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iran
I Love America—Now Trump Has Bombed My Family in Iran
Since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?
Jul 11, 2025
We bombed Iran and, despite a temporary cessation of hostilities, it’s likely that President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intend to drag the United States into yet another destabilizing effort in the Middle East, perhaps the most dangerous one yet. As an Iranian American, I feel as if my greatest fears are now being realized.
Like many Iranian Americans, I love this country and the many blessings that it’s provided my family — so much so that I proudly chose to wear the uniform of its Navy. I’ll never forget the immense sense of pride I felt, on July 31st, 1996, when I was sworn into the United States Navy, or the unparalleled sense of responsibility I experienced when I wore my uniform for the first time as an American sailor graduating from boot camp at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, in 1997. I then had the honor of being selected as the first Iranian American to serve as a member of the United States Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. And on every one of those occasions, my loved ones, Iranian immigrants all, proudly stood by my side, beaming with joy as I embarked on what I viewed as a sacred commitment to serve the nation that I love.
We Have to Remember Who We’re Meant to Be
Like many immigrant families, mine came to the United States in search of peace, prosperity, and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of “equal justice under the law”; the country that had given history George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others; the nation that had served as a safe harbor for German refugees like Albert Einstein and Hollywood film director Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi persecution; the great nation that did indeed free the world from the scourge of Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II, and later landed the first men on the surface of the moon. No nation has had so much potential to do good in the world as we do in the United States of America. Our Founding Fathers, imperfect as they might have been, passed on to us the proposition that liberty and human dignity are anything but idle words — that they are, in fact, fundamental human values written in the very hearts of every person. In short, they passed on to us a promise: that all men, every soul, in fact, is endowed by our Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Nor did those founders suggest that such sacrosanct, if now seemingly self-evident, values stopped at American shores. They were all too aware that, for centuries, imperial forces had pillaged and wreaked havoc globally on smaller, defenseless countries and on civilizations virtually everywhere. Throughout the centuries, such imperial powers had risen by way of their strength, if not their virtue, and fallen thanks to their global misadventures. And let’s be clear, by any metric you want to mention, the United States is indeed a global imperial force at an all-too-critical crossroads. The question is: Will we allow parasitic and nefarious entities and interests to drain us of our resources, cajole us into breaking yet more international laws, and turn us into a global pariah while betraying the great founding promise of our republic?
With Donald Trump at the helm of state, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes.
Why the Con, Don?
In order to understand the peril in which we find ourselves as a nation, we need look no further than Trump’s recent betrayal of his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Just three months ago, she testified before Congress that, according to the assessment of the intelligence community, Iran had not made the decision to weaponize its nuclear program.
When asked about Gabbard’s assessment recently, Trump quipped, “I don’t care what she said,” as if she had merely been offering an opinion of her own, not testifying about a multi-agency conclusion that Iran was not a nuclear threat. In fact, as a matter of religious edict, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had declared a “fatwa,” ruling that the potential global devastation of nuclear weapons violated the very tenets of the Islamic faith and that his country was forbidden to develop such weaponry.
For my part, more than 25 years ago, as a young sailor on active duty, I found myself recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense HUMINT Service (now the Defense Clandestine Service) specifically because of my Persian-Farsi skills and cultural knowledge. Even then, it was widely reported that our government had a wealth of intelligence capabilities when it came to determining the exact scale, scope, and goals, not to speak of mindset and shoe sizes of the Iranian leadership, especially when it came to their military and nuclear capabilities.
It’s Never Actually Been About Nukes or Regime Change
To be clear, I’m no fan of the repressive Iranian regime and wholeheartedly reject its fundamentalist ideology. At the same time, since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?
Why would the Trump administration allow itself to appear to be so schizophrenic by moving the goalposts on what has often seemed like a daily basis? The answer: such head fakes and confusion are part of their strategy. Chaos is the point, a crucial aspect of the psychological tactics deployed against the American public to distract us from their end game. My guess is that, not unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain worm, Donald Trump and many of the corporate oligarchs who support him suffer from a parasitic infection — a murderous devotion to Israeli Prime Minister (and International Criminal Court-charged war criminal) Benjamin Netanyahu’s master plan for the Middle East. He, of course, seeks to destabilize that entire region and expand the borders of Israel into countries like Lebanon, Syria, and even possibly the Iranian peripheries. That scheme, called “The Greater Israel Plan,” has been the decades-long aim of radical right-wing elements in the Israeli government.
The modern iteration of that strategy was commissioned by Netanyahu himself. As Jonathan Granoff asks at The Hill:
“Why does [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party] make no credible effort at building a better future for Palestinian people, knowing it serves only to align their interests more closely with Hamas? And why amid all the chaos strike Iran and aggravate the risk of wider war? Where does Israel’s policy of violent coercion rather than cooperation and an ever-widening reliance on military force come from?”
And he answers those questions this way: “It actually has an identifiable source. In 1996, Netanyahu, then Likud party leader, commissioned the policy document ‘A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ whose lead drafters were neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, co-architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”
The desire to implement just that end-game scenario by hardline members of the Israeli government is the only reasonable way to explain the otherwise confounding actions of both the Trump and Netanyahu governments. A rational person could argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign in 2024 by pro-Israel billionaires like Miriam Adelson were a mere pittance when compared with the possibility of stealing so much in the way of land and resources in the Middle East. You could also be forgiven for imagining Benjamin Netanyahu, seduced by the wicked wiles of that infamous crew, considering the constricted borders of Israel and thinking: Why not? Why shouldn’t I take it?
Of course, I’m hardly the first person to notice the strange, almost cultish loyalty of so many of our elected officials to his dangerous way of thinking. For instance, in his book Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed The World, investigative journalist Christopher Lee Bollyn wrote: “Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year.”
Bollyn certainly offers a striking explanation for the events now taking place before our eyes, the voluntary death spiral into which we, as a nation, have been thrust at least in part by the radical Netanyahu government and his death-cult devotees led by the current American president.
Blowback: It’s Not Good for Israel Either
In the same way that Donald Trump’s greed-fueled ambitions far outweigh any desire to do right by the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychopathic schemes in pursuit of his end game have only served to degrade the international reputation of Israel, making it (outside of the United States) essentially a pariah nation. Even within this country, the Trump administration’s kowtowing to the whims of Netanyahu’s regime, from an unprecedented crackdown on free speech (supposedly to quell “anti-semitism”) to defunding major universities, has earned a massive backlash from both the left and the right.
What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel, through its citizenry, has the capacity to do so much good in this world of ours. My Jewish friends all have a keen sense of justice and a deep sense of compassion towards the plight of the oppressed, values that have been handed down to them, particularly from Holocaust survivors who witnessed the abject evil wrought upon humanity by men with messiah complexes who were without honor or virtue. And that’s exactly why Israelis should, in the end, reject the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, so that their country can indeed once again become a cherished safe haven for the Jewish people living alongside the future nation of Palestine.
In that regard, one could easily make the case that the greatest threat to the nation of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu. In his years of public life, due to his unrepentant acts of horror and violence, especially in his latest tenure as prime minister, even American support for Israel has cratered. And the global decline is starker yet, with European nations like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Spain now considering massive embargoes of the Israeli state.
Freedom Is Not Free, Can America Survive?
In 1997, when I was stationed in Washington D.C., my friend Jeff (Smitty) Smith’s little brother came to visit him from Missouri. Smitty and I took him around D.C. and finally came to the then-newly-built Korean War Memorial. If you’ve been there, then you know that the stark and hallowed message of that memorial is: “Freedom Is Not Free,” words chiseled in stone. On seeing this, Smitty’s brother was taken aback, and asked, “What does that mean?” Then 19 years old, I hadn’t really thought about that, but it hit me instantly. “I think it means,” I told him, “that our American soldiers are willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom.”
I thought of that day again as I was writing this, how in the age of Donald Trump we’ve betrayed the sacrifices of all those generations and how far we’ve fallen as a nation. After I reached out to my editor, Tom Engelhardt, with my ideas for this piece, my mom asked me if it was “safe” to write such an article while Trump was president. After all, he and his goon squad, to their everlasting shame, have gone to the ends of the earth to crush free speech, especially any criticism of Israel or the administration’s nefarious deeds writ large. (Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who dared coauthor an op-ed questioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime, only to quickly find herself disappeared off the street by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security and imprisoned by the American government.)
In truth, that such thoughts even entered my mother’s mind or mine made me first sad and then ticked off. But certain patterns of history seem all too tragically repetitive. When an imperial power is in peril, unless there is a significant course correction, potential tyrants can take control, with the urge to destroy sovereign nations abroad and crush sacred freedoms at home.
In truth, though, it doesn’t have to be that way for us. Yes, we are now governed by wildly lesser men than the great ones of our past. Which is why none of us should cede any ground, when it comes to patriotism or the very idea of national security, to the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth who mistake violence and jingoism for love of country. Such lesser men have the urge to manipulate the immense levers of power in their own favor while using those same levers to crush the righteous dissent of the American people.
This is no longer a matter of right versus left, but of uniting all people of peace and goodwill to reclaim the promise of our founding, ensuring that the precious future aspirations of all peoples, be they Americans, Israelis, or Iranians, not be crushed within the grip of a death cult of End Times fundamentalists who, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, would happily engulf human civilization in flames and laugh as the world around them burns.
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For a Different Kind of Apocalypse—From LA to Tehran
Instead of pushing us close to the brink of Armageddon through military escalations at home and abroad animated by religious fundamentalism, U.S. policymakers must find the courage to lead us toward world peace through diplomacy and climate repair.
Jul 03, 2025
As an Iranian American Christian from Los Angeles, I watch with alarm as a fringe religious prophecy creeps into the highest levels of American policy. What may sound like a spiritual metaphor—biblical End Times, Armageddon, divine vengeance—is now inspiring large-scale political decisions, putting lives at risk from LA to Gaza to Tehran.
After Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis and took hundreds captive on October 7, 2023, Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip’s mass incarcerated Palestinian refugee enclave—with the U.S. supplying about 68% of Israel’s foreign-origin weaponry in this war. Amnesty International describes Israel’s response to October 7 as a genocide—killings “with the specific intent of destroying Palestinians in Gaza.”
In April 2024 in LA, masked vigilantes attacked UCLA’s nonviolent pro-Palestinian encampment for three hours with wood, metal, and fireworks before LAPD intervened. At the beginning of this year, Angelenos were devastated by the Eaton and Palisades Fires—worsened by global warming—taking dozens of lives, destroying thousands of homes, and creating eerie orange skies above Los Angeles.
The thought of my U.S. taxpayer dollars funding bombing campaigns of my ancestral homeland that could eventually become nuclear, threatening the beautiful ancient city of Isfahan that I visited in my childhood, is unbearable.
Now, the world is in the throes of President Donald Trump’s chaotic second term. Shortly after his inauguration, he once again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—while LA was ablaze. More recently, as Angelenos have protested the federal government’s inhumane mass deportation campaign, which has lately targeted Iranian nationals, the Trump administration majorly escalated by sending in thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
On June 13, while the U.S. and Iran were in the middle of diplomatic negotiations around reinstating Obama-era restraints on Iran’s nuclear energy program, Israel under Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu, still waging a genocide on Gaza and facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court as of November 2024, began a large-scale attack on Iran. This represented the most significant attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988—culminating in the killings of at least 600 Iranians, including many civilians and children. In response, Iran attacked Israel with retaliatory strikes that killed dozens of Israelis.
In a televised address on Sunday, June 22, President Trump reported that the United States military under his command bombed three sites in Iran housing the country’s nuclear energy program, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, entering the U.S. into Israel’s offensive attack. He even at one point raised the possibility of a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran in the future. On Monday, June 23, Iran retaliated against the U.S. by launching limited missile strikes directed at an American military base in Qatar, with no casualties. Later that day on social media, Trump announced a cease-fire deal between Israel and Iran. Though both nations continued to exchange fire shortly after the cease-fire went into effect, Israel and Iran are now experiencing a fragile peace. Trump and Netanyahu have purportedly agreed to end the war in Gaza within two weeks of the U.S. strikes on Iran, and the U.S. and Iran are expected to talk during the week of June 30.
This conflict has deeply impacted Angelenos, including my own family. LA is home to the largest Iranian diaspora globally, known as “Tehrangeles.” As an Iranian American, I don’t see Iran as a geopolitical adversary; it’s home to my loved ones and heritage. Israel concentrated many of its airstrikes in Tehran—the most populous city in Western Asia—including airstrikes in my own cousin’s neighborhood. The escalation of this conflict, including Trump’s call on Iranians in Tehran to “evacuate immediately,” forced my cousin and disabled U.S. citizen grandmother to flee Tehran to Northern Iran. It was a strange feeling when I last spoke to my grandmother before her internet went out, hearing her say in Farsi, “Ma ra zadan”—“They hit us.” The thought of my U.S. taxpayer dollars funding bombing campaigns of my ancestral homeland that could eventually become nuclear, threatening the beautiful ancient city of Isfahan that I visited in my childhood, is unbearable. After all, Iran is filled with rich world history—including the most widely accepted site of the tomb of Prophet Daniel of the Bible, who I am named after.
How did we get to this escalating polycrisis of destruction? In part, because white Christian nationalist leaders have embraced a belief in the End Times—an extremist theology that now holds wide political sway according to religion scholar Bradley Onishi. Texas megachurch pastor, founder of influential political lobbying organization Christians United for Israel, and Trump adviser John Hagee preaches that warfare between Israel, Palestine, and Iran is part of a biblically predicted Battle of Armageddon, in which the U.S. must militarily support Israel to be reunited with God in the Rapture. He cites Ezekiel 38 and 39, an Old Testament prophecy that says a restored Israel in the End Times will be attacked by a nation called Gog, supported by Persia (modern-day Iran). In retaliation, a vengeful God of Israel would decimate Gog and Persia through brute force “to cleanse the land.” In Hagee’s words, Iran is “already in the hit list in Ezekiel 38.” This prophecy also talks of climate destruction during this violent vision of the End Times, including “torrents of rain, hailstones, and burning sulfur.” These ideas are no longer confined to pulpits—they are shaping real-world policy. Even former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that God sent Trump to save Israel from Iran.
If we must turn to apocalyptic scripture to understand the future, then why don’t we skip ahead to Revelation 21: the creation of a “new heaven and a new Earth,” including a “new Jerusalem,” where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Los Angeles and our world are enduring too much grief to bear. Instead of pushing us close to the brink of Armageddon through military escalations at home and abroad animated by religious fundamentalism, U.S. policymakers must find the courage to lead us toward world peace through diplomacy and climate repair. That means reinstating the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran of zero weaponization, as opposed to an unrealistic goal of zero enrichment. It means pushing for an immediate, permanent cease-fire between the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and Iran, and it means reentering the U.S. into the Paris climate accords.
My faith teaches redemption, not vengeance. As God promises in the Bible, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
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Iran: The Things It Won’t Do to Say
If Thomas Friedman’s fairytale world of light-versus-darkness were to evaporate, less noble motives for U.S. and Israeli actions might be revealed.
Jul 01, 2025
In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell remarks that “the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.”
With the Israeli and U.S. aerial invasions of Iran on June 13 and June 21, respectively, the Victorian convention remains intact. There are certain questions it won’t do to ask. Are the invasions legal under international law? Are they morally justified? And who has the right to make those determinations?
These questions would be central in a media sphere that values legal and moral consistency. In Western media, by contrast, asking them is like mentioning trousers before a lady. Political debate focuses instead on U.S. President Donald Trump’s personality flaws or on speculation about whether the bombing will succeed in its stated aims.
It is because the world values democracy and international law that it condemns U.S. foreign policy.
The nearly universal embrace of the Victorian norm is apparent when we consider The New York Times, a liberal paper known for confronting Trump on many matters. In June 2025 the Times published over 40 opinion pieces in which Iran was a central focus. They range from unabashed praise for “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision” (6/23/25) to the editorial board’s advice that “America Must Not Rush into a War Against Iran” (6/19/25). Disagreements aside, however, nearly all the writers evidently consider international law irrelevant.
With just one significant exception, the paper’s editors and columnists have ignored the fact that the U.S. and Israeli bombings violate the United Nations Charter, the central document of international law. The charter prohibits the “threat or use of force” by nations that are not under attack or not authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Nor have they mentioned the multiple other international crimes which the U.S. and Israel are committing every day, including the near total blockade on humanitarian aid into Gaza, daily sniper assaults on desperate unarmed people, and deliberate starvation of infants, all part of what U.N. human rights experts and mainstream human rights organizations have long understood as a genocide. (A Times online-only piece by David Wallace-Wells [6/25/25] did cite the genocide findings.)
Furthermore, amid wall-to-wall condemnation of Iran’s possible nuclear ambitions, not a single New York Times editor or opinion writer has noted that the U.S. and Israel are in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and international treaties requiring them to help establish a “nuclear-weapons-free zone” in the Middle East and to work toward global abolition. There is universal silence on Israel’s refusal to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the fact that it’s the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East (partly enabled by the United States, in violation of multiple laws), and the refusal of the U.S. and Israel to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As the leading international law scholar Richard Falk observed in an earlier era of U.S. debate over Iran, there is “a presumed total irrelevance of international law to the policy debate.”
The Times editors are following precedent. In a detailed study of Times editorial coverage of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Falk and coauthor Howard Friel found that “no space” on the opinion pages “was accorded to the broad array of international law and world-order arguments opposing the war.” The same pattern has long held true for Times coverage of Iran. Pious concern for “the rule of law”—that concept invoked by liberals to criticize Trump’s domestic authoritarianism—usually stops at the water’s edge.
The only significant exception in our Times sample was a guest column by Yale law professor Oona Hathaway (6/24/25). Hathaway notes that the U.S. bombing is an obvious violation of the U.N. Charter’s “prohibition on the unilateral resort to force,” which “is the foundational principle of the postwar legal order.” She further observes that Trump’s decision sets “an example of lawlessness” that further undermines the international rule of law, inviting other rogue actors to do the same. Apart from Hathaway’s commendable exception, only two letters-to-the-editor published on June 23, plus one line in a Peter Beinart column (6/21/25) and one in a Lydia Polgreen column (6/29/25), mentioned that the bombing violates international law.
The Times’ other authors exhibit no such ideological indiscipline. Thomas Friedman, true to form, casts the affair as a war for civilization. U.S.-Israeli aggression is part of “a global struggle between the forces of inclusion and the forces of resistance” (6/23/25). Those who promote “inclusion” include the U.S., Israel, and “pro-American governments,” who are working “to integrate global and regional markets,” as manifested in their enthusiasm for “business conferences, news organizations, elites, investment funds, tech incubators, and major trade routes.” They include Arab dictatorships like the one in Saudi Arabia, where Mohammed bin Salman is boldly remaking his country into “the biggest engine for regional trade, investment, and reform of Islam” (even if he “has made some serious mistakes”). By contrast, the “forces of resistance” want “a world safe for autocracy, safe for theocracy, safe for their corruption; a world free from the winds of personal freedoms, the rule of law, a free press.”
Others are more critical, but keep their criticisms within the bounds of polite Victorian discourse. The editors (6/19/25) urge Trump not to be “dragged into another war in the Middle East, with American lives at stake.” If he wants to bomb Iran, “he should then make the case to the nation for committing American blood and treasure.” Iranian blood and treasure do not merit a place among the possible downsides. Nicholas Kristof (6/23/25) also has reservations about the U.S. bombing, but mainly because of potential costs to the United States. Agreeing with Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, he worries the Iranians could retaliate and “threaten our armed forces in the region.” Why those forces are in the region, or have the right to be, goes unquestioned.
Concerns about legality, when expressed, focus on the lack of authorization from the U.S. Congress. If the president wants war, he should “make the case” to Congress. Unquestioned is the U.S. Congress’ legal right to launch a war, even an “unprovoked” war, as the editorial board observes this one to be. International law is a triviality. In an entire Times “Opinions” podcast (6/27/25) debating the legality of the U.S. bombing, none of the three discussants—Jamelle Bouie, David French, and Carlos Lozada—bothered to consider the legality under international law. The same disdain is nearly pervasive in U.S. political discourse, including in many progressive criticisms of the bombing, from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to Rev. William Barber.
In another episode of the “Opinions” podcast (6/25/25), Times columnist and “hawk” Bret Stephens debated Rosemary Kelanic, a “skeptic.” The interchange was most notable for how the skeptic spent almost as much time agreeing with her opponent as rebutting him. Although she feared the bombing could be “counterproductive” since it gives Iran “a huge incentive to build a bomb” (a self-evident causal relationship long understood by all serious observers), she stressed that Israel is right to “be extremely upset” and blamed Iranian leaders for having “put themselves in this situation.” Israel is justified in “not trusting Iran” because “Iran retaliated and killed Israelis, like, Israel should be mad at Iran.” Translation: It’s reasonable for aggressors to get mad at targets who fire back, provided the aggressors are on our side.
Kelanic also endorses Stephens’s labeling of Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” This is a point of consensus among Stephens the hawk, Kelanic the dove, and debate moderator David Leonhardt. Leonhardt’s own intervention is telling given his position as Times editorial director. At one point he soliloquizes that Iran is “a malevolent force in the world that’s killed a lot of Americans.” The weakening of Iran and its regional allies is thus cause for rejoicing. “I look at that as an American,” he says, and it “cheers me in some ways.” Since Iran “has really caused a lot of pain and suffering over the last several decades,” its weakened condition makes it “much less able to cause that suffering.”
Leonhardt accidentally identifies part of the problem: The editorial director at the world’s leading newspaper views world affairs “as an American”—through the lens of nationalist exceptionalism, not through a set of universal standards applied equally to all actors. Were he to remove his nationalist blinders and behold the actual record of “the last several decades,” Leonhardt might reach different conclusions about the sources of “pain and suffering.”
He would, for example, see the facts compiled by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, which estimates that wars since September 11, 2001 have killed “at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting” through direct and indirect violence. Most of those people have been killed in wars that the U.S. government bears primary responsibility for initiating or enabling, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Yemen. The U,S. lead is even starker if we include the mass extermination of Palestinians since October 2023, which is not part of the Watson Institute data. No Western or Israeli intelligence agency has alleged that Iran’s violence against Western or Israeli personnel, retaliatory or otherwise, has produced even 1% of that death count. It takes real fealty to state doctrine to see Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”
Shedding the nationalist blinders would also reveal key facts about the U.S. and Israeli bombing of Iran. Iranian human rights group HRANA reports that Israel’s bombing “targeted infrastructures, military and civilian facilities, residential areas, and industrial sites in 25 provinces,” killing a minimum of 865 people, of whom at least 363 were civilians. Civilian death estimates were mentioned only twice, in passing, in our New York Times sample (6/24/25 and 6/28/25).
A researcher not confined by nationalism might also consider global opinion, based on the novel idea that people’s preferences should matter in a democratic world. Leonhardt self-identifies as “someone who favors democracy” (6/25/25), yet this approach somehow escapes him. A key source would be the annual Democracy Perception Index (DPI). In the 2025 edition, released in May, people in 76 of the 96 countries surveyed “have a more positive view of China” than of the United States. Of major global leaders, “Donald Trump stands out with the most universally negative image,” with 82% of countries giving Trump a “net negative rating,” versus 61% for Russian President Vladimir Putin and 44% for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
It’s not that people disagree with the U.S.’ professed ideals of democracy and rule of law—just the opposite. Most respondents in almost every country say democracy is “very” or “extremely important.” Most also favor the idea of a “rules-based world order.” People in 85% of countries, including the United States, say all countries “should follow international laws and agreements, even if it limits their freedom of action.” Yet surveys by DPI and many other pollsters show that the world views the United States as the top threat to democracy and peace. It is because the world values democracy and international law that it condemns U.S. foreign policy.
These findings would be important considerations for anyone who “favors democracy” and “rule of law.” But in our political culture they are inappropriate for well-mannered debate, like mentioning trousers with a lady present.
Asking impertinent questions about legality and morality could, of course, spark unhealthy scrutiny of U.S.-Israeli objectives. If Thomas Friedman’s fairytale world of light-versus-darkness were to evaporate, less noble motives for U.S. and Israeli actions might be revealed: Western control of resources, the preservation of ethno-racial supremacy in Greater Israel, and the need to eliminate all who oppose those goals. All things it won’t do to say.
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