Are We Going to War With Iran or Not?
Americans shouldn’t have to read the tea leaves to know about life-and-death decisions made by their government.
It sure looks like the United States is getting ready to go to war in the Middle East. On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. government suddenly announced the evacuation of embassy staff and military dependents across the region. Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, then cancelled his planned testimony to Congress.
As those evacuations were happening, the British government's shipping industry security office issued a bulletin about "increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity." Asked what was happening, President Donald Trump ominously told reporters, "you're going to have to figure that one out yourself."
While the administration wouldn't publicly say what was going on, its officials were happy to leak the source of the panic to the press. Israel was preparing an attack on Iran, sources told NBC and CBS. The NBC report included a detail that somewhat changes the picture: Israel would attack "most likely without U.S. support."
Still, Iran isn't treating the U.S. and Israel as separate actors. There is a round of U.S.-Iranian talks scheduled in Oman on Sunday, and an Iranian official told Reuters that the alleged warnings about an Israeli strike were a form of "psychological warfare" aimed at building leverage.
Israel's "only option is one that is combined with the United States, and at a minimum, they would need the U.S. to protect them from the barrage of missiles that would be coming from Iran in retaliation," Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where I used to work, told Al Jazeera. "It's unclear at this point whether this [series of evacuations] is just part of the choreography or whether this is real movement towards taking military action."
Whether the warnings are a bluff or a prelude to a real war, they highlight a deeper problem with the way the U.S. is run. War is the most serious decision a government can make, and Americans shouldn't find out about it through cryptic omens or fat-fingered group chat leaks. If the president feels the need to keep his options open—whether to start a war or stand in the middle of one—he should have to go to Congress and get a war authorization.
Recent polling by the University of Maryland shows that 69 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, want a diplomatic deal with Iran, and only 14 percent of Americans want war.
Even the Bush administration, not exactly believers in congressional oversight or limits on presidential power, took more care to build a public case for war in Iraq. (The fact that they lied about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program shows, perversely, that they cared what the public thought.) But the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all demonstrated that it's easier to jump into a war and dare Congress to stop it, correctly betting that Americans' indifference or hostility to the Middle East would be enough to sustain the war politically.
Worse yet, all of these administrations took the decision about war with Iran out of American hands. Since the late Bush administration, Israel and the U.S. have been conducting the Juniper exercises to practice for a joint military campaign. Although the target was never named, and U.S. officials explicitly denied in 2023 that the exercise was based on "mockups of Iranian targets or of any other adversary," the drills were clearly designed with Iran in mind.
Unclassified U.S. military emails from the time of the Juniper Falcon 21-2 exercise in July 2021, revealed by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets in October 2024, show the heavy involvement of officials from the "Iran Branch" of U.S. Central Command's planning directorate. They also include references to a classified U.S.-Israeli communications system called SEAGULL, nicknamed the "bird phone" or "chicken."
Neither U.S. Central Command nor the Israeli defense ministry responded to Reason's requests for comment.
When the war in Gaza began, the U.S. Air Force deployed intelligence-sharing teams to help the Israeli military. (The Biden administration, which insisted from the beginning that it wasn't involved in targeting decisions, admitted that the U.S. military was helping Israel "locate and track" targets in October 2024.) And there are still U.S. troops manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in Israel, who have been there since October 2024 and were shooting at Yemeni missiles as late as last month.
All that is to say that the U.S. will be enmeshed in any Israeli war unless it makes an effort to extract itself. And Iran knows it, too. Last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that his country would treat the U.S. as a "participant" in any Israeli attack. On Wednesday, Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh added that "all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them in host countries."
There's a big political incentive for Israel to start a war that the U.S. is expected to finish. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is poised to lose the next election, has used the threat of Iran as an argument against early elections. Amb. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. envoy to Jerusalem, publicly said that Israel would look weak if it voted out its government in the face of a "possible nuclear threat from Iran." Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid accused Huckabee of inappropriate political interference.
War with Iran is also tied to one of Trump's self-imposed deadlines. In April, he gave Iran two months to come to an agreement over its nuclear program. At first, the administration insisted that Iran could continue low-level uranium enrichment for its civilian power plants, then changed its mind. The Iranian government is insisting that, while it is willing to accept limits and swear off nuclear weapons, it won't give up civilian enrichment.
"It would be nicer to do it without warfare, without people dying," Trump said in a podcast interview with the New York Post published on Wednesday. "Yes, so much nicer to do it. But I don't think I see the same level of enthusiasm for them to make a deal."
The Trump administration has started to more publicly sell the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Although Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Congress on Wednesday that there are "plenty of indications" Iran has been "moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon."
That's more a change in U.S. rhetoric than the underlying facts. The Department of Defense told Al Monitor, a magazine based in Washington, that there hasn't been any change to the intelligence assessment made in March.
On Thursday morning, the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board voted to declare Iran was violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The resolution, put forward by the United States and European countries, cited Iran's current stockpile of highly-enriched uranium and its failure to answer questions about past nuclear research.
The irony is that Israel, which the U.S. is relying on to play enforcer, has never signed the Non-Profliteration Treaty. Israel is believed to have an undeclared arsenal of around 90 nuclear bombs, which were built partially by stealing and smuggling materials out of America. The same University of Maryland poll found that 69 percent of Americans, including 63 percent of Republicans, think the Middle East would be safest with neither an Iranian nor Israeli bomb.
But the result of war might be the opposite.
"A strike could potentially have an amalgamating effect, solidifying Iran's determination—I will say it plainly—to pursue a nuclear weapon or withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told The Jerusalem Post last week. "I'm telling you this because they have told me so directly."