The specter of war is once again looming over the Middle East, and once again, the United States is the cause. Donald Trump, who burst onto the political scene more than 10 years ago, in part by denouncing the warmongering adventurism of previous administrations in this region, is openly threatening Iran with strikes on a much larger scale than the June 2025 war, which was started by Israel and joined by Washington. The precedent set in Venezuela showed that the current concentration of US military forces around the Gulf, even without ground troops, must be taken seriously.
It targets a regime that has been definitively discredited by its decision in January to drown in blood the wave of anger that swept Iranians in the face of their economy’s collapse. This situation is entirely due to the blindness of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has used and abused his regime’s capacity for regional disruption with catastrophic results.
The “axis of resistance” painstakingly built by Tehran has been crushed in two years by the Israeli army, leading to the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Strangled by sanctions, Iran has never been so internally weakened and diplomatically isolated. The regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, seen as a guarantee against foreign intervention, is now close to provoking a second intervention in less than a year.
Indifferent to the fate of the population
Yet the American threats raise serious questions. Trump is talking about a war whose objectives remain undefined for the moment. Is the US president seeking to strengthen his position ahead of new negotiations, or to destroy a nuclear program that he claimed in June had already been wiped out? Is the target Tehran’s ballistic missile program, which poses a real threat to all of the Islamic Republic’s neighbors?
Is he considering regime change in Tehran, an outcome that would be difficult to achieve through bombing, however massive? His procrastination during the uprising in recent weeks, including the promise of aid that never came, showed that he could be indifferent to the fate of the Iranian people. Trump likes to pull off spectacular coups, with a brief campaign followed by a victory announcement. There is no guarantee that the Iranian case will lend itself to this approach.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, in Washington, February 20, 2026. ALEX BRANDON/AP
His threats also raise other questions. First, about the functioning of US institutions. The president is considering a military operation of considerable importance, given the size of Iran and the geopolitical consequences of such a decision, without a single vote in Congress, which alone has the power to declare war. The disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 was at least preceded by a vote in Congress, after debate, in favor of military intervention.
Similarly, such an attack, without a United Nations mandate, would clearly be illegal under international law, as Washington could not claim self-defense to justify it. The legitimate hatred provoked by the Iranian regime should not obscure an obvious fact. In a time of major global disorder, those who believe that the ends justify the means will have no choice but to remain silent when force, without any safeguards, is used to their detriment.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.