Right Move, Wrong Team

The rulers of Iran bet their regime on the 'Trump always chickens out' trade. They refused diplomacy. They got war. They chose their fate. They deserve everything that has happened to them. Only the world's most committed America-haters will muster sympathy for the self-destructive decision-making of a brutal regime.
Striking Iran at this time and under these circumstances was the right decision by an administration and president that usually make the wrong one. An American president who does not believe in democracy at home has delivered an overwhelming blow in defense of a threatened democracy overseas. If a single night's action successfully terminates Trump's Iran war, and permanently ends the Iran nuclear bomb program, then Trump will have retroactively earned the birthday parade he gave himself on June 14. If not, this unilateral war under a president with dictatorial ambitions may lead the United States to some dark and repressive places.
Trump did the right thing, but he did that right thing in the wrongest possible way: without Congress, without competent leadership in place to defend the United States against terrorism, and while waging a culture war at home against half the nation. Trump has not put U.S. boots on the ground to fight Iran, but he has put U.S. troops on the ground for an uninvited military occupation of California.
Iran started this war. In August 2002, courageous Iranian dissidents revealed to the world an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz. Suddenly, all those chanted slogans about destroying Israel moved from the realm of noise and slogans to the realm of intent and plan. Over the next 23 years, Iran invested an enormous amount of wealth and know-how in advancing its project to annihilate the state of Israel. Iran deterred Israel from attacking the nuclear project by deploying missiles and supporting terror groups.
After the October 7 terror attacks on Israel, Iran gradually lost its deterrence. Israel defeated Hamas and Hezbollah militarily, and the Iranian-allied regime in Syria collapsed. But Iran did not change its strategy. It was Iran that initiated the direct nation-to-nation air war with Israel. After Israel struck an Iranian compound in Syria in April 2024, Iran fired 300 ballistic missiles into Israel, a warning of what to expect once Iran completed its nuclear program. If the war launched by the rulers of Iran has brought only defeat and humiliation to their country, that does not make those rulers victims of anybody else's aggression. A failed aggressor is still the aggressor.
Now Americans face the consequences of Trump's intervention to thwart Iran's aggression.
Some of those consequences may be welcome.
The attack on Iran is the very first time that President Trump has ever done anything Vladimir Putin did not want him to do. That's one of the reasons I personally doubted he would act strongly against Iran. Maybe Trump can now make a habit of defying Putin—and at last provide the help and support that Ukraine's embattled democracy needs to win its war of self-defense against Russian aggression.
The strike on Iran was opposed by the reactionary faction within the Trump administration—and in MAGA media—that backs America's enemies against America's allies. It's very wrong to call this faction 'anti-war.' They want a war against Mexico. They have pushed the United States on the first steps to that war by flying drones over Mexican territory without Mexican permission. This faction is defined not by what it rejects, but by what it admires (Putin's Russia above all) and by who it blames for America's troubles (those it euphemistically condemns as 'globalists'). That reactionary faction lost this round of decision-making. Perhaps now they will lose more rounds.
But if some of the domestic consequences of this strike are welcome, others are very dangerous.
Presidents have some unilateral war-making power. President Obama did not ask Congress to authorize his air campaign in Libya in 2011. The exact limits of that power are blurry, defined by politics, not law. But Trump's strike on Iran has pushed that line further than it has been pushed since the end of the Vietnam War—and the pushing will become even more radical if Iranian retaliation provokes more U.S. strikes after the first wave.
Trump has abused the president's power to impose emergency tariffs, and created a permanent system of revenue-collection without Congress. He asserts that he can ignore rights of due process in immigration cases. He has defied judicial orders to repatriate persons wrongfully sent to a foreign prison paid for by U.S. taxpayer funds. He is ignoring ethics and conflicts of interest laws to enrich himself and his family on a post-Soviet scale—much of that money flowing from undisclosed foreign sources. He has intimidated and punished news organizations for coverage he did not like by abusing regulatory powers over their corporate parents. He has deployed military units to police California over the objections of the elected authorities in that state.
This is a president who wants and wields arbitrary power the way no U.S. president has ever done in peacetime. And now it's wartime.
Americans have a right and proper instinct to rally around their presidents in time of war. But in the past, that rallying has been met by the equal instincts of presidents to rise above party and faction when the whole nation must be defended. Trump's decision to brief Republican leaders of Congress before the Iran strike, but not their Democratic counterparts, was not merely a petty discourtesy—it confirmed his divisive and authoritarian methods of leadership and warned of worse to come.
It is not confidence-inspiring that Pete Hegseth leads the Pentagon. Or that Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Kristi Noem are in charge of protecting Americans from Iranian retaliatory terrorism. Or that Tulsi Gabbard is coordinating national intelligence. Or that enemy-of-Ukraine J.D. Vance is poised to inherit all.
Trump exercises national power, but he cannot and will not act as a national leader. He sees himself—and has always acted as—the leader of one part of a nation against the rest: the wartime leader of Red America in its culture war against Blue America, as my former Atlantic colleague Ron Brownstein has written. Now this president of half of America has commanded all of America into a global military conflict. With luck, that conflict will be decisive and brief. Let's hope so.

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