The messages coming out of the Trump administration in the first hours after Israel launched its attack against Iran on Thursday evening were mixed. An initial statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unequivocal: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” Israel was acting alone.
A statement from President Donald Trump early the next day, though, seemed to align more with Israel’s attack—and used the threat of worse violence to press the Iranian government to make a deal on its nuclear program, for which further talks, now canceled, had been planned for this past weekend.
The messages coming out of the Trump administration in the first hours after Israel launched its attack against Iran on Thursday evening were mixed. An initial statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unequivocal: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” Israel was acting alone.
A statement from President Donald Trump early the next day, though, seemed to align more with Israel’s attack—and used the threat of worse violence to press the Iranian government to make a deal on its nuclear program, for which further talks, now canceled, had been planned for this past weekend.
Whether Trump greenlit or yellow-lit Israel’s war on Iran, he’s backing it now, both rhetorically and through the provision of defensive support. In doing so he’s breaking an important campaign promise to be a pro-peace president. This opens space for a potential challenger to take up that mantle.
In the last few weeks before November’s presidential election, the Trump campaign noticeably leaned into an anti-war message, with his running mate, then-Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, hailing him as a “candidate of peace.” This wasn’t new to Trump; he had run in 2016 as a critic of the Republican Party’s warmongering and the larger foreign-policy establishment’s support for endless wars. Leaving office in 2021, Trump said he was “proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.”
If this was true, it was not for a lack of trying. As president, Trump brought the U.S. to the brink of wars with North Korea in 2017 and Iran in 2020, escalated support for the Saudi war in Yemen while rejecting efforts by Congress to reassert its authority, and arguably helped set the stage for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza with his embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hostility toward Ukraine and the Palestinians.
But the fact that Trump is not genuinely anti-war isn’t the point. He lies constantly. He lies about anything if he thinks it will help him. He lied about being anti-war because he rightly recognized that there’s a large constituency for that message. Back in 2016, Vance, who was then a critic of Trump, wrote a piece examining the appeal of Trump’s anti-war message. “Anger about the wars isn’t the only reason voters support Mr. Trump,” Vance wrote. “But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won’t reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite.”
By backing Netanyahu’s war against Iran, Trump has bowed to that party elite and once again put the country on the brink of another catastrophically costly and unnecessary war. The question now is whether any Democrats will have the skill to take advantage of that.
One of the clearest and strongest reactions to Israel’s attack came from a surprising source: Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed. “Israel’s alarming decision to launch airstrikes on Iran is a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence,” Reed said in a statement on Friday. “These strikes threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces. While tensions between Israel and Iran are real and complex, military aggression of this scale is never the answer.”
Reed, who is the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is not known as one of the party’s anti-war voices, so it’s notable that his statement didn’t include any of the usual throat-clearing about “self-defense,” which Israel’s attack is not, or “preemptive strikes,” an inaccurate term as there’s no evidence that Iran was preparing an imminent attack. As Trump’s director of national intelligence recently affirmedU.S. and allied intelligence agencies continued to assess prior to Israel’s strikes that Iran had not made a decision to construct nuclear weapons.
The truth is that Trump helped create this crisis by withdrawing from the nuclear deal the U.S. signed with Iran in 2015, which had Iran’s nuclear program capped and under heavy surveillance, as Sen. Chris Murphy noted in his response to the attack. Iran’s accumulation of more highly enriched uranium that could potentially be used for a weapon if further enriched is a direct result of that foolish decision.
But this war is also a product of a foreign-policy establishment that remains far too comfortable with, indeed often eager for, military violence as a means of solving America’s problems, even though it is doing the opposite.
In fact, there is a large constituency for a stronger anti-war stance. It is worth noting that in every election since the end of the Cold War (with the post-9/11 exception of 2004), Americans have voted for the less militarist, less interventionist candidate. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 in large part because he had the courage to speak out against the Iraq War six years earlier. We need leaders with the courage to do that now.
In the wake of the 2016 election, our political establishment has begun to reckon with the failure of neoliberal economic policies. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (in)famously claimed, “There is no alternative.” Many of our political elites have belatedly recognized that she was wrong. Deregulation, austerity, the weakening of labor rights, the financialization of the economy, the god-like worship of “the free market” as the most efficient and appropriate judge of all value—these were all choices that had extremely negative consequences. Insisting that there was no alternative was simply a way to suppress political debate about those other options.
We have yet to undergo a similar reckoning about foreign policy more generally. We desperately need to. A reflexively militarized relationship to the world is a choice. A national security state that feeds off a budget that will soon break a trillion dollars while working families struggle to make ends meet is a choice. Those who insist that these are unshakable realities are simply trying to obscure, as Thatcher did, that there are other choices available.
In 2024, Democrats made a mistake by leaving the anti-war lane wide open for Trump. A Democrat who has the courage to offer a different choice, to offer Americans a new vision of U.S. foreign policy that boldly embraces global peacemaking, is a Democrat who can win. Trump has just opened the door to them.
