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New York Times Analysis: Why a US War with Iran Would Be a Disaster

2025-06-16 23:55:20Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ROSEMARY KELANIC
Donald Trump

By Rosemary Kelanic – New York Times

The United States is very close to being drawn into another military involvement in the Middle East, this time by Israel, which looks less and less like a true friend.

Israel’s surprise attack on Iran on Friday has almost certainly destroyed any chance of reaching the nuclear deal the United States has been pursuing for months. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also recklessly put the 40,000 American troops stationed in the region at immediate risk of Iranian retaliation, which could drag America into a war with Iran.

However Iran interprets the American role in the attacks, it appears that Israel acted without giving the United States sufficient warning to take appropriate defensive measures. Although President Trump acknowledged on Thursday that an Israeli attack could be imminent, the United States did not begin voluntary evacuations of military families and non-essential embassy personnel until Wednesday afternoon, while the State Department began drawing up plans for a mass evacuation of American citizens just hours before the attack.

Trump, and all Americans, should be furious. Now Netanyahu and warmongering voices in the United States will almost certainly pressure Donald Trump to help Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, something that would be difficult for the Israeli military to accomplish on its own and that even the US military may not be able to accomplish. It would be the biggest mistake of the Trump presidency.

A war with Iran would be a disaster, the ultimate failure of decades of excessive regional intervention by the United States, and precisely the kind of policy that Trump has long railed against. The United States would gain nothing from a war with a weak country on the other side of the world that creates problems in its own region but poses no critical threat to American security. And the United States would lose much: most tragically, the lives of American soldiers, along with any chance of escaping our painful past in the region.

Americans of all political persuasions oppose a war with Iran, presumably because they understand two major lessons from the U.S. experience in Middle East wars over the past 25 years. Not only do preemptive wars not work; they also bring unforeseen consequences with lasting impact on America’s national security.

The misguided invasion of Iraq in 2003 was also a war to prevent nuclear proliferation. A disaster ensued, not least because Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The American invasion caused chaos and civil war in Iraq and shifted the regional balance of power toward Iran, allowing it to create new proxy militias in the country. It also led to the eventual rise of ISIS.

There is no reason to think that a war with Iran will go any better, and it could be much worse. If it does, U.S. military involvement would probably begin with airstrikes rather than a ground invasion, given Iran’s size and impassable mountainous terrain. But as the futile $7 billion campaign against the Houthis showed, airstrikes are enormously expensive, involve high risks of American casualties, and are likely to fail anyway. The United States has never managed to secure air superiority over the Houthis, a disorganized militant group with the resources of a poor country like Yemen, over which it has failed to establish control.

Iran is far more capable of defending itself than the Houthis. If airstrikes fail to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the pressure on US forces to accompany the airstrikes with a ground component will increase significantly, perhaps something similar to the “Afghan model” that the US used to topple the Taliban. We know how that ended. Despite the intention to keep that war small and short, an involvement that began with just 1,300 US troops in November 2001 expanded into a disastrous 20-year invasion that reached as many as 100,000 US troops at its peak in 2011 and ultimately resulted in the deaths of 2,324 US service members.

Even in a best-case scenario, where the United States helps destroy most of Iran’s nuclear sites, it would only delay Iran’s progress toward a bomb. War cannot stop weaponization for long, so diplomacy or deliberate non-engagement have always been better options for dealing with Iran. Its enrichment program is more than 20 years old, spread across several facilities within the Islamic Republic, and employs thousands of scientists, 3,000 at the Isfahan facility alone. It is likely that enough Iranian scientists know how to enrich uranium for weapons that Israel would not be able to kill them all, even if airstrikes were to target them.

Assuming some technical continuity continues, Iran will probably be able to quickly rebuild its nuclear facilities. And a defiant Iranian regime will undoubtedly be determined to arm itself to deter future attacks from Israel and the US.

This likelihood, combined with Israel’s insistence that Iran should never have a bomb, suggests that Netanyahu’s victory theory may rest on an implicit logic of regime change. To support this point, Israel appears to be engaging in attacks aimed at disabling the regime’s leadership in Tehran.

The Israeli leader has long embraced the desire for regime change in Iran, and hinted in September that it could happen “sooner than people think.” As a French diplomatic source told Le Monde last fall, “The idea is circulating in some circles that perhaps the Israelis are leading us to a historic moment, that this is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.” The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December intensified speculation about a similar overthrow in Iran. Some American warmongering voices and members of the Iranian diaspora now claim that regime change is becoming inevitable; as Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, put it: “Now is the time to think about the regime change campaign in Iran.”

This is magical thinking. History has shown time and again that bombing a country turns its people against the attacker, not against their regime, no matter how deeply unpopular it is. Footage already shows Iranians protesting in the streets, not to oppose their government, but to demand revenge on Israel. And even if the regime were to fall, so what? For all the flaws of the Iranian government, a bad government is better than the chaos of no government. Do we really want to turn Iran into a failed state, like Iraq or Libya after the United States attacked those countries?

Trump often boasts of his record during his first term of not starting any new wars. That is a record worth turning into a legacy. He must resist pressure from Netanyahu and warmongering voices in the US to avoid tragic and irreparable self-harm.

*Dr. Kelanic is the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities

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