Trump says the joint US–Israeli attacks on Iran are about stopping “imminent threats.” Critics warn he has launched a regime‑change war with no clear endgame. U.S. and Israel Launches Major Combat Operations and Strike on Iran.
In an eight‑minute address released on Truth Social, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that the U.S. military has begun “major combat operations in Iran,” hours after Israel launched missile strikes on Tehran and other cities. Trump said the objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,” calling Iran’s leadership “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” He accused Tehran of endangering U.S. troops, allies and commercial shipping “throughout the world,” and vowed that Washington would “not put up with it any longer.”
According to reporting on The U.S. News Media Is Sleepwalking the Public Into a Possible War Against Iran. A massive 85% of Americans oppose a war with Iran YouGov poll, with only 5% in support. Similarly, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 70% of voters do not want the U.S. to take military action, even if protesters in Iran are killed.
This framing casts the escalation as a necessary act of national self‑defence rather than a discretionary war of choice. Yet even in the speech, Trump acknowledged that “lives of courageous American heroes may be lost,” and that this would be “something that often happens in war” – an implicit admission that the U.S. is entering a potentially prolonged conflict, not a short, surgical strike.
To justify the offensive, Trump recited a long list of grievances dating back to the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran and the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. He blamed Iran and its proxies for attacks from the USS Cole bombing to roadside bombs in Iraq and assaults on U.S. forces and shipping in recent years. He also pointed to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, calling Iran the “number one state sponsor of terror” and alleging that it had “just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens” in street protests.
Trump anchored the new war in last June’s “Operation Midnight Hammer,” when he claims the U.S. “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. According to the Al Jazeera analysis that followed his speech, mediators and nuclear experts later said Iran had rebuilt its nuclear arsenal within months and remained only weeks away from a bomb, raising doubts about Trump’s claim that the programme was destroyed. That gap between presidential rhetoric and on‑the‑ground assessments is central to current fears that the U.S. may again be over‑promising what air power alone can achieve.
Regime Change, Imminent Threat or Broken Diplomacy?
The timing of the strikes is striking. Al Jazeera’s chief U.S. correspondent Alan Fisher noted that hours before Trump’s announcement, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on American television saying Iran had agreed it would no longer process enough material to build a nuclear weapon, and that “the heart of an agreement” was within reach in indirect talks. Trump himself had told reporters he was “not pleased” with Iran but “hadn’t made a decision” on military action.
The president’s speech paints a different picture, portraying the offensive as a forced response to Iran’s refusal “for decades and decades” to abandon nuclear ambitions and long‑range missiles that could threaten Europe and eventually the U.S. homeland. Critics argue that the volte‑face – moving from a near‑deal to all‑out war – suggests domestic politics and longstanding hawkish advisers may have weighed as heavily as any last‑minute intelligence on “imminent threats.”
While Trump did not use the phrase “regime change,” his own words and Fisher’s analysis make clear that this is about far more than disabling missile launchers. Trump promised to “destroy their missiles,” “annihilate their navy” and “raise their missile industry to the ground,” vowing that Iran would “never” obtain a nuclear weapon. He directly addressed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, armed forces and police, telling them to lay down their weapons for “complete immunity” or face “certain death.”
Most dramatically, Trump spoke “to the great proud people of Iran,” urging them to stay indoors while “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” then “take over your government” once the bombing stops, calling it “probably your only chance for generations.” He claimed “no president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” casting himself as the leader who would finally back an Iranian revolution with “overwhelming strength and devastating force.”
Fisher summed up the implication bluntly: “This is about regime change in Iran.” He said Washington has “set the table for a revolution” before, but never this overtly with such a large military operation, and warned that there is “no guarantee there is a clear path for whoever may take over the Iranian government.”
The Israel Factor: Hand in Hand in Iran
The war announcement comes against the backdrop of Israeli missile strikes on Tehran and other locations, which Israel describes as a pre‑emptive move to neutralise Iranian threats. U.S. and Israeli forces are “working hand in hand,” Fisher said, leveraging a huge U.S. military build‑up in the Gulf that many analysts had warned could be the prelude to war.
Israel has its own reasons for wanting to weaken Iran, from Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and other armed groups to the fallout from the Gaza war and Lebanon front. For Trump, aligning closely with Israel’s security agenda fits a broader pattern in which major moves on Iran, Gaza and regional diplomacy are tightly intertwined with his domestic political messaging about strength and loyalty to key allies.
One of the sharpest concerns raised in the immediate reaction is institutional. Congress representative Thomas Massie, Republican who co-lead on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution aimed at blocking or rolling back Trump’s ability to wage war against Iran without explicit authorization from Congress posted on X “Act of war unauthorized by Congress…” Fisher noted that Trump appears to have “effectively launched a war in Iran without seeking congressional approval,” and that it is not even clear whether Congress was informed in advance. That echoes long‑running debates over presidential war powers and the legacy of the 2003 Iraq invasion, which Trump himself has often criticized as a disastrous war built on uncertainty and faulty assumptions.
Now, analysts point out, Trump is “walking into a similar situation himself,” with unclear war aims beyond expansive regime‑change rhetoric and no public timeline for how long the operation will last. The evacuation of non‑essential embassy staff across the region, ordered before the first strikes, suggests planning for a significant backlash – from missile attacks to proxy assaults on U.S. personnel – that could draw the U.S. into a wider regional conflict.
For Iranians, the stakes are immediate: survival under bombardment and the risk of state collapse or prolonged internecine conflict if the government weakens but does not fall quickly. For Israelis, the offensive may feel like a decisive attempt to dismantle a long‑feared security threat – but it also risks triggering responses from Iran and allied groups from Lebanon to Yemen.
For Americans, Trump is selling the war as a “noble mission” to ensure that “our children will never be threatened by a nuclear armed Iran.” Yet the history he cites – from the Iran–Iraq war to U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – also underlines how easily regime‑change campaigns can spiral into years of occupation, insurgency and blowback. Whether this war will be different may depend less on Trump’s promises of overwhelming force and more on the political, diplomatic and regional order that will have to follow the bombs.
