There is No Single Reason for the Iran War (or Anything Else)

Oversimplification is the handmaiden of dogmatism.

I’m going to start this post with the ending: there is never any one cause for anything, and understanding that is an important part of intellectual, emotional, and political maturity.

The case in point, obviously, is the Iran War, which has multiple causes and motivations, some of which are at odds with one another:

• Impulse. Trump has been pushing to confront Iran militarily since 1980. He has long seen our tolerance of its regime as a sign of weakness, and this was a time to just do it.

• And he probably sincerely (in his way) believes that regime change in Iran will bring peace, by which he means American dominance. Which might be true if it were possible to maintain, which it probably is not (cf. Afghanistan).

• And now is the moment, before the 2026 election, which, if it is fair (a big “if”) will surely go against Trump. Now or never.

• Oil, also. Which is not only a matter of craven greed but of “energy dominance” – which, again, is true in a limited way.

• Israel, also. Netanyahu, too, is facing an uncertain election, as well as a potentially less friendly US Congress next year. Iran is a murderous, theocratic regime that has waged proxy wars on Israel for decades. Time and again, Netanyahu has opposed negotiations with Iran (“appeasement”) and now the political stars align. Note that this is a different set of motivations from most of Trump’s, but they overlap enough to make the collaboration work. More on this below.

• Epstein, also. More on this in a moment, but of course this is one of the motivations. Is it sufficient for Trump to declare war and kill thousands of people? I have no idea. But, and this is part of the point, it’s one motivation among many; one more straw on the camel’s back.

• The Economy, maybe. Robert Reich has written the war is to deflect attention from the lack of affordability. I dunno.

• China. There’s a reasonable interpretation that the real adversary here is China, which until very recently got most of its oil from Venezuela and Iran. Ironically, hobbling China’s oil supply may only accelerate its energy dominance — i.e., of post-fossil-fuel energy. But that will be a bumpy road for years and these campaigns could kneecap America’s primary rival.

• And there is evidence that China had sold Iran missiles that could be used against the United States Navy. If the Middle East evolved into prolonged conflict between proxies of China and the US (much as it was between the Soviet Union and the US for decades), that would be bad for American interests (and Israel).

• And Russia. Trump has now gone after Russian-allied authoritarians in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, weakening Putin, who now has to contend with another superpower without scruples or respect for international law. (Arguably the damage Trump has done to our European alliances outweighs the benefit of this ‘dominance’, but that’s a different question.)

• Perhaps not a motivation, but the rhetoric of Christian Nationalist messianism — that a war with Iran/Persia/Babylon (not the same thing, but whatever) is part of the unfolding End Times — was preached by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in perhaps the most astonishing governmental embrace of End Times theology in American history. It is also widespread on the Christian Right. I don’t know to what extent this belief and/or derangement played into the decision to go to war, but around a quarter of the country may believe it.

• Definitely not the motivation, but Iran did just murder thousands of pro-democracy activists and innocent bystanders, though this fact is barely ever mentioned.

My point is not to argue which of these factors are the most important ones; plenty of pundits have done that. It is, to risk the cliché, to argue for “both/and” or in this case, both/and/and/and/and.

In a way, this should be obvious, because it is how we all (or at least I) make decisions all the time. Just this week, I was debating whether to take a particular trip in two months, and I listed out five or six reasons on each side. I realize that most people are, lucky for them, more decisive and less analytical than I am, but still, obviously we do this in our ordinary lives.

Yet when it comes to politics, there’s this desire to have one answer, one cause, one motivation that explains everything, and usually does so in a way that confirms our priors.

For anti-Zionists and antisemites, that means blaming Israel: this is Bibi’s War, and America is just a puppet. Notice how this view slides easily into antisemitic conspiracy-theorizing. Is it really plausible that Israel, which depends on the United States for aid, is actually pulling the strings? Yes, AIPAC is a strong lobbying organization, but they’re losing clout on both the Left and the Right — is this really within their power? That Netanyahu wanted this war is clearly true. That he persuaded Donald Trump and the entire administration to do his bidding (at a gigantic political, financial, and human cost) is clearly preposterous. No surprise that Tucker Carlson has now moved on from blaming Netanyahu to, I kid you not, blaming the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect.

Likewise, for conspiracy-spotters on the Left and Right, it’s purely a distraction from the Epstein Files, which obviously has a lot of resonance, not to mention a blockbuster film to back it up (Wag the Dog). But is it really that linear? Is everything else merely a pretext? I do think the metastasizing Epstein crisis plays some role in Trump’s calculus, but a simple cause-and-effect relationship is too simplistic. There is no one wag. And besides, if it were simply a gigantic plan to distract, it isn’t going to work:

More broadly, this is not how Trump works. It’s never linear with Trump; he didn’t start the war to distract from the rising costs of living, or Epstein, or any one particular thing. It’s all distraction, all the time. This is the Roy Cohn method: always attack, always punch, never stop, never let up. Along with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” maxim – which arguably overlaps in this case – it’s Roy Cohn’s Cassius-Clay-inspired pugilism that governs. This is why Trump so often says he’ll have a proposal in “about two weeks”; he knows that by then, he will have put out a dozen distractions to change the subject. It’s one battle after another.

And then, of course, is the war’s highly questionable morality and legality.

On the Right, everyone has simply contradicted themselves, as has been amply displayed on the Internet. Here’s Pete Hegseth talking about why America should stop trying to engineer regime change. Here’s Trump saying Obama would go to war with Iran because he couldn’t make a deal. Here’s JD Vance endorsing Trump because he won’t start more wars. Here’s Mike Johnson saying that, in fact, everything was totally legal here because this is a limited operation with an immediate need (what, exactly?) to attack Iran by surprise. (Bookmark that one.) There is no complexity here: everything is extraordinarily simple, even if it is diametrically opposed to what has been said in the past. Opportunistic or not, this is totalitarian thinking — Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

One would think we would’ve learned from Iraq that a powerpoint presentation about the balance of power in the Middle East is different from, you know, destroying a country’s government and then rebuilding it from scratch. One might even hope that the price of thousands of innocent Iranian lives is too high to pay for these unlikely strategic objectives.

But of course one would be wrong.

Add to that the fact that this bilateral war comes at a moment when, unlike the Iraq wars, the United States has completely alienated all of its allies:

And yet — as true as that all is, it still isn’t that simple. Here’s a post from Rep. Yassamin Ansari (who is Iranian-American) that deservedly went viral:

That seems exactly right to me. This was a horrible regime that repressed its own people and spread extremism and death throughout the region. And also, this war is likely to do more harm than good, killing thousands of civilians and bringing chaos to the region (though who knows). Two bad things can be true at the same time.

The point is this: there’s not one motivation, not one wag, not one objection, not one good or bad guy in a given situation. And this point matters not only analytically, but for how we understand complex, multi-causal systems (oppression, systemic racism, climate disaster, sexism, capitalism) and what we ought to do about them, which I’ll be writing about next week unless another mega-crisis arises. There is a simple, emotive appeal to “It’s Just About The Oil” or “This is Israel’s War” or “Wag the Dog.” Simplicity feels strong; it’s a little angry, firm, decisive. But it’s almost always wrong.

And, finally, it is the kind of bad thinking that leads to extremism, fascism, scapegoating, conspiracy theorizing, and extremely self-defeating choices like Brexit, Trump, and other marches of folly. Oversimplification is a species of anti-intellectualism, and anti-intellectualism is the handmaiden of dogmatism — usually from the Right, but sometimes from the Left as well. It’s a lot simpler to blame the immigrants, the Jews, the corporations, Israel, or the Woke Mob than to say, yet again, that the causes of a crisis are complex and interrelated. For all the truth about the ‘Epstein Class,’ there’s also the falsehood that our entire economic and political miasma is due to a shadowy cabal of elite pedophiles. That is too simple, and oversimplification leads to conspiracy theories. Indeed, even the most baroque, outrageous conspiracy theory is, in a sense, simpler than accommodating the multiple array of causes for a phenomenon and the biggest complexity of all: that there is no one minding the store.

I want to resist this urge to simplify. Were I still working as an activist, or a pundit with thirty seconds to make my point, I would, no doubt, still do so as a matter of necessity. But the better way is to accommodate ourselves to complexity, nuance, and uncertainty. These are our allies in the fight against the mob.

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I

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Some stuff I’ve been reading this week:

• Of the many solid explainers of why the war is probably illegal (but Democrats have been just as careless as Trump), I like this one by Tobias Barrington Wolff .

• Another excellent roundup: The UnPopulist’s comprehensive takedown of all things RFK Jr.

• I will hopefully be writing about this soon — I’m a bit backed up on pieces at the moment — but for now, please know that everything Jesse Singal said in his New York Times op-ed about trans people is based on garbage pseudo-science and bullshit. Singal is a real piece of work: whining about being attacked by the big, bad trans people while knowingly, obviously twisting the facts. The guy is a fucking liar, okay? He knows what he’s doing and he keeps doing it, to bigger and bigger audiences — and then he plays the victim when people call him out for it. Thank you Erin Reed for keeping the receipts. It takes a lot of time to refute this crap. Shame on the Times fact-checkers for letting him wildly misstate the facts.

And here’s some of my recent stuff:

• At Religion News Service, I wrote a piece on the very Purim-like irony of the Jewish holiday of Purim coming just as a mad king attacks Persia.

• I went back on the State of Belief podcast to talk about all things Epstein. Let’s not forget that story, please, and let’s center the victims and remember that over a thousand women were trafficked (we think) and have received almost no justice. Here’s the podcast:

Have a good weekend.