Logical Misconceptions: Why Trump Went To War
It's the philosophy, stupid
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That is not just the Trump administration’s position; it has been the position of every US administration since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. America barely tolerates non-nuclear allies from pursuing any nuclear technology, much less adversaries. Had there been no Islamic Revolution in 1979, the United States could’ve tolerated a civilian nuclear program in Iran; with the Revolution having occurred, no nuclear program would ever be acceptable.
Of course, Iran has possessed domestic, non-weaponized nuclear power plants for decades. To be clear, their continued existence does not signify acceptance on America’s part; American policymakers if they could would wipe both the entirety of Iran’s nuclear capability off the map as well as everyone who would ever study nuclear energy for Iran. That’s precisely what the United States and Israel has done for decades, assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists and sabotaging their nuclear facilities. Whether it was Obama’s 2010 Stuxnet sabotage action against Iran’s nuclear facilities or Trump’s Summer 2025 bombings of the same facilities, the goal has largely remained unchanged: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Presumably, there are contingencies in place if Iran does possess a nuclear weapon, up to and including an Israeli nuclear-tipped first strike on Iran, which carries the risk of immediate Russian and Chinese intervention (the radiological clouds over Israel and Iran will dissipate over Russian and Chinese territories, affecting hundreds of millions of their people). In other words, Iran cannot possess a nuclear weapon for that presages immediate, unavoidable global nuclear catastrophe.
There are, of course, a lot of baked-in assumptions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions (to say nothing of the baked-in assumptions about how Russia and China might respond). The first is that they would finish building a bomb, ever. To many in the econo-diplomat world, they’ve only ever seen Iran’s nuclear program as a leverage point to bargain away in an eventual deal with the United States. They aren’t a North Korea, an essentially hyper-homogenous (politically, culturally, and economically) entity that can turtle itself away from the world economy and spend decades perfecting MIRV-capable ICBMs that can effectively destroy any major world power with the click of a button. Iran’s leaders and people would both rather prefer ‘win/win’ economic trade deals with anyone and everyone (excluding Israel).
And that’s precisely what happened in 2015: when the United States came knocking with the JCPOA, Iran was rather eager to stop its nuclear program in return for desperately needed economic relief. And that should have been that: with Iran’s nuclear program effectively defanged by the JCPOA, America’s prime motivation to oppose Iran (Hezbollah and Hamas are not American enemies in the slightest) would evaporate, opening Iran up to American investment.
But Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And the JCPOA, for all its merits, had an expiration date ten years after the deal was struck. Here then is the conundrum: if in ten years Iran can start building a nuclear warhead, then Iran might have a nuclear weapon. And Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Therefore, a deal that postponed Iran’s nuclear ambitions for 10 years was the same as no deal at all, and that’s precisely what Donald Trump did in 2018 when he officially pulled out of the Iran deal.
If you want to understand the true logic of this, you’d need to dumb your brain down a bit and think on the level of Trump. You could, if you wanted to, use complex metaphysics, empiricism, and relativity to explain Trump’s reasoning. For instance, if x is postponed for y years, then x is not happening right now. However, at year y, x could start happening. If time is relative to observers (with the speed of light from the perspective of light effectively being instantaneous), then y equals zero. Therefore, x is fundamentally postponed for 0 years (i.e. not at all), thus the relative inevitability of time ensures that x more or less is guaranteed to happen immediately. Obviously, clearly, y is not 0. No human alive perceives time outside of t-symmetry (though some have tried!). Nor is y imaginary. It is a real number, marked by real material events (the orbit of the Earth around the sun). Yet, for some reason, Trump and his backers have rendered the entire concept of time into relativistic certainty.
Trump, of course, is not learned enough to recognize the logical cage he’s built for himself. He’s very much stuck in the moment, having bought into all these preconceptions on-sight, with no capacity to question the underpinning logical framework or its conclusion.
As the JCPOA negotiators and proponents realized in 2015, there was no alternative to a negotiated settlement with Iran. The alternative, war, is precisely what we are seeing take place today: not only is Iran’s nuclear regime still intact, but Iran has routed the US Armed Forces from the Middle East and shuttered the Hormuz Strait, both individually twin pillars of strategic defeat forming a foundation of epochal devastation.
We don’t know ultimately what convinced Trump to hit go; who can know what lies in a man’s heart but lies he tells himself? Regardless, the American state acting in this way became inevitable after 2018. With a negotiated settlement rejected by the American powers that be in 2018, that only left war. However, that war could not and would not start until Iran itself had been weakened. This wasn’t just Trump; the Biden administration more than did its part in Gaza (up to and including using US special forces to raid Hamas tunnels (according to Sy Hersh and others who know)), in the West Bank, and especially in Syria and Lebanon to ensure Iran’s regional allies were weakened.
In effect, with peace ruled out, the US military and diplomatic strategy since 2018 has been to fray, fracture, expose, and then destroy the Iranian state. It culminated in Iran’s near-revolution in Winter 2026 and the subsequent murder of Iran’s civilian leadership. The theory of victory was vastly empty, and essentially boiled down to a Hitlerian ‘we only have to kick in the door, and the whole rotten edifice will fall apart’. When Iran, like the Soviet Union in Summer 1941, didn’t immediately capitulate in the face of relentless pressure and then has gone to successfully both resist and turn the strategic tables on the United States, Trump reacted exactly like Hitler, firing his generals left and right and demanding a Holocaust of the Iranian people.
America does not share a land border with Iran. There will be no Iranian Stalingrad, no occupation of Berlin (DC) with Trump in the bunker as Iranian katuysha’s rain down from above. Despite all this, we needn’t doom. The prospects for peace—a JCPOA with terms far, far more favorable to Iran—remains the only logical conclusion. The alternative (a nuclear Iran, a nuclear world war) is impossible to desire, even for the most hardcore clerics in either Iran or Israel. The only question remains: when will this peace happen?
Trump of course is still stuck in the logical trap that led him to war in the first place. The JCPOA was to terminate ten years after it was signed; Trump has been angling for a twenty year deal but Iran has pushed back with a five year deal. Maybe they’ll compromise on seven or the rounder ten. Either way, this is near-impossible for Trump to stomach, as in his mind, and in the minds of the elite superstructure he has erected around his person, a nuclear Iran after a ten year peace deal is the same as a nuclear Iran, right now.
Thus the United States must attack Iran, not to destroy their government per se but to destroy their ability and capacity to resist. That’s why Trump has been threatening their entire civilization with death. That this is all based on false premises and is quite impossible to achieve (Iran would rather be slaughtered by American warheads than capitulate their sovereignty), yet Trump and America will continue to do so.
It’s very easy to doubt, that having started this war, Trump is in any condition to end it. Even if he wants to (and he does), the logical underpinnings that led him to war still exist. That’s why he has been saying for months now that higher gas prices are worth it, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. With Iranian total surrender the only strategic option amenable to Trump (the alternatives being a renewed JCPOA or an American ground invasion of Iran), the status quo of an on-again off-again state of war in the Middle East could persist until Trump leaves office.
For Donald Trump’s hang-ups are Donald Trump’s. While Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush, et cetera spent their respective presidencies setting the floor up for military action against Iran, none of them pulled the trigger until Donald Trump foolishly chose to do so. A future American President could realize that Iran not pursuing nuclear weapons for five or even ten years is as good as Iran not pursuing nuclear weapons, period, and leave it as a problem for their successors to negotiate, on-and-on, every ten years or so until the end of time or the end of states.
As stated prior, it’s a question of imminent metaphysics. Does the delayed pursuit of something signify the inevitability of pursuit? If a lion does not eat a zebra for a month, do we count that zebra as already amongst the dead? Perhaps not, if after that month expires, the lion could be given incentives not to eat the zebra, and so on, until both lion and zebra die of natural causes. Or does the existence of the lion presage the murder of the zebra, and that the zebra’s existence is only for the lion’s pleasure to slaughter and devour? Yet when these metaphors cease being animals and become human beings and states of millions of people, the metaphysical must rise to ethical: Israel should not annihilate Iran, even if it’s to prevent a nuclear Iran, even if preventing a nuclear Iran prevents a nuclear world war, for that whole logical premise is both faulty and ethically evil. If you’ve constructed a trolley problem where one trolley path leads to the death of 90 million people and the other to the death of 8 billion, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your trolley design!
Thus, Donald Trump is caught in a logical trap of his own making. He cannot escape it. He will not escape it. Peace will soon come again to the Middle East. But only once Trump has been removed from power. Hopefully, by January 2029, that will have come to pass.