US War on Iran Is Not About Nuclear Threats. It’s About US Power and Domination.

Shortly after President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States had conducted strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address in English, with a gleeful look on his face.

“President Trump and I often say peace through strength,” Netanyahu said. “First comes strength, then comes peace. And tonight, President Trump and the United States acted with a lot of strength.”

Netanyahu’s euphemistic jingoism obscures what is actually occurring: The “strength” here is an unprovoked war of aggression that the U.S. has joined Israel in waging, and the “peace” Netanyahu speaks of pursuing is sheer domination. Trump’s strikes add to the long history of the U.S. and Israel using brutal force to bend people, states, and international institutions to their will. Now, this war with Iran — in addition to Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, its seizure of land in the West Bank, and its bombardment of Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen — is showing the full bankruptcy of a world order that allows Israel and the U.S. to subjugate others using death and deceit.

Both countries have spent decades spinning a lie about Iran’s civilian nuclear program, insisting, baselessly, that it is in fact a nuclear weapons program, something Iran gave up in 2003. With the assistance of corporate media pundits who have helped spread falsehoods around the Iranian nuclear program, they have manufactured a threat out of thin air. It is shameful for media to continue to fearmonger over the threat of a nuclear Iran when assessments from the U.S. intelligence community have clearly shown as recently as March that there is no evidence of Iran currently seeking or creating a nuclear weapon.

Perhaps the fearmongering over nonexistent nuclear weapons in Iran is meant to deflect attention from the fact that the U.S. has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads — more than any other state besides Russia — and that Israel has an estimated 90 weapons of its own, a fact that it has never confirmed nor denied. Additionally, Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, making it one of the few nations to have failed to do so. Its own nuclear program has never been monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Now, outrageously, under the auspices of preserving global security and in the name of nonproliferation, these two nuclear states are bombing a nonnuclear state — a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that has willingly opened its doors to IAEA monitors.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 21 U.S. attack on Iran, panic about the potential spread of radiation erupted in the areas surrounding the three nuclear energy facilities bombarded at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. That panic layered with the anxiety of the ongoing Israeli strikes across the country. Human rights groups report that at least 865 Iranians have already been killed, as Israel attacks residential buildings, Iran’s state broadcaster, oil and gas depots, and Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, as well as medical facilities and workers.

For Iranians, the bombardment of the last 10 days, first from Israel and now from the U.S., have been a nightmare turned to life. Iranians within the country have struggled to make sense of panic-inducing warnings from Trump, who has demanded that residents of Tehran — a city with 17 million people living in its greater metropolitan area — “evacuate immediately.” Those of us in the diaspora have struggled to contact loved ones amid blackouts. And Iranian Americans like me have watched as our tax dollars go toward weapons that are used to attack the cities where our loved ones live. How did this happen?

Ever since 1979, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has held a direct war with Iran as a specter over all of our heads. War has been discussed as both inevitable and impossible, a potential quagmire that could make the fallout of the Iraq War look minimal. That hasn’t stopped the U.S. and Israel from finding every possible way to strangle Iran, from imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions, to conducting electronic warfare, to assassinating scientists and military leaders.

The U.S. notably assisted Iraq as it used chemical weapons against Iran during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and then shot down an Iranian commercial plane, killing 290 people, during that same war. Then the U.S. occupied Iraq and Afghanistan — neighboring countries on both sides Iran — while labeling Iran as part of an “axis of evil” and pressuring other nations to join in their crusade to isolate the country. All of this followed the 1953 coup in which the U.S. and United Kingdom ousted Iran’s oil-nationalizing prime minister, allowing Iran’s then-monarch to return to the country and repress its people for 26 more years, eventually with the help of a brutal secret police force trained by the CIA.

Iranians have long had the conditions of their lives limited by a power-hungry U.S. state. It is not surprising that this would eventually grow to include an active “hot war” — which this is, even though Trump and his ilk are reluctant to label it as one, both for legal reasons and, likely, to prevent further Iranian retaliation. But what else can you call an operation in which 14 “bunker-busting” bombs are dropped on another country?

This attack did not mark the U.S.’s entry into the war, either. Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Iran has been conducted by U.S.-made missiles, paid for with U.S. taxpayer funding, and shaped by U.S. logistical support. The U.S. reportedly sent hundreds of Hellfire missiles to Israel just before it began its shock campaign on Iran.

That weapons shipment came as Iran was in the midst of negotiations over its civilian nuclear program with the U.S., which, under Trump’s first administration, unilaterally dropped out of the agreement with which Iran was complying that put strict limitations on Iran’s uranium enrichment. Israel, seemingly with U.S. support, attacked one of Iran’s lead negotiators, effectively blowing up the negotiating table.

Yet somehow, Trump has had the audacity to demand, in all caps, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from Iran in the aftermath of the U.S. strike. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” he posted on Truth Social shortly afterward. “IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR.” This is the future that these powers want — one in which “negotiations” are in fact acts of aggression meant to force other countries into submission. This war is not about nuclear weapons. It is about U.S. hunger for unbridled control, and that should terrify every other country.

The U.S. and Israel have long worked to engineer a reality in Iran and across the Middle East that would be favorable to their interests. Much of this has involved shaping and warping international norms and institutions for their own purposes. Year after year Netanyahu has stood up in front of the United Nations and on other international stages to say that this year — no, really, this year — would be the one in which Iran would become a nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the U.S. has weaponized its dominance in the international financial system to isolate Iran economically and diplomatically, threatening sanctions on countries and companies that dare to do business in Iran.

None of this is new. What is, though, a more recent development is the arrogance and glee with which the U.S. and Israel have discarded international norms and law wholesale, and how instead they now openly embrace and celebrate brute force to assert their power over others. They are shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.

In the past, when Israel assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, it did so violently but covertly. During this war, those attacks transformed into a stunning spectacle of cruelty as Israel struck residential buildings that housed nuclear scientists, along with all the other Iranian civilians who lived in those buildings.

But why would we expect any less after last year’s pager attack in Lebanon, in which Israel turned personal devices into explosives, killing dozens and wounding thousands, including children? As if it were not enough to commit such a crime, Israeli leadership later flaunted that attack, handing out mounted pagers to U.S. political allies like Trump and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.

Despite insisting that its targets in Iran are military and nuclear sites, Israel seems to be deploying once again its terrifying “Dahiya doctrine,” a principle of collective punishment it first employed in Lebanon in 2006. The doctrine calls for attacks on civilian targets in an attempt to force adversaries to surrender while also undermining any popular support they may have. The very concept is a violation of the fundamental concepts of international law, and it has been used more dramatically than ever since 2023.

Nowhere is that dedication to collective punishment more evident than in Israel’s ongoing, U.S.-backed, livestreamed genocide in Gaza, during which Israeli soldiers have themselves openly flaunted war crimes on social media. People all over the world have access to clear video evidence of crimes against humanity, and yet largely have not acted to stop them. Despite the fact that Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court, several states party to the Rome Statute have threatened not to comply with their legal obligations to arrest him, openly flouting international law in service of genocide.

Now, Israel is also developing malicious new ways to kill the Palestinians in Gaza living under its brutal siege, shunning basic humanitarian principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence to instead prop up a privatized aid scheme that’s widely considered to be a “death trap.” Now, tanks routinely fire on starving Palestinians as they wait in line at aid distribution points run by the Israeli and U.S.-backed scheme, desperate for food. Likely part of Netanyahu’s calculus for attacking Iran now included the assessment that doing so would divert some international attention from these ongoing crimes in Gaza.

Israeli impunity is matched only by that of the U.S., where the post-9/11 congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force has normalized U.S. drone and airstrikes abroad. Under that authorization, the U.S. continues to conduct a range of what it calls “counterterrorism” operations in dozens of countries.

The lack of accountability for the U.S. invasion of Iraq has echoed throughout this entire operation in Iran. The parallels between the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and its attacks on Iran this month are beyond obvious. The same people have been brought out to peddle the myth of weapons of mass destruction, from David Frum, the Bush speechwriter-turned-Atlantic senior editor who first slotted Iran into the “axis of evil”; to Reuel Marc Gerecht, the CIA analyst-turned-pundit who swore in the pages of The New York Times in 2002 that an Iraq War wouldn’t destabilize the Middle East.

Iran has its own Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi politician who urged on the U.S. invasion of his home country — someone who could best be described in Farsi as a vatan foroosh (“homeland seller”). Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed former Shah of Iran, has been gleefully advocating for Israeli military action while he waits from the comfort of his home in the U.S., insisting he is ready to install a “constitutional monarchy” in Iran, whatever that might mean. Now, as in the post-9/11 period, we also see U.S. officials insisting that Iran is planning to launch “sleeper cell” attacks within the U.S. — a claim that will surely be used to clamp down on dissent against the war as well as manufacture even more consent for ongoing U.S. attacks on Iran.

Like in 2003, battle lines are being drawn; rather than point to the absurdity of U.S. and Israeli claims, European leaders are now issuing statements that lead off with the pronouncement that Iran can never have nuclear weapons, while urging Iran — which did not instigate the current conflict — to exercise restraint.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz went so far as to applaud Israel for doing the “dirty work … for all of us” of attacking Iran last week, adding: “I can only say, [I have] the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army had the courage to do this, that the Israeli state leadership had the courage to do this.”

This is the world we are entering — one in which acts of state aggression are not only tolerated, but also celebrated. The answer here isn’t to go back to the pre-2023 order, in which the U.S. and Israel merely adopted more discreet forms of violence, but to take an honest look at the multiple ways in which both countries have evaded accountability for inflicting horror and shape our movements to prevent that horror from happening in the first place.

This means creating a real antiwar movement in the U.S. — one that will go beyond challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s war on Iran to actually challenging that war itself. It means demanding arms embargoes. It means escalating the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to exact real economic costs for committing genocide. It means organizing across sectors to keep weapons from making it into the hands of génocidaires. It means urgently building organizations that can respond to immediate crises while also building infrastructure for long-term political struggles that do not fade with the news cycle or depend on electoral outcomes.

Governments have shown they are either unwilling or unable to hold the U.S. and Israel to account. Those of us incensed by Israeli and U.S. acts of aggression must take on that mantle ourselves.