On Election Night in November 2024, Donald Trump delivered a victory speech with an antiwar message. “[My opponents] said, ‘he will start a war,’” he said. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
President Trump still boasts about his role in stopping wars. By waging war on Iran, though, he has launched the United States into its most consequential military campaign since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, in a region that has confounded past U.S. administrations.
Yet, exactly how and why the Trump administration decided to go to war with Iran remains murky. Unlike in 2002, when President George W. Bush’s administration made its case to Congress and the world for its invasion of Iraq, Mr. Trump did little to prepare Americans ahead of time for military action. He has offered various reasons for ordering airstrikes, and both called for a popular uprising in Iran and said he wanted to deal with a more “friendly” regime. His officials have said the military objective is to destroy Iran’s missile stockpiles and its offensive capabilities.
Why We Wrote This
Why did Donald Trump, who campaigned against starting new wars, end up launching a major campaign against Iran? It remains murky. But experts say the president’s emphasis on loyalty over dissent, the confidence he drew from military successes, and Iran’s own weakness were likely important factors.
There are no obvious Iran hawks in Mr. Trump’s current Cabinet, like the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who pushed for a preemptive strike against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Instead, the decision to go to war appears to have been largely Mr. Trump’s, in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, say foreign policy experts and sources familiar with administration planning. While some Cabinet members reportedly raised concerns about the risks, no concerted opposition emerged.
Past presidents have leaned on experts from the National Security Council to weigh military and diplomatic options in the run-up to conflicts. Mr. Trump has slashed staffing at the NSC and installed Marco Rubio in a dual role as secretary of state and national security adviser.
This underscores the administration’s view of policymaking as largely a matter of loyalty and execution, says William Howell, the dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a book on wartime presidents. “It’s about fidelity to the individual,” he says. “There’s not a lot, therefore, of hard thinking, fact-collecting, long-term planning – the kind of stuff that emerges out of sustained deliberation.”
Mr. Trump has kept an open door for political allies with differing views on Iran and the use of U.S. military power. These range from Tucker Carlson, an avowed skeptic of Israel and of foreign wars, to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a veteran GOP hawk. Mr. Carlson reportedly visited the White House multiple times in the weeks leading up to the Iran strikes. Mr. Graham has talked up his own persuasion, telling Politico that he lobbied Mr. Trump for months to take down Iran’s “terrorist regime.” (Politico also reported, citing a source familiar with internal deliberations, that Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, supported military action against Iran.)
In diplomacy, Mr. Trump also has taken an unconventional approach: He put Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, rather than veteran diplomats, in charge of negotiating with Iran to dismantle what remained of its nuclear program after last June’s bombings by U.S. warplanes. The talks, mediated by Oman, failed to yield an agreement. Mr. Witkoff, a New York real estate investor, and Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and scion of a New York real estate family, have also been involved in peace talks regarding Gaza, and Mr. Witkoff has been tasked with bringing about an end to the war in Ukraine.
Some see the recent failed peace talks as a pretext to buy time for U.S. and Israeli military preparations. Mr. Trump has said that he wanted to give diplomacy a chance and that war was the last option. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, the regime’s interlocutor in the talks, said on March 4 that Mr. Trump had “betrayed” diplomacy and treated “complex nuclear negotiations … like a real estate transaction.”
Special envoys with a direct line to the president can absolutely be effective, says Arta Moeini, director of research at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, a foreign policy think tank in Washington. “Sometimes, not being embedded in the traditional bureaucracy actually helps you,” he says. In the case of Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Trump signaled that “this is my person, and you can negotiate with him.”
But Iran’s regime is highly bureaucratic, and “the strategic implications of every move that they make, every statement, has to be checked.” Mr. Witkoff might be the right person to close a deal, says Dr. Moeini, but an envoy “who doesn’t understand the complexity of the nuclear issue and can’t translate Iran’s offer to the boss can’t be a good negotiator.”
The contrast with Trump’s first term
In his first term, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of a nuclear nonproliferation deal with Iran negotiated in 2015 under President Barack Obama, and ordered an airstrike in 2020 that killed Iran’s military chief, Qassem Soleimani. But he resisted pressure for broader military operations, including from Mr. Netanyahu, who wanted the U.S. to bomb Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.
During that first term, calls for a tougher line against Iran were also coming from within the White House itself, including from longtime foreign-policy hawks John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both of whom favored military actions aimed at regime change in Iran.
Such voices are notably absent in this second administration – a reflection of both their diminished standing within the GOP and Mr. Trump’s willingness to buck experts and establishment figures this time around. But while foreign-policy hawks have been left out of this administration, say analysts, seasoned military leaders have also been pushed aside. Mr. Trump was somewhat restrained in his first term by senior military officials such as Jim Mattis, his former defense secretary, who checked some of the president’s impulses on U.S. military deployments. Pete Hegseth, the current defense secretary, is a former Fox News host and retired infantry officer who hasn’t managed complex military operations.
Vice President JD Vance came into this administration as a prominent skeptic of U.S. military interventions, which he argued came at the expense of domestic programs. In October 2024, he told a podcaster that “our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources.” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, built her political career on opposition to foreign wars; in 2020, while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, she sold “No War With Iran“ T-shirts.
In the buildup to war with Iran, Mr. Vance reportedly urged caution, according to The New York Times. But he also reportedly argued that if the U.S. were to take military action it should “go big and go fast.” Mr. Vance hasn’t confirmed that account. He defended the administration’s decision to go to war during a Fox News interview on Monday in which he emphasized the need to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but didn’t speak to other goals or the war’s endgame.
Some observers say the president’s emphasis on loyalty has created a culture in which dissent and even healthy debate are suppressed. ”People around Donald Trump basically all say that, you know, the decision is by Trump,” says Dr. Moeini. “They don’t want to stand up in a strong way to say no.”
Mr. Rubio has briefed congressional leaders on the war objectives and assessments. Analysts say it’s unclear whether the secretary of state, who has also been focused on Venezuela and U.S. pressure against Cuba, expressed any concerns prior to the attack on Iran about potential repercussions.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio told reporters at the Capitol that the U.S. had launched a preemptive strike on Iran because Israel was poised to attack and that would trigger Iranian reprisals against American targets in the Middle East. On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt provided a somewhat different explanation, saying Mr. Trump “had a feeling … based on fact, that Iran was going to strike” U.S. assets in the region.
Exploiting Iran’s weakness?
To Ryan Costello, the policy director at the National Iranian American Council, Mr. Trump not long ago seemed “among the least likely Republicans to go to war with Iran.” Instead, he says, Mr. Trump “is taking the George W. Bush and John Bolton playbook and running with it.”
Mr. Costello, whose group is aligned with Iran, argues the shift is largely because Israel influences Mr. Trump. This military campaign “is more the vision of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government to take the fight to Iran.”
Others say Mr. Trump’s previous criticisms of Republican neoconservatives who launched unpopular wars were politically expedient but didn’t reflect any abiding commitment to peace over war. Indeed, in his second term, Mr. Trump has launched more airstrikes in a year than Democrat Joe Biden did in four years as president. This includes the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, leaving in place a Maduro deputy who is amenable to U.S. oil interests.
Analysts say the success of the Venezuela mission – which Mr. Trump has referenced in recent days while discussing his Iran policy – appears to have emboldened the president and might have led him to discount the risks that military strikes on Iran would entail.
At the same time, many agree that Iran was far weaker than it was during Mr. Trump’s first term, as a result of Israeli and U.S. attacks and internal dissent.
This weakness presented an opportunity for Mr. Trump to “end a war that the Iranians started” in 1979, says Jason Brodsky, policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran, a group with ties to hawkish Republicans. “He’s looking at it through the lens of his legacy,” he says.
Mr. Hegseth, the defense secretary, made a similar point during a news briefing, saying that for 47 years the Iranian regime “has waged a savage, one-sided war against America.” He added: “It took the 47th president, a fighter who always puts America first, to finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence.”
Mr. Brodsky says that Mr. Trump’s increased use of military force in his second term is a response to geopolitical changes in the Middle East, including in Iran. “The regime is a paper tiger and it’s weaker than many people believed,” he says. “It’s an opportunity.”
One particular opportunity – to launch an airstrike that could take out Iran’s supreme leader and senior officials based on CIA and Israeli intelligence – might have moved up the timetable for the war. While the buildup of forces was already underway, the Feb. 28 daytime meeting held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at his compound presented a valuable strategic target.
Some also suggest Mr. Trump might have been influenced by an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate him in 2024, reportedly to avenge the killing of Mr. Soleimani, the Iranian military commander. Mr. Hegseth also said on Wednesday that the leader of the unit behind that plot was killed in an airstrike.
“That has an effect on any person,” says Mr. Brodsky, referring to Mr. Trump’s motives.