Threatening American Democracy Isn’t Bringing Democracy to Iran

American and Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 3,200 Iranians, cost Americans at least 16.5 billion dollars (since February 28th), violated constitutional military protocol, undermined American foreign alliances, and permanently destroyed parts of Tehran, all under the premise that such attacks would eliminate the extreme, oppressive regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. United States President Donald Trump did this without congressional approval, despite the fact that the Constitution grants sole power to declare war to Congress. Weeks after he began this war, Trump admitted that Iranians face “a very big hurdle” in overthrowing the regime, casting doubt that it’s even possible. In other words, Trump has put American democratic systems on hold to start an impromptu war with Iran that even he worries will fail to replace the Iranian regime with a democratic government. The legacy of decades of American military intervention in the Middle East has been passed down to one of the most undemocratic and reckless presidents to have stepped foot in the White House, and in his hands, the longstanding American tradition of Middle Eastern imperialism under the guise of spreading democracy has become substantially more dangerous.

It was moving and hopeful to witness the celebration that came from Iranians around the globe after the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the oppressive leader of the totalitarian Iranian regime. But two weeks later, it has become clear that democracy remains out of reach. For decades, the war on terrorism and its ideological chokehold on Middle Eastern governments has been used as a justification for intervention, but sloppy tactics and shortsighted strategy have resulted in diminishing the hope of and possibility for establishing viable democracies. Despite these past failures, Trump’s war of choice in Iran is the most dangerous of all.

Iran Timeline and Background 

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 installed a fundamentalist Islamic, theocratic, totalitarian regime. From 1989 up until a couple of weeks ago, the regime’s supreme leader was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Since then, the Iranian regime has propped up global terrorism, imposed oppressive laws and torturous punishments on women and ethnic minorities, and mass murdered tens of thousands of the protestors who’ve risen up against it.

It has also become an explicit ideological and geopolitical enemy to the West, namely the United States and Israel. Israel and Iran are also regional, ideological enemies: they are two of the largest powers in the Middle East and are constantly vying for power and security from each other. One large catalyst of the Israel-Iran relationship is the regime's financing of Hamas, the terrorist organization responsible for the October 7 attacks on Israel and long-term attacks on Israel.

Israeli strikes on Iran led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu targeted nuclear and top military sites in June 2025. Days later, the US entered the war, effectively ending decades of negotiation and diplomacy between the US and Iran, and sent warplanes into Iran targeting sites of nuclear development. Trump claimed that this military action eliminated all nuclear threats from Iran. And yet Trump and Netanyahu later launched joint surprise strikes without warning on Iran in pursuit of the elimination of the regime and of the very same nuclear weapons Trump claimed were already eliminated, on February 28, 2026.

The CIA found information revealing that Khamenei would be meeting with other top regime officials early on February 28, and so Israeli warplanes took off, killing Khamenei along with other officials. Since then, the US and Israel have continued to launch strikes on Tehran, Iran’s capital, claiming to further eliminate the regime's strength. As of March 24, US-Israeli strikes have killed over 3,200 Iranians, more than 1,400 of whom were civilians.

But neither civilian deaths nor the elimination of Khamenei’s inner circle can dismantle a regime that is systemically intertwined with Iranian society and built to last—true destruction of the oppressive regime would require months of strategy and planning. 

Motivation and Justification for the War

The defensive justification for the US entering war was the elimination of nuclear threats and preemptive defense of inevitable Iranian strikes on the US, despite the months he spent claiming that his June strikes on Iran had completely eliminated nuclear threats. Since Trump’s new claim that Iran’s nuclear strikes would “soon reach the United States of America” (should Iran not be bombed), he’s been contradicted, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the CIA separately claimed that Iran had no current capabilities to strike the US, and US intelligence found no evidence of Iranian plans to strike the US mainland. 

The offensive justifications for the US entering the war focused on regime change and claimed to be for the good of the Iranian people. Framing his war as humanitarian and ideological means that the validity of his attacks is contingent on the possibility of the Iranian regime actually falling and being replaced by a democratic government, but the lack of thoughtful strategy and countless contradictions in the claims he’s made to the American public prove the illegitimacy of these justifications, which raises the question as to what his motivations truly are.

In stark contrast with his moral, humanitarian, America-focused claims, his private planning meetings with US officials and Netanyahu reveal an alternate motivation. First of all, his strikes on Iran were preceded by several private meetings with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials focused on encouraging Trump to stay on a war route. As peace talks between the US and Iran progressed, Netanyahu ensured they wouldn’t jeopardize Israel’s ability to attack Iran. Trump admitted in a private conversation with political commentator Tucker Carlson that, despite knowing such enormous risk for the US and Iranian people, he felt “that he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated, “We knew that [inevitable Israeli strikes on Iran] would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” In other words, Trump threw America into a war that wasn’t for America to fight: Netanyahu sought war with Iran, and Trump enabled and supported him.

The Future of Iran

In terms of the future of Iran, the lack of strategy inherent to Trump’s actions makes the possibility of a democratic, just Iranian government taking power a practically impossible feat for a fragmented, attacked people without the physical means—weapons or physical unity—to install a new government. Trump’s only justifications to the American public for initiating war on Iran have been contradictory, changing, and most definitely ignorant of the reality of the Iranian people.

Worse yet, Trump’s failure to utilize strategy and thorough planning in his reckless elimination of Ali Khamenei means that the Iranian regime can and likely will survive without its old Supreme Leader. Two weeks after dropping billions of dollars into eliminating Ali Khamenei, even Trump admitted that unarmed Iranians taking down a machine-gun-bearing military is beyond difficult. The reality is, it’s impossible. Trump handled the militaristic destruction of much of Tehran and murdered a couple of central regime leaders while calling on the Iranian people to actually dismantle the institutionalized and oppressive regime. This is beyond naive, irresponsible, or unstrategic: it’s deliberately neglectful of the Iranian people and their future. Trump’s fruitless, reckless, imperialistic games cost lives.

Trita Parsi, the co-founder and vice president of a thinktank on American foreign policy, says that since the American attacks on Iran in June, the Iranian regime has prepared for the event of losing central power, and explains that “provincial governors have been granted authorities comparable with those of the president in order to keep the government running if the central command structure was disrupted. Local military commanders have similarly been empowered to make decisions without waiting for instructions from Tehran.” America’s failures in Iranian intervention are beyond ignorant of the call amongst Americans for US dollars to go to US causes, and are beyond dismissive of the imperialistic, selfish, profit-seeking arguments of immorality that apply to every war the US has fought in the Middle East. In fact, the Supreme Leader has already been officially replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. Although the regime may be weakened by the death of their previous Supreme Leader, the United States’ unstrategic, top-down elimination of only the highest leaders in the Iranian regime means that it will be extremely feasible for Mojtaba Khamenei to rebuild the abusive regime his father left behind.

Mojtaba Khamenei won’t have to start from scratch, either: Ali Khamenei left behind a military systematically intertwined with Iranian society. Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, explains that Ali Khamenei’s elite paramilitary guard “is not a monolith, but it is ubiquitous. It presides over sprawling economic conglomerates, penetrates every layer of the state bureaucracy, runs its own intelligence apparatus, cultivates Iranian proxies and shapes the narrative in Iran through an affiliated media empire.” With a “ubiquitous” military maintaining the regime's power, Trump’s reckless attacks on Iran will almost certainly prove useless to Iranians hoping for an end to the regime.

The Future of America

Trump’s attacks on Iran are his biggest threats to the institutions of American democracy yet. First and foremost, Trump effectively declared war without congressional approval, while the Constitution grants sole power to declare war to Congress. The loophole he used was officially labeling his attacks on Iran as “major combat operations” rather than acts of war, contradicting his official claims in which he publicly referred to such action as war. In attacking Iran, Trump knowingly caused military retaliation from Iran, bringing the US, in all senses of the word, into war.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has repeatedly taken action exceeding his constitutionally-enshrined powers and compromising the integrity of American democracy, but the extent of ignorance of the Constitution and the sheer scale of the attacks he’s funding make the war on Iran his biggest hindrance to democracy yet. As politicians and individuals in his party and cabinet validate and defend such dangerous and unconstitutional actions, Trump is less and less bound to the laws that maintain democracy and protect the American public. 

Unsurprisingly, Trump failed to clearly even attempt to explain the rationale behind going to war before killing Ali Khamenei and effectively declaring war on Iran. He gave no announcement of his plans before the attacks. When he eventually did attempt to justify the war, he did so via video on TruthSocial, the social media app he owns, and through sporadic comments from members of his cabinet, with largely exaggerated or false claims of why the attacks had to be done right in that moment rather than after thorough timing. The claims were largely that Iran was on the verge of developing long-range missiles that could reach the US mainland within a week, and the prediction that the regime would develop a new, fatal bomb material by the end of the week, both of which were either not proven by any source or explicitly proven false. In reality, the United States has little definite knowledge of the inner workings of the Iranian regime, much less definite timelines on their nuclear weapon development, meaning the claims used repeatedly by Trump and his cabinet of why the war had to happen now! are completely illegitimate. In contrast, presidents have historically appealed to and justified foreign military intervention to the American public before attacks, and with solid, defined goals, and often found solid evidence for a war timeline strategy. Trump had done none of this.

Worse, he sought out no global support from American allies for these attacks, further severing the ties America held so strongly to global democracies mere years ago. Our closest geographical and political ally, Canada, for one, was unhappy with the reckless nature of Trump’s Iran strikes. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explained that Trump and Netanyahu “acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting with their allies, including Canada.” Though Carney criticized the lack of UN engagement and allied consultation, Canada stopped short of opposing the war outright, offering qualified support for the stated goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Although American allies Britain and France reluctantly provided ships and planes to the US for limited purposes, French President Emmanuel Macron agreed that Trump’s actions violated international law, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer held off on supporting the war for several days, stating there was neither a legal basis nor a thought-through plan. Severing ties with America’s closest and most supportive allies is no mistake: Trump has been working to break American historical standards of upholding international law and collaborating with foreign allies for the entirety of his time in office, withdrawing from countless international organizations that have facilitated foreign alliances, trade, prosperity, and peace over the last hundred years. His reckless war on Iran only furthers his isolationist, hostile attitude to America's strongest allies and is his biggest breach of national and international law and trust.

Conc

Trump’s American support for the war is contingent on the fact that Israelis and not Americans face Iran’s retaliation for the attacks. Iran is a great distance from the US, and its proximity to Israel means that Israelis, rather than Americans, were and are the clear target of Iran’s reactionary attacks. Needless to say, Israel would benefit from the elimination of the current Iranian regime, the largest political and economic supporter of global terrorist organizations, including Hamas, but the reckless and thoughtless nature of the campaigns means that even that goal is likely to fail. Netanyahu wouldn’t have been able to carry out such attacks on Iran without US-backed support. Trump enabled Netanyahu to put Israeli lives on the line.

The Iranian and American people alike deserve justice, democracy, and freedom from oppression. But under the mask of fighting for the freedom of Iran, Donald Trump has pushed both of these nations further and further from these fundamental human rights.