On June 22, 2025, President Donald Trump unleashed the American military on Iran. Operation Midnight Hammer was not just a demonstration of how far the U.S. military can reach and how hard it can hit. It was also an unprecedented and unfortunately logical culmination of decades of misguided, counterproductive U.S.–Iran policy.
Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neoconservative logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.1
The fate of the region, and potentially the world, now revolves around whether the Trump administration remains chained by or can free itself from that failed policy’s myriad constraints. For decades, the U.S. and Iran have been heading for war. It may soon be too late to stop it. Failure to secure a diplomatic solution to the current crisis will almost certainly result in a full fledged war (and the destruction of Trump’s presidency). The ball is in his court.