NEWS ANALYSIS
For Trump, the Iran Attack Is the Ultimate War of Choice
There was no immediate threat from Iran. But the president saw a chance to push a weakened government over the edge, and is betting he can spark a popular uprising.

David E. Sanger has covered conflicts among nations and superpowers in more than four decades as a foreign and Washington correspondent for the Times.
With his broad attack on Iran early Saturday morning and his call to the Iranian people to overthrow their government, President Trump has embarked on the ultimate war of choice.
He was not driven by an immediate threat. There was no race for a bomb. Iran is further from the capability to build a nuclear weapon today than it has been in several years, thanks largely to the success of the president's previous strike on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites, in June.
While Mr. Trump claimed Tehran was ultimately aiming to reach to the United States with its array of missiles, even his own Defense Intelligence Agency concluded last year that it would be a decade before Iran could get past the technological and production hurdles to produce a significant arsenal.
And there were no indications of a coming Iranian attack on the United States, its allies or its bases in the region. Instead, Mr. Trump struck the Islamic Republic largely because he apparently sensed a remarkable moment of weakness for the government — and an opportunity for the United States to topple Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps after 47 years of episodic confrontations, which he described at length in an eight-minute video.
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But unlike past presidents putting American forces at risk — and, in an age of terrorism and cyberattacks, perhaps civilians as well — Mr. Trump did not spend months building a case for war. He never presented evidence of an imminent threat, or answered the question of why a nuclear program he claimed he had "obliterated" eight months ago was now on the brink of revival.
His pretaped video, released in the middle of the night as the missiles started exploding in Tehran, recited a list of long-running grievances with Iran, including its brutal use of terror. But he never explained why in the pantheon of threats facing the United States, including an already-nuclear-armed North Korea and the expanding nuclear arsenals and territorial ambitions of Russia and China, a weakened Iran ranks first.

So in choosing this moment, and this vector of attack, a man who came to office promising an end to reckless military interventions — and wars intended to prompt regime change — is taking a huge risk. There are few, if any, examples in history of toppling the government of a large nation — in this case about 90 million people — with air power alone.
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And yet Mr. Trump has made clear that is his plan. He has no intention, administration officials have insisted, of sending in ground troops to finish the job, the invitation to the "forever wars" that he campaigned against.
"The idea that we're going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen," Vice President JD Vance, who is famously skeptical of American military interventions and openly called for the United States to withdraw support from Ukraine, told The Washington Post days before the attack on Iran.
So Mr. Trump's strategic bet rides almost entirely on the ability of the Iranian people, largely unarmed and unorganized, to seize the moment and overthrow a government that millions of them find both brutal and odious. The protests that filled the streets of Iranian cities, and led to a crackdown that killed thousands, gave him his chance.

But if Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who urged him starting in December to launch this war, and who joined in it from the start, have a plan to accomplish that goal, they have yet to reveal it, even to their closest allies.
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Senior officials of three of those allies, ranging from Europe to the Gulf and interviewed in the past few days, said that in their interactions with Mr. Trump's top aides, they heard little enthusiasm for these attacks, and no plausible legal justification for striking Iran now. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. But their experience partly explains why Britain, America's closest ally, barred the United States from using Diego Garcia and bomber bases in Britain to launch American fighters and bombers.
"It is not as if Iran poses a threat to our interests that it hadn't for 47 years," said Richard N. Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the 2009 book "War of Necessity, War of Choice," a study of the two conflicts with Iraq, in 1991 and 2003. The first, he concluded, was defined by narrow and achievable aims: liberating Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded. Once Iraq was driven from Kuwaiti territory, George H.W. Bush decided against overthrowing Hussein.
But Mr. Trump's decision on Saturday was more like George W. Bush's decision to rid the world of Hussein and his government, because of the long-festering threat it posed to international peace.
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"As in the second Iraq war, there wasn't a necessity to attack Iran, there was an opportunity," Mr. Haass said. "This is a classic preventive attack, to keep Iran from gaining a capability in the future. What's missing is 'why now?' because there were other choices: diplomatic accords under military pressure, economic embargoes, interceptions of Iranian ships."
In international law, the difference between a war of necessity and a war of choice is huge. A pre-emptive strike — where one nation sees an attack massing across the river or the ocean and strikes first — is considered legitimate.
A preventive strike, in which the powerful hit the weaker state, is considered illegal. An example would be Russia's decision to invade Ukraine, which the United States and much of the world denounced as a gross violation of the international order.
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Mr. Trump's response is that he did not need a precipitating event. He ran through more than four decades of deadly Iranian actions — from the 1979 hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, to attacks on American bases and ships. "We're not going to put up with it any longer," Mr. Trump said in a recorded video he posted on his social media account. And even the Pentagon's name for the mission, Operation Epic Fury, seemed to reflect the accumulation of grievances.
The international legal ramifications are not likely to influence Mr. Trump's view of the attack. "I don't need international law," he told four reporters from The New York Times during an interview in January. "I'm not looking to hurt people." And he added that while he thought his administration should abide by international legal principles, he made it clear he would be the arbiter of when those principles applied to the United States.
"It depends on what your definition of international law is," he said.
It may also depend on what the definition of "war" is. In his statement, Mr. Trump called this action a war, warning the country that it may have to confront casualties. But he made no effort to seek an authorization to use military force, much less a war declaration, from Congress.
He would certainly not be the first president to initiate a major military action without formal approval from Congress. But in Mr. Trump's case, he has dismissed the thought that he even needs it.
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When historians look back at this moment, they are likely to ask two questions: Why did Mr. Trump act now, and why was Iran his target?
The first may not be hard to answer. He sees himself as the only American president since the 1979 Iranian revolution with the courage and determination not to let the problem fester. "For many years, you have asked for America's help, but you never got it," he told the Iranian people in his video early Saturday. "No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let's see how you respond."
Add to that the fact that the Iranian government sought to have Mr. Trump killed during the 2024 campaign, according to an indictment issued during the Biden administration. Presidents tend to take that kind of thing personally.
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The second question is harder. The accusations Mr. Trump made about Iran — especially about its missile and nuclear capabilities — are far easier to prove in the case of another longtime adversary, North Korea. It has 60 or more nuclear weapons, and regularly tests missiles that are designed to reach Los Angeles or Chicago, even if they have not yet been proven to go the distance.
But North Korea is not weak: For 20 years, it has possessed the nuclear weapons that Mr. Trump says he must prevent Iran from ever getting. It can strike back if its leadership seems in mortal danger, in ways the Ayatollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards cannot.
In the end, Mr. Trump's venture — his seventh attack on a foreign nation since he came to office — may be judged by whether it ignores the Churchill rule.
Long before he became Britain's wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill wrote about his youth, as a journalist and sometime participant in wars. "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter," he wrote in "My Early Life."
"The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.