I remember sitting down in 2020 and writing something that felt urgent, something that felt necessary, something that felt like screaming into a void that was somehow also screaming back at me. It was the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the United States had just assassinated Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran’s most powerful military commanders, via a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport. Just like that. A missile, a flash, and suddenly the entire world was holding its breath waiting to see if we were about to stumble into another catastrophic Middle Eastern war. I wrote the post. I said no war with Iran. I meant it with every fiber of my being, because I had watched enough history, read enough headlines, and lived through enough of the post-9/11 era to know exactly where that road leads. It leads nowhere good. It leads to body bags and broken families and a region that gets carved up and destabilized for generations while the people who made the decision to go to war never once face the consequences of that decision themselves.
And here we are. It is 2026. Six years later. One year into Donald Trump’s second term. And I am sitting down to write this again, because apparently that is just something I have to do now. Apparently this is my life. Apparently history does not just rhyme, it photocopies itself, staples the pages together, and slaps you across the face with the whole packet. The tension with Iran is back, it never really went away if we are being honest, but the temperature has risen again in a way that has that familiar sick feeling creeping back into my stomach. The same feeling I had in January 2020. The same feeling I had in every moment between then and now when the news would spike and the analysts would start doing their worried-face television appearances and the think pieces would start flooding in about what escalation might look like. That feeling is back. So I am back. No war with fucking Iran.
Let me be clear about something before I go any further, because there is always someone ready to misread this kind of thing. Saying no war with Iran is not saying that Iran’s government is good. It is not saying that the Islamic Republic is a beacon of human rights or that its leadership deserves a pass on everything it has done and continues to do. It is not saying that Iranian proxy activity across the region is harmless or that the complicated web of influence Iran has built through groups across Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and beyond is something to just shrug at. None of that is what I am saying. What I am saying is that a direct military conflict between the United States and Iran would be a catastrophe of almost unfathomable proportions, and the people who would suffer most from that catastrophe are not the people making the decisions in Washington or Tehran. They are ordinary people. Iranian civilians. American service members. People living across a region that has already been through decades of war, instability, and intervention. The argument for no war with Iran is not an argument about who the good guys are. It is an argument about consequences, about scale, about what actually happens when you light that match.
The 2020 moment that prompted my first post was genuinely terrifying if you were paying attention. The Soleimani strike was not like anything the United States had done before in that region in that particular way. Killing a foreign government’s top military official, a man who was essentially the architect of Iran’s regional military strategy, was a massive escalation, and the Trump administration at the time seemed to be operating on the assumption that Iran would absorb it without responding in kind. That is not how countries work. That is not how governments work. That is not how human beings work, frankly. Iran did respond, launching ballistic missiles at US military bases in Iraq, and by some extraordinary combination of warning and luck, no American soldiers were killed in those strikes, though over a hundred troops suffered traumatic brain injuries that the administration initially tried to downplay as “headaches.” The world exhaled slightly. We did not go to war. But the structure that almost produced that war did not go away. It was still there. It is still there now, if anything more loaded than it was before.
What is so maddening about watching this situation in 2026 is that it is so deeply, almost insultingly familiar. The pattern is the same. The rhetoric is the same. The cast of characters has some new faces but is hitting the same marks. Iran’s nuclear program has continued to advance in the years since the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, that nuclear deal that represented years of painstaking diplomacy and which was torn up in 2018 because apparently we were not interested in diplomatic solutions, we were interested in maximum pressure. Maximum pressure is a strategy that sounds tough and produces headlines and satisfies a certain constituency that likes its foreign policy to sound muscular, but its actual results in practice have been to push Iran closer to nuclear capability while eliminating the international monitoring infrastructure that at least let us see what was happening. That is not a victory. That is setting yourself up for exactly the crisis you claimed you were trying to prevent. And now here we are, closer to that crisis than we have ever been, with Iran’s enrichment program at levels that have everyone deeply alarmed and the diplomatic off-ramps looking increasingly overgrown and unused.
There is something almost philosophically exhausting about watching history repeat itself in this specific way, and I want to sit with that exhaustion for a minute because I think it is important and I think a lot of people feel it even if they do not always articulate it. We have been here before. Not just with Iran. We have been here with Iraq, where the intelligence was wrong or manipulated and the war happened anyway and the consequences are still unfolding twenty-plus years later. We have been here with Libya, where intervention toppled a government and left behind a failed state and a migrant crisis. We have been here enough times that there is a recognizable shape to the thing, a recognizable sequence of events, a recognizable set of justifications that get trotted out each time, and yet somehow the lesson does not stick. Somehow each new iteration of the crisis gets treated as if it is unprecedented, as if the history does not exist, as if the people urging caution are being naive rather than being the ones who have actually been paying attention.
The hawks always have an answer for this. They say that Iran is different, that the nuclear dimension makes this uniquely dangerous, that deterrence requires credibility and credibility requires demonstrated willingness to act. They say that a nuclear-armed Iran would be an existential threat to Israel and a destabilizing force in the region in ways that cannot be tolerated. These are not entirely frivolous arguments, and I want to engage with them honestly rather than just dismissing them, because this stuff is complicated and pretending it is not does not actually help anyone. A nuclear Iran is genuinely concerning. The question is whether military action makes that problem better or worse, and the overwhelming weight of expert analysis, not pacifist wishful thinking but actual serious strategic analysis, suggests it makes it worse. Strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities do not destroy the program, they delay it by a few years at best, while simultaneously eliminating whatever remaining appetite Iran might have had for any kind of negotiated solution and providing the most powerful possible justification for Iran to pursue a bomb as fast as it can. You do not bomb your way out of nuclear proliferation. You have never been able to bomb your way out of nuclear proliferation. The history of nonproliferation is a history of diplomacy, of incentives, of verification regimes, of creating conditions under which a state calculates that it is better off without the bomb than with it. Destroying those conditions and then acting surprised when the proliferation accelerates is not a strategy. It is a cycle.
And what about the human cost, which somehow always gets treated as secondary to the strategic calculus, as if the people who would actually die in this war are a footnote. Iran is a country of nearly ninety million people. It is not a small country. It is not a weak country. It has a sophisticated military, a deep history of asymmetric warfare, and the demonstrated ability to project force across a wide region through proxy networks that have been built and cultivated over decades. A war with Iran does not look like a brief air campaign followed by a grateful population welcoming liberators. A war with Iran looks like a protracted regional conflagration that pulls in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, potentially drawing in other regional powers, producing a refugee crisis that dwarfs anything we have seen in recent memory, and creating the conditions for exactly the kind of ungoverned spaces and radicalization pipelines that produce the next generation of threats. The people who want this war have a model of what it looks like that is completely disconnected from what wars in this region have actually looked like every single time we have done this. I do not know how to say this more plainly: the track record of American military intervention in the Middle East does not support the level of confidence that the interventionists seem to have in their own judgment.
I think about the Iranian people specifically and I think about them a lot in these moments. Because there is a tendency in Western political discourse to flatten Iran into its government, to treat the Islamic Republic and the population of Iran as if they are the same thing, when in reality Iran has one of the most vibrant and restless civil societies in the region, a young population that has demonstrated again and again through protest movements and at enormous personal risk that it does not simply accept the government it has, that it yearns for something different, that it is not a monolith of anti-American hostility waiting to be liberated or bombed. Bombing Iran does not help the Iranian people. It helps the hardliners in the Iranian government who have spent decades arguing that America is an existential enemy and who struggle to make that case stick during periods of relative calm. Nothing consolidates a population behind an authoritarian government like an external military attack. Nothing discredits internal reformers and dissidents faster than the moment when the country they have been asking to engage diplomatically instead starts dropping bombs. A war with Iran does not free the Iranian people. It traps them further inside a system that will use the war as justification for every repression it wants to carry out for the next twenty years.
Six years ago I wrote something and then I watched the crisis de-escalate and I felt relief and I moved on because you move on, because the news cycle moves and the urgent thing becomes yesterday’s urgent thing and life continues. But the underlying situation did not get resolved. It got managed, temporarily, at the cost of allowing the conditions that produced the crisis to continue and in some cases to worsen. The JCPOA was not restored in any meaningful way despite the Biden administration’s attempts. Iran’s nuclear program continued to advance. The regional proxy conflicts continued. The mutual distrust deepened. The diplomatic infrastructure that would allow for serious negotiation was not rebuilt. And so here we are again, one year into a second Trump term, with maximum pressure back on the menu, with the hawks circling, with the intelligence briefings doing whatever intelligence briefings do in moments like this, and with that sick familiar feeling back in my stomach.
I am not naive about diplomacy. I know that diplomacy with Iran is hard. I know that there are bad-faith actors on multiple sides of these negotiations and that any deal requires trust that does not exist and verification that is resisted and domestic political pressures in both countries that make compromise almost impossible to sustain. I know that the moderate voices within Iran who would prefer a diplomatic path have been systematically weakened by a combination of internal repression and the failure of the diplomatic engagement they advocated for to produce results for ordinary Iranians. I know that this is genuinely complicated and that there are no clean solutions. None of that changes my fundamental position, which is that a complicated problem with no clean solutions does not become simpler or more solvable by introducing large-scale military violence into it. Complicated problems with no clean solutions get worse when you bomb them. That is not a controversial position. That is just what happens.
So here I am, writing this post again, feeling the strange disorienting sensation of repeating yourself across years, of watching the needle move back to a place you thought at least partially settled, of understanding in a bone-deep way that the political and strategic logic that keeps producing these crises is not going to resolve itself just because you write a post about it. I know that. I am not under any illusion that these words change the calculations being made in Washington or Tel Aviv or Tehran. But I wrote this in 2020 because I needed to say it, and I am writing it in 2026 because I need to say it again, because sometimes the only thing you can do in the face of something terrible and preventable is to put your opposition to it on the record, to refuse to be silent, to refuse to accept the premise that war is inevitable or necessary or in any way a solution to the actual problem.
No war with Iran in 2020. No war with Iran in 2026. No war with Iran, period. Not because Iran’s government is good. Not because everything is fine. Not because the concerns about Iran’s nuclear program are fabricated or the regional tensions are imaginary. But because war with Iran would be catastrophic, because the people who would pay the price are not the people making the decision, because history has shown us over and over what this kind of intervention produces and it is not stability or democracy or safety, and because we deserve better than to keep learning the same lesson the most expensive and bloody way possible. I said it before. I will say it as many times as I have to. No war with fucking Iran.