The US war in Iran and its consequences

Donald Trump's war in Iran has brought conflict close to Pakistan's border. After all, Iran is one of its four neighbours. Pakistan has also to be mindful of the fact that it has, after Iran, the world's second largest Shiite population which is very troubled by the American-Israeli attacks on Iran. They were involved in a demonstration outside the large American consulate in Karachi and were fired upon resulting in the deaths of 10 people. Sixteen more died in violent demonstrations in other parts of the country.

Donald Trump has made no serious effort to explain why he chose to launch a large military operation in Iran. A push by Israel may have been one reason but Israel has the military strength to take on Iran without US involvement. The Jewish state is very nervous that a nuclear-armed Iran would destroy Israel. Under no circumstances is it prepared to have Iran equip itself with nuclear arms.

That notwithstanding, American hostility towards Iran goes back to the time when Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch, was deposed and sent into exile. "Death to America" became a popular slogan under the rule of Shiite clerics. One of the early hostile acts by the religious government in Iran was to raid the large American embassy in Tehran and take 444 American prisoners who were released only when Ronald Reagan became the US president.

There was no immediate reason for the attack other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's belief that whoever succeeds Trump may not be as responsive to his fears about Iran developing a nuclear bomb and attacking his country. As was typical of the way Trump operates, he seemed to not have given much thought to what he expected by the intense bombing of Iran in association with Israel. Working together in the first four days of the war that began on February 28, 2026, the two countries hit 4,000 Iranian targets from land, sea and air. As a group of journalists writing for The New York Times reported that the bombing campaign was one of the most intense periods of strikes involving US forces in decades. It did not reveal a broad strategy other than destruction of both military and civilian infrastructure.

At a briefing for reporters on March 10, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States had struck over 5,000 targets in 10 days and that the day they spoke "would be our most intense day of strikes." In their briefing, the two officials described the Iranian threat to the region. "The last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the lowest number of missiles they've been capable of firing yet," said Hegseth. In addition to preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons, the defense secretary said the war's objectives were to destroy the Iranian Navy and eradicate missile stockpiles and launchers and prevent the country from being able to manufacture more. It was clear from the list of targets: the aim was to dramatically reduce Iran's threat to Israel. It was very unlikely that any of the weapons being attacked could reach the US.

The US and Israel were close allies in the war against Iran. European leadership was keeping itself at some distance from them. They had little say in the beginning of the war but, according to analysts, they feel more emboldened as the war goes on, needing to take a position in the conflict. "They need to do that because they are elected politicians," said Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group based in London. "Pretending that you have no control over things is not something that will go well with the European public. They're already restive and frustrated."

It fell to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to sum up Europe's predicament after he sat next to Donald Trump in the Oval Office on March 3, listening to the American president's bullish briefing on the military campaign. "We don't know if the plan will work and whether the military strikes from abroad will enable political change from within," Merz said. "This plan is not without risk, and we too would have to bear its consequences."

That the plan was not working became clear. Trump had said that he would be involved in selecting the new Iranian leader to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who, along with his family, was killed in an airstrike launched by Israel. In the 37 years that Ayatollah was supreme leader, he transformed the office to which he was elected from a traditional religious affairs bureau with a political cast into a security juggernaut with oversight of the military, intelligence, economy, foreign affairs and the clergy. His son, 56-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei, was elected by the council of clerics to succeed his father. According to Saeid Golkar, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee who wrote an article on the leadership change in Iran, he was already considered the "mini supreme leader".

European analysts had other worries. "If you had real collapse, fragmentation, refugee flows from Iran, that would have a huge impact on Europe," said Thomas Wright, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who was senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. "Will they engage with the Trump administration to heighten its awareness of that scenario to avoid it?" he asked.

It wasn't clear that Trump and his close associates gave much thought to how Iran would act to damage American interests. The narrow Strait of Hormuz through which a significant amount of oil and gas passes was blocked by the Iranians. The result was a significant increase in crude oil prices. Service stations serving the public also raised the price of petroleum available to them.

Trump's decision to go to war against Iran split his support in the Republican party. In a letter to President Trump, Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, became the first senior member of the Trump administration to quit over the war. He argued that Israeli officials and the American news media had deployed a "misinformation campaign that wholly undermined [Trump's] America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran." He also said, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."