Trump's Justification for the War Against Iran He Has Now Launched (Presented Most Recently in His SOTU Speech)Was and Remains Bogus.
During his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump had a lot to say about Iran, against which he had already deployed a massive force: two carrier strike groups and assorted warplanes, including stealth fighter jets, refueling tankers, and airborne surveillance and command posts.
His statements were either demonstrably false, made no sense in light of his previous claims, or were vastly exaggerated. But the indictment had a purpose. Trump was presenting a narrative intended to justify the war he has now unleashed.
Here are the claims Trump made to set the table for war.
He boasted that the United States had “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” last June. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!” he declared on June 25, using the trademark random capitalization. Yet he claimed that he might have to destroy what he had previously declared destroyed.
Steve Witkoff, one of his negotiators in the talks with Iran (the other being his son-in-law, Jared Kushner), went one better. He told Fox News that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial grade bombing making material,” even though his boss had insisted repeatedly that Iran’s enrichment facilities had been reduced to rubble.
So, which is it? Was Iran’s nuclear infrastructure demolished in June? Or is Iran on the verge of making weapons grade uranium (enriched to 90 percent or more) in vast quantities?
Trump left the impression that unless he demolished Iran’s enrichment installations (again), the US would be vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear attack. But Iran isn’t on the verge of building nuclear weapons, and it lacks ballistic missiles with a range greater than 2,000 km. Contrary to Trump’s claim, there’s no evidence that it’s developing a 10,000-km-range missile that would be needed to do the job.
Besides, any Iranian nuclear strike on an American city would guarantee a retaliation that would annihilate the Iranian state. The notion that Tehran would invite annihilation requires an assumption that its leaders are reckless, even irrational, and there’s no basis for that.
Trump stated that though his administration was engaged in talks with Iran on a nuclear deal, “We haven’t heard those sacred words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon’.”
In fact, in 2010, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) declaring an Iranian nuclear weapon “haram” (forbidden). Moreover, as recently as February 24, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Aragchi statedthat although Iran reserved the right to use nuclear energy for non-military purposes, it “will under no circumstances ever develop nuclear weapons.”
One can say that these words don’t amount to much, but what the president said was that they hadn’t ever been uttered by any Iranian leader. Based on that claim, he added that he could not leave Americans exposed to a nuclear attack by “the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror.”
In fact, the overwhelming majority of global terrorist attacks are carried out by Sunni groups that regard Shi’a Iran as an apostate, even an enemy. Indeed, in 2023–2024, Iran itself was among the countries that experienced the largest increases in terrorist attacks.
Trump averred that he’d prefer to seek a nuclear deal with Iran through diplomacy rather than force, never mind that when he began his first term, American diplomacy had already produced a nuclear agreement with Iran. In July 2015, the Obama administration and Iran—joined by Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—signed the Joint and Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
JCPOA required the dismantling and storage of 13,000 centrifuges (machines for enriching uranium) and capped the number of centrifuges at 6,104. As for uranium enrichment, the ceiling was set at 3.67 percent (far below weapons-grade concentration) and the amount Iran could hold was limited to 300 kgs. Any excess had to be moved out of the country.
JCPOA also required the removal and disablement of the Arak reactor’s core and banned the reprocessing of spent fuel, all of which had to be shipped out of Iran. Heavy water reactors were prohibited as was heavy water production.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was charged with verifying Iranian compliance with these commitments through electronic monitoring and on-site inspections.
In exchange for these commitments, the UN Security Council lifted its 2006 sanctions on Iran, though JCPOA specified that they could be reimposed rapidly for a decade under a “snapback” provision if Iran breached any of its terms.
This was the deal Trump needlessly defenestrated in May 2018. For that, he was applauded by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who denounced it from the outset as “a historic mistake” and doggedly tried to scuttle it, including during his March 2015 address to a joint session of Congress. After ditching the JCPOA, Trump unilaterally reimposed the 2006 Security Council sanctions and made them even tougher.
After Israel and the US attacked Iran last June, the Iranian parliament passed a resolution that ended cooperation with the IAEA on nuclear safeguards, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it remains a party. Britain, France, and Germany responded by invoking the JCPOA snapback provision, which triggered UN Security Council sanctions. This is where things stand now.
JCPOA wasn’t perfect. For one thing, depending on the provision, there was a time limit of 10–15 years. But given Iran’s desperate need to preserve relief from economic sanctions, the agreement could have been extended through negotiations, perhaps even improved upon. Trump ditched the JCPOA, reimposed sanctions on Iran, and didn’t pursue a follow-on deal. Iran adhered to JCPOA for a time but eventually resumed enrichment and also started restricting the IAEA’s access for inspections.
In June 2025, following the attack by Israel and the US, Tehran announced that it would no longer be bound by the deal and its parliament passed legislation ending cooperation with the IAEA.
Trump declared that the advancement of Iran’s enrichment program had created an emergency that must be addressed urgently, by war if need be. But it’s an emergency he helped create, starting in 2018.
Witkoff told Fox News that Iran had enriched uranium to 60 percent—far beyond the 3.67 percent cap imposed by JCPOA. But that escalation followed the collapse of the 2015 deal. Had it remained in force—or been renegotiated and improved without Trump’s current insistence on zero enrichment, which Tehran rejects outright—Iran might still be operating under that lower limit.
These details raise a basic question: What is the justification for waging war against a country that hasn’t attacked the US or even threatened to strike any of its bases and military assets, except in self-defense?
As Peter Beinart has noted, the media has failed to address it adequately amidst its frenetic coverage of the hazards that could follow a US (and possibly Israeli) attack on Iran: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; Iranian missile attacks on American bases, forces deployed in the region and on Israel; and the chaos and violence that might follow if the Iranian state implodes.
These risks certainly merit consideration, but they arise from Trump’s threats to attack Iran—for objectives that remain unclear. Sometimes he has mentioned regime change, at other times a nuclear deal, at still other moments cutting Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile—which Tehran has steadfastly opposed, just as it has zero enrichment, on the grounds that as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it is allowed to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
What, then, is the rationale for a war that will kill numerous people and destabilize an already volatile region? The president’s State of the Union did not provide one. Instead, it offered contradictions, exaggerations, and claims of urgency detached from the facts.
Trump’s attack on Iran is neither a retaliation undertaken in self-defense nor a preemption in the face of an impending strike. Like Iraq in 2003, it is a preventive war—unmoored from the principle of self-defense. The American public deserved a compelling explanation, not wild, fact-free claims.