President Donald Trump’s critics are having a field day. He promised peace, they insist, and now he has brought war. The indictment is delivered with particular relish by those who have long despised him, and it arrives accompanied by a full dossier of his own words.
The New York Times’s Ezra Klein assembled the prosecution exhibit: Trump declared, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” and “I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war.” His colleague Peter Baker cataloged more: In 2016, Trump had denounced military adventurism and regime change as a “proven, absolute failure,” and that in 2024 he was still boasting of starting “no new wars.”
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The pile-on extends well beyond a single newspaper. The Daily Beast tallied “All the Times Trump, 79, Claimed He Was the ‘Peace President’ Before Bombing Iran.” The Guardian declared he had become “a Bush-style regime change president.” Fortune concluded that the man who ran on “America First” had now embraced imperialism outright: “This is maximum Trump.”
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At first glance, these critics appear to have landed a clean shot. The quotes are on the record. The bombs have fallen. Case closed, one might think.
Not so fast.
The entire prosecution rests on a fundamental misreading of the facts. The question is not whether Trump ordered military action against Iran. He did. The question is whether, in doing so, he started a war. He did not. That war was started for him, nearly half a century ago, by the other side.
The conflict with Iran did not begin on Feb. 28, 2026. It began in November 1979, when Iranian students, acting with the full backing and direction of the revolutionary regime in Tehran, stormed and seized the United States Embassy, holding 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. Under settled principles of international law, an embassy is the sovereign territory of the nation it represents. An armed seizure of that territory is an act of war, as legally unambiguous as an invasion of home soil. The Iranian Embassy in Washington, D.C., is, by the same principle, sovereign Iranian territory. When Iranian-backed forces seized ours, they committed an act of aggression against the United States of America. The U.S. has been in a state of war with Iran since that day, whether or not any administration has had the honesty or the courage to say so plainly.
What followed was not an aberration, but a sustained campaign. Iran-backed Hezbollah killed 241 American service members in a single truck bombing in Beirut in October 1983. Iran-backed groups assassinated CIA station chief William Buckley, hijacked American aircraft, bombed US embassies from Beirut to Nairobi, and murdered American diplomats, soldiers, and civilians across four decades and four continents.
Between 2003 and 2011, Iranian-backed militias killed at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq, accounting for roughly one in every six American combat deaths in that war. The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas, which Iran arms, trains, funds, and directs, killed 46 Americans and took at least 12 more hostage. As recently as January 2024, an Iran-backed drone strike on the Tower 22 base in Jordan killed three American service members and wounded more than 40 others. Between October 2023 and November 2024 alone, Iran and its proxies launched more than 180 attacks against US forces in the Middle East.
This is not a war that was waiting to begin. It is a war that never stopped. And it is a war in which only one side has been consistently and seriously fighting.
Consider what the alternative amounts to. “Peace,” under the framework implicitly accepted by Trump’s critics, means that every so often, when Iranian-backed forces kill an American soldier here, a diplomatic staffer there, a few dozen servicemen elsewhere, the U.S. absorbs the losses quietly, responds proportionally if at all, and avoids escalation. That is not peace. That is managed defeat, dressed up in the language of restraint. Real peace is not the temporary absence of a major American military operation. Real peace is the cessation of initiated aggression. On that definition, there has been no peace with Iran since 1979. There will be no peace as long as the regime responsible for those attacks remains in a position to continue them.
Trump’s argument, properly understood, is not in contradiction with his campaign promises. It is their logical fulfillment. He said he would keep America out of war. The argument here is that the only durable way to accomplish that goal is to end the war Iran is already waging. He said he would put “America First.” Allowing a hostile regime to kill American citizens with relative impunity, year after year, is not America First by any reasonable definition. He said he would not start new wars. He has not. He has, at last, resolved to finish an old one. That resolution, paradoxically, is the peace policy.
If there is one legitimate criticism to be laid at Trump’s door, it is not hypocrisy — it is delay. Iran’s war against the U.S. was already well underway during his first term. He chose, then, not to prosecute it with full force. That was an error of omission, and he now appears to be correcting it. He is an imperfect man, as all men are, operating under enormous pressure. But on the specific charge that he has betrayed his promises of peace, the indictment does not hold.
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The self-declared “peace president” and the president ordering strikes on Iran are, on this reading, the same man pursuing the same end: a genuine, durable conclusion to a conflict that the other side declared nearly half a century ago and has prosecuted with remarkable consistency ever since. To call that warmongering is not merely unfair to Trump. It is a failure to reckon honestly with what peace actually requires.
As of the present day, 13 U.S. service members have perished in Trump’s campaign against Iran. This is terribly sad, a tragedy, without doubt, greatly to be regretted. However, had the president of the U.S. not engaged against the present Persian regime, and that country had continued pursuing its past murderous practices against Americans, many, many more of our people would have been killed. Trump is thus saving American lives with his present initiative.
Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Oded Kohn Faran holds LL.B. and LL.M. degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the General Director of Faran & Co. International Translations Ltd. and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.
