the lack of postwar planning would lead to chaos.

Every major assumption made by the architects of the Iraq war proved wrong. It triggered a decades-long conflict that shattered Iraqi society, reshaped the Middle East, and cost the US massive blood and treasure. On the invasion’s 20th anniversary, the Costs of War project at Brown University estimated that the conflict in Iraq (along with neighboring countries where Washington later intervened to fight Islamic State militants that had emerged from Iraq’s civil war) had cost the US a staggering sum: nearly $2.9tn.

Donald Trump spent years ranting against the regime change wars started by his predecessors – and the damage they inflicted on Americans. On Saturday, he launched his own war in the Middle East, with little hint of how it might end.