Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis
US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration
The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.
Trump’s recorded eight-minute address after the first bombs had fallen, made clear that this would be no limited strike aimed at cajoling Tehran into concessions at the negotiating table. He warned that if Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender they would be killed, and the country’s armed forces, its missile and navy would be smashed.
The way would then be open for the Iranian opposition and the country’s ethnic minorities to rise up and bring the regime down.
“It’s time for all the people of Iran – Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochis and Akhvakhs – to shed from themselves the burden of tyranny and bring forth a free and peace-seeking Iran,” Trump said.
Coordinating the message as well as the missiles, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country had joined the war “to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.
The maximalist aims of the joint attack cast doubt on whether there had ever been any prospect of success for the US-Iranian negotiations in the preceding weeks, in which delegates discussed possible limits on uranium enrichment. Those talks, the latest round on Thursday, had been conducted under the shadow of what Trump called his “beautiful armada” gathering in the Middle East, the biggest US force in the region since the ill-fated 2003 Iraq invasion, and it now seems likely that only a complete capitulation on Iran’s part could stop this assembled American might being unleashed.
Trump has long railed against the folly of the Iraq war. He campaigned twice on a platform of ending US military entanglements abroad, and lobbied aggressively to be awarded the Nobel peace prize based on the factually shaky claim to have ended eight wars.
Barely 10 days before launching the war, he had hosted the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace which was supposedly going to resolve conflicts, not just in the Middle East but around the world. That meeting brought leaders and senior officials from 27 disparate states, most of them autocracies, to Washington to praise Trump the peacemaker.
They heard Tony Blair, a living link to the Iraq debacle 23 years ago, declare Trump’s Middle East vision, “the best – indeed the only hope – for Gaza, the region and the wider world”.
By then, however, most of Washington’s traditional allies in Europe and beyond had become deeply sceptical of Trump’s motives and stayed away. The Board of Peace was sold to the UN security council in November as the only path to ending the slaughter in Gaza, but it had been clear long before the first missiles were fired at Iran, that it was a “bait-and-switch” scam. The UN thought it was buying one thing but it was sold something quite different: a rival body to the security council, but one in which Trump would be in charge.
The attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US. In an attempt at justification Trump spoke in generalities, denouncing the Tehran leadership as “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” and 47 years of enmity between the US and the Islamic Republic.
Over that half century, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat than now, weakened both by the joint attack by the US and Israel last June that degraded its defences, and decades of sanctions combined with economic migration which brought mass protests on to the street.
In the Board of Peace, however, there is no requirement for Trump to justify himself. There are no rules other than those giving Trump the power to make them up as he goes along. It has become increasingly clear that the board is not primarily a forum for resolving conflict, but a vehicle for the president’s political and financial interests. Those governments who signed on as board members now find themselves complicit in a war few of them want.
It is not entirely clear what transformed Trump from a peace president to a war president, but there are clues. At home he faces setbacks, ever lower popularity in the runup to the midterm elections, and a recent rebuke from a normally friendly supreme court on his power to use tariffs as his favourite foreign policy tools.
Wilbur Ross, commerce secretary in Trump’s first term, said the court defeat had made an attack on Iran more likely.
“I don’t think he can take this loss and then be seen as backing down on Iran,” Ross told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, the cloud of suspicion over Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has not been dispelled despite the best efforts of the justice department to ration the flow of revelations about the sex-offending financier’s child-trafficking operations.
“I’m really worried, because he gets so unhinged almost when he’s in trouble like this,” Democratic senator Chuck Schumer told MS Now television a few days before the war began. “I’m worried what he might do in Iran – who knows?”
Abroad, Trump appeared to have given up chasing a Nobel peace prize, warning the Norwegian prime minister (who had no say in awarding it) last month that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of peace”.
For Trump, who had far more success as a reality show character than a property developer, war began to look like a better distraction than peace. He was thrilled by a daring and successful raid on Venezuela in January, in which US special forces whisked the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, out of the country without a single US casualty.
Trump is clearly counting on spectacular success in Iran, broadcast live, to bring his country along with him after the fact. Before his overnight recorded statement, there had been no real effort by the administration to lay out a convincing case to Congress or to the nation, at a time when polls suggest only a quarter of the US electorate supports a new war in the Middle East.
Regular on-camera press briefings at the Pentagon have been a historical fixture in the runup to previous conflicts, but the recently renamed Department of War had not held one since December.
With the annual State of the Union address on Tuesday coinciding with US military preparations coming to a peak, there was some expectation Trump might use the occasion to lay out a case for war. But he spent only three minutes on Iran out of a record total of one hour 47 minutes.
Congress, which in theory has the constitutional prerogative to decide whether America goes to war, has been almost totally sidelined. Eight congressional leaders from both parties were briefed on classified information a few hours before the State of the Union speech by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. But Democratic senators emerged saying that they had not been given a good reason why the country had to go to war now.
In 2003, the road to war in Iraq was paved with lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The path to a new conflict in Iran 23 years later has been lined largely with incoherence or silence.
Trump has made clear that he expects the Iranian people to be the agents of regime change after US and Israeli bombs have weakened the existing power structures. There is no intention to carry out a ground invasion. In his recorded statement he did warn the public to expect some US casualties, but it is unclear how many combat deaths the electorate, including Trump’s own supporters, would accept in such an obvious war of choice.
Faced with the possibility of defeat for his party in November’s elections, the president has chosen to take the biggest gamble of his presidency.
History suggests that it is very hard to bring down entrenched regimes with aerial bombing alone, and now that it has been made clear to the government in Tehran it is in an existential struggle, it can be expected to try to inflict maximum harm on its attackers with everything at its disposal.
“The Iranians have come to the conclusion that restraint has been interpreted as weakness and invites more aggression,” Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, said, adding that Iran’s capacity to wreak damage on its enemies has not really been tested.
“In the 12-day war, the Iranians didn’t use any of the military capabilities that they have developed over many, many years to target US assets, like short-range missiles, cruise missiles, naval assets, drones, underwater drones, anti-ship ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” Vaez said.
Iranian forces would have a wide range of targets close at hand, including vessels, military and commercial, in the strait of Hormuz or the wider Gulf. Selective targeting proved effective for Tehran’s allies, the Houthi forces in Yemen, who narrowly missed a US aircraft carrier with one of their missiles.
The Houthis could well take part in the Iranian response, aware that the defeat of the Tehran regime would rob them of their sponsor. Hezbollah, though much weakened by Israeli bombardment last year, has rebuilt some of its strength and could also choose to join in for similar reasons.
“In all the years of war games in Washington, in the Pentagon and with all the thinktanks, without exception one or two US warships would sink,” Vaez said.
“Obviously, it would push Trump to retaliate in a devastating manner. But then he will have launched another major war in the Middle East,” he added.
“There’s no way that Trump can frame that as a victory. His presidency will be completely eclipsed by that.”
• This article was amended on 28 February 2026 to clarify that there were no US casualties in the US military operation in Venezuela, not no casualties at all.