In Donald Trump’s war on Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East [sic], we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away [sic], and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991 had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003 the Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace but stood back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.¹ Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” On March 3 Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.² Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it.

—March 12, 2026