Several months ago I wrote an editorial entitled, “President Trump is Waging Peace Across the World.” At the time, the Trump Administration had brokered peace deals in several regional conflicts, a hopeful sign of general disinterest in warfare. A ceasefire had been reached in Gaza that promised to reject the kilab collective known as Hamas while protecting Levantine civilians from further violence. Military engagement with Iran was limited, though illogical to me as it was intended to eliminate a nuclear weapons program that the US Intelligence Community still concluded to be dormant since 2003.
If President Trump entered 2025 intent upon waging peace after being the first President in centuries not to start new conflicts, 2026 saw an end to this goal. First the United States military invaded Venezuela and kidnapped a head of state, claiming that the US government would be in charge for the time being. Now the United States of America is at with the Islamic Republic of Iran for no clear purpose.
Let me reiterate: the President of the United States has provided no justification for war with Iran, and Congress has chosen not to impede this nebulous conflict with a war powers resolution. Congressman Thomas Massie explains this well in the video below.
The Islamic Republic is a violent dictatorship, and one of my chief gripes with the President’s immigration policy this term is that he is deporting Christian refugees to the country where they will be summarily executed. As Christianity remains identified as a Western philosophy, a war with the West only places Christians and returned refugees in the path of further harm. The Ayatollah and his acolytes deserved justice for decades of war crimes and human rights violations. To the victims of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei’s death may be the only justice they see. But no justification has been provided by anyone in Washington, DC for why the bomb that dropped on the Ayatollah’s compound had to be dropped by the US military. Iran did not attack first. Iran was not planning on attacking the United States. So why attack Iran?
The United States held back from keeping the Russians at bay in Ukraine. A republican government in Afghanistan was overthrown in short order following America’s withdrawal. A year of leveraging soft power stopped many wars during the first year of President Trump’s second term. That approach has been replaced with capricious warfare. There is an argument that unpredictable use of military force may spur foreign countries to be on their best behavior, whether that is maintaining favorable relations with the US or solving conflicts through diplomacy rather than warfare. However, the concentration of American military assets in the Middle East leaves every other region of the world vulnerable to local conflicts.
Numerous consequential geopolitical flashpoints exist across the world, and America cannot hold the line against all of them. North Korea may attempt to invade South Korea. China may attempt to invade Taiwan. Russia may attempt to invade a NATO ally. An America unoccupied by a war with Iran would be equipped to expeditiously deal with any of these conflicts.
America’s attention could be spent on a million better efforts to make the world safer. The Shield of the Americas initiative, intended to eliminate the scourge of drug cartels, is imperiled while the military industrial complex fails to manufacture weapons faster than they can be replaced in the Persian Gulf. Conflicts from 2025 held back by American diplomatic pressure can restart without necessary attention from the White House. The Department of Homeland Security is currently unfunded, leaving America desperately susceptible to terrorism from both hostile foreign nations and non-state actors. America has not faced this many simultaneous military, domestic security, economic, or geopolitical threats since the 1940’s.
Pray for our President. He has lent his ears to the most anti-American and anti-peace voices in the federal government, and he needs to start focusing on protecting Americans. Pray for our Congress. They must reign in the war machine and restore funding to the Department of Homeland Security before an enemy power takes advantage of the situation with a devastating new regional conflict or terrorists seize the moment to strike US soil. Pray for peace most of all. War, at times, is a necessary evil, but a war with no justification, like our conflict with Iran, will only reap sorrow. And it is only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of it.
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