As President Donald Trump tells it, the United States had no other option than to launch a large-scale bombing operation against Iran. The threat the Iranians posed to the United States was simply too high; Iran’s history of mayhem inside the Middle East was too long to ignore; and Iranian negotiators weren’t serious about striking a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore,” Trump told the nation an hour after the U.S. military operation began on Saturday.

The Trump administration’s argument for war rests on two pillars. First, Iran is an imminent national security threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. And second, Iran never wanted to find a diplomatic route out of the nuclear crisis that has bedeviled U.S.-Iran relations for more than two decades.

Trump’s case, however, is flat-out wrong. This conflict, which has spread to other countries in the region and is affecting energy prices, didn’t need to happen.

Following the operation, Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have pointed to Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles as one reason the United States needed to take military action. Some administration officials have claimed that Iran was preparing to strike U.S. bases in the region in a preemptive attack so the U.S. military had no choice but to take action. But this claim was about as truthful as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that there could be a “mushroom cloud” over an American city if Saddam Hussein wasn’t stopped in Iraq. In other words, it wasn’t true at all.

Sure, Iran’s missiles pose a threat. Ask Saudi Arabia, which was on the receiving end of a volley of Iranian cruise missiles in September 2019, forcing Riyadh to cut about half of its crude oil production for a few days. Or ask Israel, which was the target of Iranian missile attacks in April and October 2024 and last June before the most recent hostilities. And yes, Iran’s short-range missiles can reach a good chunk of Washington’s military infrastructure in the region, as we’re currently seeing.

But it’s not like this is a new development. The Iranians have been investing significant funds in their missile program because Tehran’s conventional military capability — its air force, navy and army — is antiquated, unimpressive and inexperienced. Iranian fighter jets might as well be displayed in a museum somewhere; a good portion of them can be traced back to the era of the shah. Iran’s navy, or what’s left of it after the U.S. took out several ships over the weekend, relies on small fast-attack boats suited more for pestering civilian tankers than actually fighting destroyers on the high seas.

Iranian ground forces, meanwhile, haven’t fought a war since the 1980s. So it’s no wonder Tehran is betting its defense strategy on missiles — missiles, by the way, that the United States wouldn’t have to worry about at all if U.S presidents from both parties didn’t stubbornly cling to the notion that we needed tens of thousands of troops based in the Middle East at any given time.

What about Iran’s nuclear program? Surely the Iranians are making a dash to the bomb, right?

Wrong. Before the first Trump administration stupidly withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, Tehran’s nuclear apparatus was essentially under lock and key. Iranian enrichment had been curtailed, its stockpile of enriched materiel capped well below what it needed for a bomb and international nuclear inspectors examining the entirety of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. After Trump withdrew the U.S. from President Barack Obama’s negotiated nuclear deal, the Iranians increased the quality of their centrifuges, churned out more enriched uranium at higher grades and built up a sizable stockpile of enriched materiel. Yet the U.S. intelligence community still assessed that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had not yet made the decision to actually acquire nuclear weapons.

Bombing Iran to stave off a hypothetical Iranian nuclear bomb is even less convincing today than it was back then. Despite what U.S. officials are telling the public, there is no evidence whatsoever that Tehran’s nuclear program was close to a bomb. The Iranians have yet to recover from the U.S. military operation last June, which severely damaged their three major nuclear facilities and likely destroyed a large portion of their centrifuges. The 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium Iran possessed at the time is now buried deep underground in one of those damaged facilities, and as far as we know, the Iranians haven’t bothered to dig it out. The only work Iran has done on its nuclear program since June is to fortify what’s left of it in preparation for additional U.S. strikes.

Then there’s the issue of the negotiations. Trump has repeatedly stated that Tehran wasn’t committed to a diplomatic resolution. However, the problem wasn’t Iran’s willingness to compromise — it was Trump’s willingness to accept the fact that any nuclear deal he struck wasn’t going to result in everything he wanted. Unfortunately, this is something Trump was unable to come to terms with. The U.S. position throughout the monthlong talks was maximalist to the core: Iran must give up all of its enriched uranium, stop enriching for eternity and, after all that’s agreed to, negotiate its ballistic missile arsenal away. Of course, none of this was going to happen, and we must question whether the Trump administration actually believed those goals could be accomplished.

When all is said and done, Trump opted to fight a war of choice without a rationale that was even semi-convincing. And just as bad, he didn’t bother to explain it all to the American people beforehand.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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