US attacks on Iran may have been necessary, but the way Trump acted should raise alarms about what lies ahead.
By David FRUM
Iran’s rulers bet their regime on the slogan “Trump always says no.” They rejected diplomacy. They took the war. They chose their fate. They deserve everything that has befallen them. Only those who hate America the most devotedly in the world 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 who routinely make the wrong decision. An American president who does not believe in democracy at home has dealt a crushing blow in defense of a democracy threatened abroad.
If a single night’s action successfully ends Donald Trump’s war with Iran and permanently ends Iran’s nuclear bomb program, then Trump will have retroactively earned the birthday parade he gave himself on June 14.
If not, this one-sided war under a president with dictatorial ambitions could lead the United States into some dark and repressive corners. Trump did the right thing, but he did the right thing in the wrong way possible: without Congress, without competent leadership to defend the United States against terrorism, and while waging a domestic culture war against half the nation. Trump has not sent American troops on the ground to fight Iran, but he has sent American troops on the ground for an uninvited military invasion of California. Iran started this war.
In August 2002, courageous Iranian dissidents revealed to the world an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz. Suddenly, all those who had been chanting slogans for the destruction of Israel moved from the realm of noise and slogans to the realm of purpose and plan.
Over the next 23 years, Iran invested a vast amount of wealth and know-how in advancing its project to destroy the state of Israel. Iran prevented Israel from attacking the nuclear project by deploying missiles and supporting terrorist groups. After the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, Iran gradually lost its ability to deter. Israel militarily defeated Hamas and Hezbollah, and Iran’s allied regime in Syria collapsed. But Iran did not change its strategy. It was Iran that initiated direct nation-to-nation air warfare with Israel. After Israel struck an Iranian compound in Syria in April 2024, Iran launched 300 ballistic missiles at Israel, a warning of what to expect once Iran completed its nuclear program.
If the war launched by Iran’s rulers has brought only defeat and humiliation to their country, that does not make those rulers victims of anyone else’s aggression. A failed aggressor is still an aggressor.
Now Americans are facing the consequences of Trump’s intervention to deter Iranian aggression. Some of these consequences may be welcome.
The attack on Iran is perhaps the first time President Trump has ever done something Vladimir Putin didn’t want him to do. That’s one of the reasons I suspected he would take forceful action against Iran. Perhaps Trump can now make a habit of defying Putin — and finally provide the help and support that Ukraine’s struggling democracy needs to win its war of self-defense against Russian aggression. The attack on Iran was opposed by the reactionary faction within the Trump administration — and in the MAGA media — that supports America’s enemies against America’s allies. It’s a big mistake to call this faction “anti-war.” They want a war on Mexico. They’ve been pushing the United States into the first steps toward that war by flying drones over Mexican territory without Mexico’s permission.
This faction is defined not by what it rejects, but by what it admires (Putin’s Russia above all) and by those it blames for America’s problems (those it euphemistically condemns as “globalists”). That reactionary faction lost this round of decision-making.
Perhaps now it will lose more rounds. But if some of the domestic consequences of this attack are welcome, others are very dangerous. Presidents have some unilateral power to wage war. Barack Obama did not ask Congress to authorize his air campaign in Libya in 2011. The precise limits of this power are unclear, determined by politics, not law.
But Trump’s attack on Iran has pushed that line further than it has been pushed since the end of the Vietnam War – and the push will become even more radical if Iranian retaliation provokes more US attacks after the first wave. Trump has abused the power of the presidency to impose emergency tariffs and has created a permanent system of collecting revenue without Congress. He claims he can ignore due process rights in immigration cases. He has defied court orders to repatriate people wrongfully sent to a foreign prison paid for by American taxpayers. He is ignoring ethics and conflict of interest laws to enrich himself and his family on a post-Soviet scale – much of this money coming from undisclosed foreign sources.
He has intimidated and punished news organizations for coverage he doesn’t like, abusing regulatory powers over their parent corporations. He has deployed military units to police California despite the objections of that state’s elected officials.
This is a president who desires and exercises arbitrary power in a way that no American president has ever done in peacetime. And now it’s wartime.
Americans have a right and proper instinct to rally around their presidents in times of war. But in the past, that unity has been challenged by presidents’ equal instincts to rise above party and faction when the entire nation must defend itself. Trump’s decision to brief Republican congressional leaders before attacking Iran, but not their Democratic counterparts, was not just a minor lapse in courtesy—it confirmed his divisive and authoritarian leadership methods and warned of the worst that could come. It is not inspiring confidence that Pete Hegseth is running the Pentagon. Or that Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Kristi Noem are responsible for protecting Americans from Iranian vengeful terrorism.
Or that Tulsi Gabbard is coordinating national intelligence. Or that Ukraine’s enemy, JD Vance, is about to inherit everything.
Trump wields national power, but he cannot and will not act as a national leader. He sees himself as – and always has 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 his former Atlanticist colleague Ron Brownstein has written. Now this president of half of America has commanded all of America in a global military conflict. With any luck, this conflict will be decisive and brief. Let’s hope so. (The Atlantic)