US bases in the Middle East. Of the nearly 1200 overseas military sites operating in the world, the US has nearly 900 while Iran has one—yet the US accuses Iran of military adventurism. Source: World Beyond War Report, 2025
For decades Iran has been the gremlin in the American global imagination. US officials claim that Iran is the main source of instability in the Middle East, allowing them to dismiss any opposition to US or US allies’ policies as products of Iranian scheming. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June, however, marked a dramatic escalation in the long-running US shadow war on Iran. Although the White House proclaimed that “Operation Midnight Hammer” successfully averted a global nuclear crisis, the reality is that the crisis was as invented as the long-standing assertion that Iran is the master agent of disorder across the region. America, not Iran, is the rogue state here.
The June strikes killed hundreds, half of whom were civilians; prompted retaliations against a US base and Israel; and nearly ignited a regional war. They also caused less quantifiable, but equally profound, damage to US and global security. Most pointedly, they make future nuclear crises more likely. Iran can rebuild its reactors and research programs in a matter of months if it chooses to, but we cannot rebuild the trust needed for international cooperation in non-proliferation so easily.
The Iran War as Domestic Distraction
Domestically, bombing Iran was primarily an act of political theater aimed at the American audience. Bombing Iran, just like bombing Yemen in March, sacrificed distant lives for a brief patriotic flare to deflect attention from the national wealth transfer masquerading as administrative, budget, and tax reforms. Iranian lives will not be the only ones lost because of the Trump administration.
Demonstrators march by the courthouse in Urbana June 18 (a few days before the US bombing of Iran), protesting the US-backed Israeli bombing and potential US escalation. Photo by Janice Jayes
Trump’s undeclared act of war also undermined American constitutional and administrative checks on executive power. Trump ignored congressional demands for a vote on the war, then marginalized and belittled US intelligence professionals who contradicted his claim that Iran posed a potential nuclear threat. Having already defunded government-affiliated foreign policy institutions like the Wilson Center and the US Institute for Peace and shuttered the Voice of America and the US Agency for International Development, Trump faces few institutions still capable of challenging his erratic policies. Academic departments that could provide context are under siege as well. Most recently Trump completed his rampage through the US foreign policy infrastructure by firing 1300 State Department staff. In just five months Trump has hollowed out all non-military avenues for US government engagement with the world, and the remaining institutions for providing expertise have been repopulated with servile and unqualified sycophants. It is unclear how much damage the strikes actually did in Iran, but in the US, they proved a successful distraction from the damage done to national security through executive branch overreach and manipulation.
Trump’s War on Non-Proliferation
This is the second time Trump has undermined international efforts to regulate the nuclear industry in Iran and weakened efforts to establish safe nuclear practices globally. In 2017 Trump unilaterally cancelled the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, in which the US agreed to lift economic sanctions on Iran dating from the 1979 revolution and Iran agreed to limit nuclear enrichment and allow monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Hit with sanctions again, the Iranians resumed enrichment as a bargaining chip for future negotiations. And then in June, even though Trump’s own director of national intelligence had testified just months before that that analysts did not believe Iran was pursuing a weapons program, the US and Israel launched bombing raids even as the US was in negotiations over a new nuclear deal with Iran. In cancelling the 2015 agreement, undercutting the IAEA, betraying negotiations, and bombing Iran, Trump crippled the best methods for preventing future nuclear proliferation anywhere through international verification.
In addition, Trump’s rogue attack on Iran, combined with continued US greenlighting of Israeli attacks in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, is likely to provoke a new arms race. The less countries trust the international system to set norms or resolve crises, the more they will pursue weapons, including “poison pill” WMD weapons, as protection in an uncertain world.
Dozens of states now possess the resources to pursue nuclear weapons. Although all proliferation increases the risk of accidental or deliberate use, there is no evidence that new nuclear states will be less restrained than existing nuclear powers. The greater danger, however, comes from the risk of proliferation at the level of extremist or criminal groups, and only a strong international network of cooperation and inspection can reduce that risk. Unfortunately, Trump’s macho military strike did more long-term damage to nuclear security cooperation than it did to the Iranian nuclear program.
Iran as the Ghost in the Machine
Trump’s ability to panic the American public with the specter of an irrational, nuclear Iran rests on decades of American culture combining racism, Islamophobia, and a conviction that there must be a scapegoat for the failure of US policies in the region. Iran is certainly involved in multiple theaters in the area, and has strategic partnerships with groups employing terror tactics, but the same can be said of the US. From the perspective of many in the region, it is the US, not Iran, that is the destabilizing agent. It is the US that has a track record of interventions geared at regime change (Iran 1953, Afghanistan 1980s and 2001, Iraq 2003, Syria 2012, Libya 2011 . . . ); that uses drone strikes and military units outside of declared war zones; that funds and arms militias, including those that use terrorist tactics; that kidnaps (renditions) and tortures individuals at secret prisons and Guantanamo in disregard of international law; and that partners with a network of undemocratic regimes with atrocious human rights records.
Waiting for Regime Change
The Islamic Republic of Iran is no paragon of human rights, but neither are most US allies in the region. Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq all received failing scores for human rights in 2023. But only the sorry state of Iranian human rights (and they also receive a failing grade) is trotted out to justify discussions of regime change. There are certainly many within Iran that would like to see political change—but through their own efforts, not military intervention from abroad.
Regime change in Iran, however, is not the regime change which the Trump bombing campaign is most likely to provoke. The last eighteen months have witnessed a level of frustration and anger with the pathetically ineffective Western-centric international system not seen since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The UN peacekeepers troops are fired at by Israel in Lebanon without consequences; UN leaders condemning the violence on civilians in Gaza are ignored; the UN assistance programs in Gaza are shut down; and even when the International Criminal Court brings charges against Netanyahu, he travels freely to Europe and the White House. Meanwhile, day after day, images of Palestinians suffering under murderous occupation appear on phones across the world. The anger at the West is palpable.
The global anger may be similar to that of 2003, but there are important differences. While Trump’s strikes were similar to unilateral strikes the US has carried out for decades—in Libya, Sudan, and Iraq—and consistent with the “over the horizon” tactics of ongoing US drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and other places Americans cannot be bothered with finding on a map or naming in a declaration of war, the US in 2025 is broke and scarred from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and too worried about potential conflict in Europe and East Asia to risk getting tied down in Iran.
More importantly, the world is different. Not only does the US have comparatively less military and economic influence than it did in 2003, but other countries have options in the more multipolar world than they had before. There are more options for buying weapons, for negotiating trade deals, or for establishing military alliances. And Trump’s erratic foreign policy is only likely to hasten the process of decentralization.
The real question the US needs to ask is not how do we keep other states from acquiring nuclear weapons, but how will we live in a world we no longer dominate? Bombing countries from halfway around the world might be carried out with the most modern of equipment, but it is an outdated tactic that will only hasten the collapse of the old international system. This is the regime change that Trump’s strike on Iran has hastened.
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