[Prefatory Note: This post is a revision of an article written for Il Manifesto in Italy two weeks ago. It doesn’t include reference to Trump’s surreal and morbid claim to have accomplished regime change in Iran by assassinating the Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khamanei and some other leading figures. The Iranian government has not changed its orientation or structure, but merely replaced murdered leaders with leaders still alive.]
From almost all perspectives the ongoing war of aggression known as the ‘Iran War’ is one of the greatest international blunders in modern history, and far worse than this, poses the highest risks of stumbling into an apocalyptic warfare since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This joint unprovoked attack on a country posing no threat, falsely rationalized after the fact by considerations of regional security and humanitarian benevolence, unleashed by Israel and the United States while the ghastly genocide in Gaza continues and spreads. Israel is rapidly extending its Gaza combat tactics to the West Bank and southern Lebanon while the world is distracted by the ongoing global ripple effects and potential escalating violence in the Iran War.
This lethal chain of events is further aggravated by Trump’s narcissist theatrics, a personalized and bewildering brand of pathologic gaslighting geopolitics that should frightens the sane among us by its clear preference for raising escalation risks to the rooftops rather than reversing course to avoid being demeaned as ‘a loser’ or ‘spineless’ in the face of Iranian resistance. Embarking on such a war represents a colossal breakdown of strategic intelligence that failed to anticipate Iran’s refusal to bow to such aggressive militarism. Iran’s formidable retaliatory capabilities seemed to have been ignored altogether as well as its collective readiness to absorb suffering and devastation rather give in to a second devastating onslaught by Israel and the United States after enduring the 12-day Iran War in June of 2025.
Likely, one explanation for these miscalculations by the 2026 aggressors was a misinterpretation of the first Iran war, which Israel initiated on June 13, 2025, with finishing touches by U.S. in the form of major B-2 air strikes dropping huge bombs on Israel’s nuclear facilities twelve days later. Iran’s soft response was evidently attributed to its weakness as well as an inflated assessments of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and leadership infrastructure. Less than a year later, underestimating Iran’s recovery and greatly improved missile capabilities this second Iran War was initiated. Iran’s internal unrest and protests weeks earlier stimulated by decades of sanctions and externally promoted in various ways, apparently made this an irresistible time to launch a second Iran War under a pragmatically populist Trump urging the Iranians to seize the occasion of the war ‘to take back their country,’ ‘regime change’ by another means.
This message from such a discredited source fared no better than barrage of missile and bombing attacks. This second Iran War initiated by the U.S., joined by Israel, was particularly perfidious considering that conflict-resolving negotiations were underway between Iran and the United States, situated in Oman whose national mediator voiced his public optimism that the parties were on the verge of a broad conflict-resolving agreement. Such a crafty misuses of diplomacy as a prelude to war rather than a genuine search for a peaceful alternative undoubtedly deepened Iran’s suspicion that ceasefire diplomacy is just a pause before the next attack. Trump said as much in his April 1st triumphalist speech on this second phase of an increasingly undisguised undertaking to keep attacking Iran as long as its government is perceived as hostile to the regional strategies of Israel and the United States.
Confusion reigns at present. Whether the war is on the verge of dangerous escalation or a diplomatic reversal of course remains clouded by inconsistent signals from Washington. Trump issues a 48-hour ultimatum demanding Iran’s surrender or experience the destruction of its energy infrastructure, prompting Iran to make counter-threats of the same nature but directed at the entire Gulf region. After which, Trump suspended the threats shortly after they were issued with the apparently fake explanations that strong talks toward reaching a peace agreement with Iran were underway and going well. Iran quickly contradicted Trump’s these upbeat comments and disclosed its own far-reaching demands for a durable future, which seemed far from conveying a readiness to submit to the will of its aggressors. Iran’s apparent position on how to end the war was clarified the by the public release of carefully phrased requirements for a peace deal by an individual described as a high public official. Iran’s position was summarized as follows: firm guarantees that there will be no future repetition of attacking Iran by Israel and the United States; the closure of American military bases in the region; compensation for the damage inflicted on Iran; an end of all warfare in the region; a new legal regime for the Stright of Hormuz; and finally, a call for the criminalization of journalism hostile to Iran. [as reported in Palestinian Chronicle, March 22, 2026].
Western media ignored this Iranian disclosure of its ambitious vision of a durable peace not only for Iran, but for the entire region. It also seemed almost equally dismissive of Trump’s latest about face, mostly interpreting it as a cynical gesture to bring down oil prices and renew the confidence of stock market traders. In this regional setting Israel has continued with its campaign of regional violence despite incurring significant civilian casualties from missile strikes while the U.S. has kept deploying more and more ground troops closer to Iran.
A War of Aggression. Iran was attacked by the United States on February 28, 2026 without even the pretext of a plausible imminent threat to the national security of either Israel or the United States. On the contrary, the attack abruptly ended promising negotiations between the United States on its nuclear program, specifically on setting agreed limits on levels and amounts of enriched uranium production and stockpiles. This disruption of negotiations, followed an Israeli/US pattern previously displayed by Israel’s September 8, 2025 attack on the residence of Hamas negotiators in Qatar to discuss a U.S.-proposed ceasefire agreement on the future of Gaza. The timing of the Iran War is a more dramatic instance of a turn toward war and away from diplomacy while purporting to pursue conflict resolution goals, at least in the Middle East.
A Military and Political Failure. From any objective perspective the war has already proved an awkward military and political failure from the perspective of U.S. and Israel. Forgetting a repetitive lesson since the Vietnam War, as reinforced by subsequent experiences in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, clear military superiority wielded with destructive fury may still fail to produce political victory. Even Israel’s genocidal assault reducing Gaza to a wasteland did not result in achieving its prime objective announced on the eve of its assault, eliminating Hamas as a continuing source of resistance to Israel designs to subjugate the Palestine people. A clear secondary Israeli objective was to extend Israel’s territorial sovereignty over the river to the sea, thereby establishing Greater Israel, and in the process eliminating forever the Palestinian challenge. As with all forms of extreme addictiveness, these militarist phantasies are out of touch with the distinctive realities of. the contemporary world and with the agency of militarist geopolitics, a lesson that could have been learned from China’s dramatic rise in geopolitical status by relying on win/win economistic means.
In the setting of the Iran War the political failure of the undertaking has already been partially confirmed by the refusal of the European and Arab countries to heed Trump’s plea for NATO alliance naval help in opening of the Strait of Hormuz where 20% of the world’s internationally traded oil and gas pass through. As Ramzy Baroud has pointed out in a Palestinian Chronicle article published on March 22, this refusal to side with the aggressor does not express a moral or legal awakening by these governments, but rather reflects the pragmatic recognition that they have no incentive to be part of a failed undertaking that could produce an international disaster of even greater severity if the U.S. chooses to escalate rather than admit defeat and end their aggression.
The other sign of political defeat and miscalculation is the failure of internal opposition to the theocratic government of Iran to take the cue of this military attack to intensify, or at least renew their protest activities, with an expectation that attacks from without would result in the collapse of Islamic governance, paving the way for a second restoration of dynastic rule in Iran. The former Reza Shah’s son, also named Reza Shah, is waiting in the wings for this scenario to become realized. He has pledged his return to Iran to restore the dynasty of his father.as practiced by
Although some scattered protests have continued in Iran, the population as a whole has shown no disposition to take advantage of the war waged against its territorial integrity and political independence by the most powerful country in the world to mount their own struggle for reform. The idea that regime change in Iran might come about in the aftermath of widespread devastation, including the targeted assassination of the Supreme Leader deemed divinely blessed even by a significant proportion of Iranians that includes many opponents and reform-minded protesters is a further sign of the delusionary character of state propaganda in the attacking countries. Such a grim approach as practiced by the U.S. of decapitating the leadership of the adversary, and considering that a kind of political victory is to deprive any war of moral and political legitimacy, and more so for an unlawful war of aggression. The American attack on a girl’s elementary school in Minab, an atrocity killing over 1itima75, mainly children under 12 further alienated Iran’s civilian population. This has been a consensus view among respected independent external assessments of the motives of the attackers.
Israel’s role in the Iran War together with Gazafication of the West Bank and Lebanon has contributed to its steep downward spiral into the dark abyss inhabited by rogue states. The U.S. is suffered the fate of a declining and irresponsible hegemon, less feared and certainly less respected after this exhibition of incompetent and dehumanizing warmaking that is causing worldwide hardships, forcing layoffs, freezing of prices, inflation, and supply chain disruption not only of oil and gas but of many essentials of societal normalcy, including fertilizers. These international ripple effects have caused their most harm to the least developed countries and to the most vulnerable sectors of all societies, including that of the prosperous attacking countries.
Ignoring U.S./Iran History.
Beyond this dangerous impasse caused by gross miscalculation, denialism (claiming victory when the opposite is the real story, and the one worth pondering, a tale of ignoble defeat), and obscured to some extent by Trump and Netanyahu threatening to climb even higher on the precarious escalating ladder. This geopolitical adventurism ignores suppressed history lessons. The U.S. has misplayed its diplomatic cards at least three times in the past when dealing with Iran. The first was in 1953 when the CIA engineered a coup against the elected leader, Mohamed Mossadegh who was neither Islamist nor Communist, but an economic nationalist who had taken public control of Iran’s oil industry from exploitative foreign ownership by legal means, infuriating a powerful coterie of Western corporate investors. The 1953 outcome was the restoration of the dynastic rule of Pahlavi Dynasty headed by the autocratic Reza Shah, and the subsequent reorientation of the Iranian state to Western ideological and economistic values.
The second time was in the aftermath of the Islamic revolutionary movement that led to the Shah’s abdication from the throne in early 1979 and the establishment of a theocratic state under the leadership of its first Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khomeini. At this early stage, the Islamic leadership sought accommodation and normalcy in its relations with the West, but the pro-Shah Iranian community in the U.S. largely opposed any American accommodation with Tehran. Its influence was bolstered by Israel’s determined resistance to an American acceptance of the movement that drove the Shah from power. These anti-theocratic forces were later further reinforced by influential domestic pro-Israeli neocon hawks favoring by way of their advocacy of a so-called ‘Clean Break’ strategy, the restructuring of the Middle East to ensure the security of Israel and integration in the markets of neoliberal globalization, lobbying for punitive sanctions against Iran until such a result was achieved.
We will never know what might have happened had the U.S. not puts all its geopolitical eggs in Israel’s basket, but if this ‘road not taken’ had been explored, these decades of political tensions and costly military confrontations with Iran might have been avoided. Indeed, in retrospect little was learned from Iran’s moderate restraint when attacked just last June. Moderation was wrongly construed as a show of weakness, as was the Iranian receptivity to negotiations. Instead, Israel and U.S. waited impatiently for an opportune time to start a more robust war, exaggerating the impetus of the internal economic populist anti-government movement in Iran. This recent protest rising war was attributed to Iran’s alleged incompetence and corruption. It seems to have been misconstrued by Western propaganda designed to make U.S./Israel intervention appear humanitarian and liberating. As expected, this perception was promoted without considering the impact of sanctions designed to bring Iran to its knees by strangling the wellbeing of the population. abetted over the years by Israeli and US tactics of assassinations, destabilizing covert operations and alarmist propaganda about Iran’s nuclear programs (while altogether ignoring the relevance of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and aggressive war-threatening propaganda).
The third occasion was when the U.S. ended conflict-resolving negotiations with missiles and bombs not out of frustration, but in reaction to their evident promise of success. Again, Iran showed a willingness to negotiate, reinforcing frequent assertions by its own Supreme Leader of a principled rejection of the production of nuclear weapon, much less its use. Iran has reinforced this unilateral declaration with a public willingness to agree to a formal internationally monitored commitment along the same lines, or better by far reaching an agreement to establish a mandatory nuclear free zone throughout the entire region, which in the past Israel has as would be expected, ignored all such peaceably achieved denuclearizing initiatives.
But denuclearizing the region was never meant to be, at least up to now. As with past and present conflicts in the region, Israel has again twisted Big Brother’s arm so hard as to embark upon this failing warmaking project. Awkwardly, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, admitted as much when he acknowledged that the U.S. launched the war to avoid what Washington considered a worse outcome if the U.S. had deferred acting until after Israel started the war, and lost political control over the military operations. Interestingly, Rubio never specified what he meant by such a comment, and has since walked it back out of existence.
No Exit? Or Safe Exit
Two images: A major course correction after mission failure, hidden by distraction or a continued ascent of the escalation raising risks of apocalyptic warfare. Trump’s diplomacy has been driven by the zigzags of his transactional narcissism often couled with personal enrichment schemes. This second Iran War already suggests that the Trumpist slogan Making America Decline Everyday (MADE) is far more descriptive of reality than the official marketing claim of Make America Great Again (MAGA). Even such a modification is too focused on the United States, overlooking the deadly global ripple effects of miscalculations made at the behest of the Trump/Netanyahu partnership, with even worse on the road ahead unless they quickly change course, accepting a ‘peace without honor’ as the least bad option.
At this time tensions and fears coexist with uncertainty as to whether a durable peace or a menacing escalation is the next stage in this latest Middle East war that should never have happened.
The media shift from questioning a war started in violation of international law and responsible statecraft to a focus on whether it is succeeding or failing is disquieting. It has made the discussion turning on issues of winning or losing rather than the underlying criminality of aggressive war, what the judges at Nuremberg had declared the ultimate war crime, the Crime Against Peace.
Lending respectability to the idea of ‘wars of choice’ as was done at the outset of the Iran War is a subversive notion earlier invoked to justify the Iraq War pf 2003. It is time for political leaders and opinion column journalists to learn that questions of war and peace should never be situated with in a realm of choice, as if pricing vegetables at a supermarket.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
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