Trump’s war on Iran: grave dangers and, at best, limited benefits

February 28, 2026
Matthew Bunn
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu have launched a large-scale war against Iran, recklessly and unnecessarily endangering American, Israeli, and Iranian lives. As with the 2003 Iraq war, the path to conflict has been paved with false statements. Pandora’s box is now open: The consequences will be lasting but are impossible to predict in the opening hours of the assault.

To begin with first principles: This war is illegal under the UN Charter, which bans military strikes when a country is not attacking or imminently about to attack—neither of which was true of Iran. Launched without any formal congressional discussion or debate, the attacks are also arguably contrary to the US Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to declare war. Though many presidents have used force without a declaration of war, for military action in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, there were debates and votes in Congress. These were entirely absent before Trump’s war. Trump launched his attack as Senate Democrats were pushing for a vote on a war powers resolution that would have constrained it.
Will this conflict likely achieve Trump’s stated goals—limiting the threats posed by Iran’s nuclear efforts, missile programs, and support for armed groups in the region, and the overthrow of the regime itself? Only preliminary assessments are possible from publicly available information today.
Iran’s nuclear program. In his State of the Union address, Trump said “we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” That’s false, of course. Iran is a party to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which obligates it never to have nuclear weapons, and the commitment never to have nuclear weapons was one part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal that Trump destroyed in his first term. (It was also one of the provisions that would have lasted indefinitely.) The issue in dispute is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities, not lack of words committing them not to have a nuclear weapon.
Many have noted the irony of President Trump simultaneously claiming that last summer’s strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program—but that it is now urgent to attack to stop Iran’s efforts to rebuild that program. The rebuilding effort does not appear to have gotten far: Satellite photographs show a few modest buildings being rebuilt at nuclear sites, but no substantial effort to restore the facilities damaged or destroyed. In general, what could be readily hit from the air was already destroyed or seriously damaged last summer— including all of Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. Contrary to US negotiator Steve Witkoff’s silly remark that Iran was “a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material,” Iran had no operating enrichment facilities after last summer’s strikes.  The Jerusalem Post archly noted that “the US envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.”
That may be an overstatement, as no one outside of intelligence circles knows what happened to the stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) that Iran was known to possess before last summer’s attacks. The Trump administration initially claimed they were destroyed. But a number of trucks appeared at key sites in the days before those sites were hit. The trucks could have carried away that material—and the Trump administration’s  recent demands that Iran export these stocks suggest that the administration believed some of those stocks were available to the Iranian government. About a thousand pounds of the uranium Iran was known to possess had been enriched to contain 60 percent of the fissile isotope uranium 235—making it potentially directly usable in nuclear weapons. (Any nuclear weapon based on that enrichment level would require more material and a different design than Iran was working on in the past.)
If the material was moved before last year’s strikes, and the United States and Israel have since found out where it had been hidden, its storage locations are presumably high-priority targets. But Iran has at least two major nuclear-related facilities that were not destroyed last summer, that are more deeply buried than the Fordow enrichment plant, and that may be hard to hit from the air. These include deep tunnels at the Isfahan nuclear site and tunnels near Natanz, at a facility sometimes known as Pickaxe Mountain. If the enriched uranium or stocks of centrifuge parts are there, or at other deep locations, destroying them might require the use of ground forces to go inside the facilities—a tactic Israel used to destroy a Hezbollah-associated underground facility in Syria some years ago.  (In essence, last summer’s strikes educated Iran about how deep it has to dig to avoid being hit by the Massive Ordnance Penetrators, the biggest non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal.)
In short: It is uncertain whether this round of air strikes will set back Iran’s nuclear program much more than it was already set back by the previous round, though it is at least possible there are some important stocks of enriched uranium or centrifuge parts that could be found and destroyed.
Iran’s missile program. The rationale that Trump publicly offered—that Iran would soon have missiles that could reach the United States—is not supported by US intelligence estimates.  Iran’s missiles certainly do pose a threat to Israel, to other countries and US bases in the region, and even to Europe. But Iran’s government sees the missiles as its main remaining deterrent against attack; it was never realistic to expect the Iranians would negotiate them away. There are certainly many missile-related targets that US and Israeli forces can hit in Iran, including launchers, missile storage sites, and production facilities.  But many of these have been rebuilt already since last summer’s strikes, and Iran’s government has learned that these missiles are the most important weapon it has to strike back against those who attack it, giving them very high priority. As I write, Iranian missiles are striking Israel and US military bases in the Persian Gulf.  Will new strikes on Iran’s missiles have a genuinely lasting impact?
Iran’s support for armed groups. Iran’s regional allies are already greatly weakened.  The Assad regime in Syria is gone, Hezbollah has lost much of its capability after Israeli attacks, and Hamas has been devastated by Israel’s bloody response to Hamas’ horrifying October 7 attack. American and Israeli attacks may weaken them further—but may also motivate Iran to provide them more support and motivate these groups to carry out attacks of their own.
Regime change. Efforts to cause regime change with air strikes have a stunning record—stunning because it is unbroken by success. It is certainly possible that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei will be killed, or that Iran’s government could fall—but what happens then? The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is arguably Iran’s most powerful institution, and it could seize power (as US intelligence agencies reportedly warned). That would be bad for both US interests and the Iranian people. Air strikes on Muammar Qaddafi’s regime contributed to its fall after his brutal murder by rebels—but Libya has been in chaos ever since, causing immense human suffering and death. It is hard to think of a case in which a foreign air attack on a country led to a change to a more democratic and peaceful government.
The negative possibilities. Meanwhile, the war will have a wide variety of lasting effects beyond the death and suffering it will cause. It may well add to instability across the region, as the US-led invasion of Iraq did decades ago. It further cements the US reputation as a state willing to use force whenever it pleases, regardless of international or domestic law. It will likely provoke reactions from many countries around the world that will undermine American interests in ways large and small.
The current round of attacks may well convince future governments in Iran that they need a nuclear deterrent against attack more than ever. There is now little prospect of getting international inspectors into Iran and re-building the monitoring regime needed to confirm long-term restraints on Tehran’s nuclear program. Coming in the lead-up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, the war is likely to provoke a backlash that will further undermine the global effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons.
For Iran, this is the second time that the Trump administration negotiated, agreed to another round of talks, and then attacked before that round could occur. That dynamic undermines any hope that US adversaries will believe that negotiations offer a plausible path for avoiding both war and complete capitulation (as the Trump team demanded of Iran).
President Trump may get lucky and find that his attacks achieve some outcomes that serve US interests. But it is hard to envision that the net result will be an improvement in US or world security.