Why I Predicted War With Iran...

...and the longue duree of violence that it nests within.

Here’s the frustratingly stupid timeline of key moments leading up to America being at war with Iran:

• March 25, 2025: Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), says the intelligence community assesses that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons and has not made a decision to do so.

• The Trump administration is quietly negotiating a new Iran Deal that would prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons, and by all accounts, Iran was close to making the deal.

• June 17, 2025: Trump gives a “green light” to Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a massive bombing campaign against Iran, without any immediate pretext other than the assertion that Iran “cannot be allowed to get the bomb.”

• DoD deploys a large number of B-2 bombers and refuelling tankers to Diego Garcia (refuelers are necessary for the B-2 to fly the return flight from Iran).

• DoD simultaneously deploys two aircraft carriers, nine destroyers, and two air wings to the Middle East because…reasons.

• June 20, 2025: Trump—without evidence—says his own intelligence community’s assessment about Iran’s pursuit of the bomb is wrong. Tulsi Gabbard, his DNI, immediately agrees with the president, changing her intelligence assessment to fit Trump’s assertion.

• June 21, 2025: Trump announces that the US just bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran:

Those strikes occurred as follows (all times are Tehran local time):
- Pre 1am: Israeli drones activated air defenses in several Iranian regions.
- 1:14am: Fighter jets were heard over Shiraz.
- 1:22am: Several aircraft were heard over central Iran.
- 2:04am: Two jets [bombers] and an explosion were heard near Qom. Qom's countryside is the site of Fordow.
- 2:13am: An explosion was heard near Kashan, another city near Fordow.
- 2:38am: An explosion was heard at Fordow, but it was assumed a drone was intercepted. Which has now proven wrong.
- 2:41am: A loud explosion was heard at Isfahan's Atomic Energy Facility.
- 2:46am: An explosion was heard at Natanz Nuclear Facility.
- 2:55am: GPS jamming was observed across Iran.

In total, the US Air Force used six B-2 (which are able to carry nuclear payloads) bombers to drop 12 “bunker buster” bombs. The US Navy launched 30 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (TLAMs). And this is in addition to the intelligence support we almost certainly provided the IDF large-scale bombing campaign.

I said this would happen. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve made a prediction about world politics that proved right, in contrast to some of my betters in the field who once again made a bold prediction that was again boldly incorrect (no shade, but a Magic 8-Ball would have a better track record than mainstream political scientists by now).

My friend Spencer Ackerman described this unauthorized, unconstitutional US bombing as the extension of a Global War on Terror (GWOT) whose terminus was always going to include Iran. He’s right about that, of course. He too knew this would happen, regardless of whether he hazarded the prediction publicly.

I would only add that the specific outcome of war with Iran was made possible here because GWOT and its “civilizational” logic converged with the power-hoarding default of how the US practices geopolitics.

What’s crucial to understand is that Israel is a reactionary ethnostate that insists on its own regional primacy. Washington’s geopolitical calculus leads it to view Israeli primacy in the Middle East as an extension of its own global primacy. Israel does America’s wet work, America underwrites Israel’s wet work. The problem with this—aside from its inhumanity and making no sense from the perspective of the American people—is that Israeli primacy means very specifically that it can have no military peer competitors.

That means neighboring militaries must be held in check through occasional violence, assassinations, and proxy conflicts, but also zero tolerance for nuclear weapons, which would be the ultimate fix to the imbalance of power that Israel enjoys.

So it is in fact an extremely violent proposition to assert Israeli primacy in the Middle East. That goal makes proactive, illegal military aggression seem natural, even necessary. Because nothing would be more devastating for a revisionist power (Israel) than having their will to aggression checked by the force of mutually assured destruction with a neighbor it doesn’t even want to co-exist with.

A generation of Middle East hands in Washington have made a system in which the US must actively enable Israel to commit ever more war against its neighbors, who respond, in turn, with war on their terms. How to understand Arab violence used to be open to interpretation—there were times, generations ago, when they appeared aggressors. But these days, their violence often looks not unlike Algerian self-defense against the French, only played out a regional rather than national level.

The pursuit of primacy spreads death and makes life worse for those who remain. Israel reproduces its own insecurity. And the chain of reasoning that connects US and Israeli militarism was going to lead to war with Iran when the conditions were favorable for it regardless of Iranian intentions. Favorable conditions—of unaccountability plus a favorable imbalance of power for Israel—arose with the impunity of waging genocide in Gaza combined with a failed Iranian assault on Israel last year, which by all accounts emboldened Netanyahu and the IDF.

Ironically, Israel and the US have made nuclear proliferation in the Middle East—the thing this war was supposedly going to prevent—all but inevitable at this point. The only real question is how many Americans are going to die in the expanding cataclysm of war in a region where no US soldier should be.