Trump’s Emerging Case for More Iran Strikes

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 

The president didn’t have much to say about the dozens of American naval assets he has dispatched to the Middle East amid the growing and credible threat of a new round of air strikes on Iranian targets. But what he did say was portentous.

 

Donald Trump’s logic could easily serve as the predicate for a sustained air campaign against the Islamic Republic designed to deliver the mullahs to a reckoning with the Iranian people they’ve abused for so long:

 

Since they seized control of that proud nation 47 years ago, the regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism and death and hate. They’ve killed and maimed thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. With what’s called roadside bombs. They were the kings of the roadside bomb.

 

“And we took out Soleimani,” Trump said of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander whose neutralization the president ordered in early 2020. “I did that during my first term. Had a huge impact. He was the father of the roadside bomb.”

 

It’s worth dwelling on this section. It departs from the casus bellum to which Trump typically defaults: Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb. Here, Trump argued that the “terrible people” in control of Tehran are an acute threat to U.S. national security even if they never cross the nuclear threshold.

 

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” the president warned. The Iranian regime is the “world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror,” he added. And they’ve already drawn American blood.

 

By “roadside bombs,” Trump is referring to the Iranian campaign of support for insurgents inside Iraq, whom the Islamic Republic furnished with shaped-charge explosive devices designed to penetrate American armor. “The Pentagon is upping the official estimate on the number of U.S. troops in Iraq who were killed by Iranian-backed militias, now putting that number at least 603,” the Military Times reported in 2019. “That means roughly one in every six American combat fatalities in Iraq were attributable to Iran.”

 

It’s hardly the first time Iran has killed American soldiers. The 1983 Beirut Embassy and Marine Barracks bombings, in which Iran-backed Hezbollah played a leading role, killed 258 Americans. The 1984 embassy annex bombing in Beirut took another 23 American lives. Hezbollah al-Hijaz, an Iran-backed militia supported by Lebanese Hezbollah, masterminded the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which 19 Americans died.

 

Add to that list the efforts by Iranian agents to assassinate foreign dignitaries on U.S. soil, as well as American political figures and government appointees, to say nothing of the combat in which U.S. forces and Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have been engaged for the better part of the last decade, and you are liable to conclude that the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been at war for nearly a half century.

 

But the president continues to base his case for a decisive war with Iran on Tehran’s quest for a bomb. The Iranian nuclear program may have been crippled by Operation Midnight Hammer, and there are few indications that Iran has either the resources or capabilities to recover the nuclear technology or material lost in those strikes. But Iran’s leaders refuse to abjure nuclear technology wholly and without reservation.

 

“We wiped it out, and they want to start it all over again and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” Trump said. “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

 

It’s odd that this administration seems to be resting its case for regime change in Iran on the dubious proposition that Tehran’s WMD program is the primary threat. In much the same way that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed a perennial conventional threat to the United States and was a thorn in its side, putting the U.S. in near-constant conflict with the country since 1991, Iran is a conventional threat, too. It will never cease to wage war against the U.S. and its allies so long as the regime survives. The Islamic Republic’s implosion would be accompanied by new challenges, but those challenges would be good problems to have compared with the perpetual menace from Tehran’s indefatigable terror masters.

 

The State of the Union was never going to be the venue in which Trump laid out his case for the robust and sustained application of U.S. airpower against Iran’s suicidally millenarian clerisy. That will require another speech — hopefully, one in which the president outlines the Iranian threat, details the record of American blood the regime has spilled, and enlists the public in a national project to rid the world of this cancer. We haven’t heard Trump make that case yet. But this was a good start.