A War That Was Never Ours

I want to be clear about what this piece is and what it isn't before I say another word. This is not a defense of the Iranian government. I have no interest in carrying water for a regime that suppresses its own people, and nothing in the pages that follow should be read as an endorsement of Tehran's leadership or its record at home. My argument is narrower and, I think, more important. This war does not serve American interests, it was sold to the American public on justifications that have shifted at nearly every stage, and it is costing the lives of our servicemen and women in pursuit of goals that keep changing shape.

This publication exists to hold power accountable regardless of which party wields it. I am not interested in defending Republicans or attacking Democrats, or the reverse. I am interested in asking a simple question that too few people in Washington seem willing to ask out loud: does this war make America safer, stronger, or more prosperous? The evidence I have gathered says no on every count, and I intend to walk through that evidence step by step.

I also want to draw a distinction that I think gets lost too easily in wartime rhetoric. When I criticize the Iranian government, or the decisions of the American and Israeli officials who took us into this conflict, I am criticizing governments and the people who run them. I am not criticizing the Iranian people, the vast majority of whom have no say in their government's decisions and are enduring this war's costs alongside our own service members. The same distinction applies throughout my body of work. I argue against governments, institutions, and the individuals who lead them, never against civilian populations who are, like the rest of us, simply trying to live.

What follows is an investigation into how this war started, how the reasons given for fighting it have moved every time the previous justification stopped holding up, who is actually paying the price, and who stands to gain. I think the American people deserve a clear eyed accounting of all four questions, and I don't think they've gotten one.

Before I get into Iran specifically, I think it's worth stepping back and looking at how the last two decades of American intervention in the Middle East actually played out, because the pattern is not subtle once you lay it side by side.

The Afghanistan War began in October 2001 with a stated and narrow objective, remove the Taliban government that had harbored al Qaeda and dismantle the network responsible for September 11th.[1] That mission was accomplished within months. What followed instead was a nineteen year nation building project that ended in August 2021 with the Taliban back in control of the entire country, the same group the war had originally set out to remove.

The Iraq War began in March 2003 on the premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the United States. No such weapons were ever found. The justification shifted afterward to removing a dictator and building a democracy, then to stabilizing a country that had descended into sectarian civil war partly as a consequence of the invasion itself. Iraq today is a government heavily influenced by Iran, the same regional power the war was, in part, supposed to counterbalance.

The 2011 intervention in Libya began under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians through a no fly zone. It expanded within months into a regime change operation that ended with Muammar Gaddafi's death and Libya's collapse into a fractured state that has not had a stable, unified government since.

The intervention in Syria began as a campaign against the Islamic State, a narrower and more defensible mission than what came before it. But even there, American objectives multiplied over time to include influencing the outcome of a civil war involving multiple foreign powers, and American troops remain in the country years after ISIS lost its territorial holdings.

I lay these out not to relitigate each war individually, but because the pattern across all four is the same. Each began with a specific, publicly stated objective. Each objective either succeeded quickly and was replaced with a much larger and more open ended one, or was never achieved at all. And each war cost far more, in lives and dollars, than the public was told to expect at the outset. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates the post 9/11 wars have cost the United States roughly 8 trillion dollars and contributed to the deaths of more than 900,000 people through direct violence alone, a figure the project's own researchers describe as a conservative undercount.[2]

I bring this history forward because it is the lens through which I think the Iran war has to be evaluated. Not as an isolated decision made in February 2026, but as the latest entry in a pattern this country has repeated for over twenty years without ever fully reckoning with the cost.

One thing that sets this war apart from the ones I just described is how the American public received it, and I think that difference matters.

When the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001, roughly 90 percent of the country supported the war, according to Gallup polling from that period. When the Iraq War began in 2003, support stood around 70 percent. Whatever else can be said about those two conflicts, they began with the overwhelming backing of the American people.

The Iran war did not. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted just over a week after the February 28, 2026 strikes found a majority of voters opposed the military action, with 74 percent opposed to sending American ground troops into Iran specifically, and more than three quarters concerned the strikes would provoke a terrorist attack on American soil.[3] A Pew Research Center survey conducted March 16 through 22, 2026, found most Americans said striking Iran was the wrong decision.[4] An Ipsos poll found only 24 percent overall said the action had been worth its costs and benefits, compared to 51 percent who said it had not been.[5] An Economist and YouGov poll from early April found 53 percent of Americans opposed the war against 34 percent in support, with opposition holding across most demographic groups outside of Republicans specifically.[6] By late July, a Reuters and Ipsos poll found support for the war had fallen to just one in three Americans, the lowest reading since the conflict began, with 69 percent of respondents saying President Trump had failed to clearly explain what the war's goals actually were.[7] Nate Silver's polling aggregate tracked net support for the war at negative 19.6 points as of mid August 2026, meaning opposition has outpaced support by a wide and sustained margin for nearly the entire length of the conflict.[8]

This is not a war the public was swept into. It is a war a majority of Americans have opposed from close to the beginning, opposed through its middle months, and continue to oppose as it drags on with no clearly stated endpoint. I think that fact alone should give pause to anyone arguing this conflict reflects the will or the interest of the American people. It does not appear to, and the polling has been remarkably consistent on that point for five months running.

To understand how far the stated justification for this war has traveled, it helps to walk through it in order.

The war began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran following the breakdown of nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran.[9] The initial and primary justification, the one presented to the American public at the outset, was preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That was the mission as stated.

Within weeks, the campaign's scope had expanded well beyond that original objective. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeted Iran's missile and drone capabilities.[10] The objective had shifted from preventing a weapon to degrading Iran's broader military capacity and, implicitly, removing its leadership.

By mid 2026, the administration's own officials were describing success in different terms again. Trump told advisers he believed Iran's nuclear program would struggle to recover after the destruction of its three main nuclear sites, and a White House official told the Wall Street Journal the United States had completed all of its military objectives against Iran.[11] At that point, by the administration's own account, the original justification for the war, preventing a nuclear weapon, had already been achieved. The war did not end.

Instead, the objective moved again. A sixty day memorandum of understanding negotiated with Iran, initially framed as a step toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz and finalizing a long term nuclear agreement, collapsed within weeks as both sides accused each other of violating its terms.[12] It was only after that agreement broke down and military operations resumed that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in mid July 2026, restricting the waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply.[13] The strait was not closed when this war began. It was closed months into the conflict, in direct response to the war continuing.

From that point forward, reopening the strait became the administration's stated objective. A U.S. official told reporters the president was focused on making Iran pay for its alleged violations of the memorandum and for American service member deaths, language that describes retaliation, not the prevention of a nuclear weapon that officials had already said was accomplished.[14] By August 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was describing the strait's reopening as the war's remaining goal, while reports indicated Trump was privately prepared to declare victory and end the conflict if Iran reopened Hormuz, with or without a formal nuclear agreement at all.[15]

I want to be precise about what this timeline shows, because I think it's some of the clearest evidence in this entire piece. This war was justified to the American public as necessary to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. By the administration's own stated assessment, that objective was met months ago. The war continued anyway, first toward removing Iranian leadership, then toward reopening a waterway that Iran had not closed until the war itself provoked it to. Each time one justification was satisfied or lost public traction, a new one took its place. That is not a war with a fixed objective. That is a war in search of one.

I think it's worth stopping here to note something that makes this war different from a case where information simply wasn't available at the time. In this case, it was.

Trump campaigned in 2024, and for the better part of a decade before that, on a promise of no new wars. On election night in November 2024 he told supporters, I'm not going to start a war, I'm going to stop wars.[16] He specifically invoked Iran by name on multiple occasions, at one point stating, if I'm president, we will not go to war with Iran, a line his own Pentagon policy chief was later asked to reconcile with the administration's actions once the war began.[17] When confronted about this on NBC's Meet the Press in June 2026, Trump denied ever making the promise, saying, I didn't guarantee no war.[18]

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's own Director of National Intelligence, the official responsible for presenting the U.S. intelligence community's collective assessment to Congress, testified under oath on March 25, 2025, nearly a year before the war began, that the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.[19] Trump publicly rejected his own DNI's assessment, telling reporters she's wrong and I don't care what she said.[20] Gabbard testified again on March 18, 2026, just weeks before the February 28 strikes, that Iran had not rebuilt its uranium enrichment capability following the earlier 2025 strikes, testimony a Democratic senator on the committee noted she had conspicuously omitted from her spoken remarks before it was drawn out under questioning.[21] Gabbard resigned from her position in May 2026, roughly three months into the war she had spent years publicly opposing, including selling No War With Iran t shirts through her 2020 presidential campaign that explicitly warned against the human and financial cost of exactly this kind of conflict. She cited her husband's cancer diagnosis as her reason for stepping down, though multiple outlets reported she had been sidelined from Iran war planning and was increasingly at odds with the administration's posture toward Tehran in the months before her departure.[22]

The clearest internal dissent came from inside Trump's own administration. Joe Kent, a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer whom Trump had personally appointed to direct the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on March 17, 2026, roughly three weeks after the war began. In his resignation statement, Kent wrote, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.[23] He went further in a later interview, stating plainly that the intelligence community had properly assessed the threat and that the narrative and agenda spun by a foreign government, Israel, won the argument and forced us into this war.[24] Kent, who described himself as a Gold Star husband and a veteran of eleven combat deployments, was explicit that his objection wasn't sympathy for the Iranian regime, he said directly he understood Iran to be a terrorist threat from his vantage point overseeing counterterrorism assessments, but that regime change war was, in his words, a recipe for disaster that had already failed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya.

Trump dismissed Kent's resignation immediately, telling reporters he'd always thought he was weak on security and calling it a good thing that he's out. Kent's departure marked the first resignation from inside the administration over the war, and it came from a National Counterterrorism Center director, not a peace advocate or an outside critic, but the official whose specific job was assessing whether Iran represented the kind of threat that justifies military action. Former NCTC director Nick Rasmussen, who held the same position under the Obama administration, noted publicly that Kent's letter didn't even directly address the nuclear question itself, meaning Kent's no imminent threat assessment was a broader judgment about Iran's overall posture toward the United States, not a narrow technical dispute over enrichment levels.[25]

Iran, for its part, has maintained since at least the mid 1990s that Supreme Leader Khamenei held a standing religious fatwa declaring nuclear weapons forbidden under Islamic law, a position Iranian officials formally cited to the IAEA as early as 2005 and have repeated consistently since, including a 2015 statement from Khamenei explicitly rejecting the idea that international negotiations, rather than religious prohibition, were what kept Iran from pursuing a weapon.[26] I want to be fair to the complexity here rather than present this as settled: the fatwa's binding force is genuinely disputed among analysts, some of whom argue Shia jurisprudence's expediency principle would allow it to be revised under existential threat, and internal pressure from IRGC commanders to do exactly that had already been reported before the war began. But the fatwa's existence and Iran's public, longstanding reliance on it as policy is not in dispute, and it was part of the public record available to the administration before it launched this war.

Opinion I don't think it's unreasonable to look at all of this together, a president who ran and won partly on a promise not to do this, his own hand picked intelligence chief testifying under oath that the central justification wasn't true, his own hand picked counterterrorism director resigning over the same conclusion, and a decades old religious and diplomatic position from Iran itself stating the same thing, and conclude that the nuclear threat used to justify this war's opening act was, at minimum, seriously disputed by the people and information sources with the most direct access to the truth. That doesn't mean I know with certainty what Iran's intentions were. It means the public was not given the full picture, and the parts of that picture that were available and inconvenient were either dismissed or quietly walked back once the war was already underway.

I think it's worth stopping here and getting something straight that gets muddled constantly in public discussion of this war: Iran is not a Sunni country, and the distinction matters more than most Americans realize.

Iran is the largest Shia majority nation in the world. Pew Research Center estimates that between 90 and 95 percent of Iranian Muslims, roughly 66 to 70 million people, are Shia.[27] Iran's government has operated as a Shia theocracy since the 1979 revolution, and Shia Islam is written into its constitution as the state religion. This is not a minor theological footnote. It shapes the entire regional picture that gets flattened whenever this war is discussed as a continuation of the post 9/11 fight against terrorism.

Nearly every jihadist attack carried out on American soil in the post 9/11 era has been tied to Sunni extremist ideology, not Shia. The September 11th hijackers were al Qaeda, a Sunni organization. The Fort Hood shooting was carried out by a gunman inspired by Anwar al Awlaki, a Sunni al Qaeda figure. The Boston Marathon bombing was carried out by brothers who had absorbed Sunni jihadist material. The Orlando nightclub shooting and the San Bernardino attack were both carried out by individuals who pledged allegiance to ISIS, a Sunni organization that Shia majority Iran fought directly, with its own soldiers, in Iraq and Syria. I am not aware of a major domestic terrorist attack on American soil in the post 9/11 era attributable to Shia extremism or to Iran directly.

I want to be fair to the full picture here, because I don't think oversimplifying it does this argument any favors. Iran's relationship with Sunni jihadist groups is not one of clean, total hostility in every instance. There is documented history of some al Qaeda figures passing through or being held in Iran after 2001, and of tactical, situational arrangements between Tehran and various Sunni militant actors when it served Iran's interests against a shared adversary.[28] That history is real and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But the dominant and far more consistent pattern is open hostility. Al Qaeda's own internal communications, including a 2009 memo recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound, describe the Iranian government in hostile terms.[29] Sunni insurgents in Iraq have carried out mass casualty attacks against Shia civilians for two decades. ISIS explicitly targeted Iran itself, including a 2017 attack on Iran's parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran. Iran, in turn, deployed its own forces and allied militias against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.

None of this means Iran is a benign actor. It doesn't need to be, for my argument to hold. My point is narrower and, I think, harder to dispute: the specific ideological pipeline that has produced actual terrorist violence against Americans on American soil for the past twenty five years runs through Sunni extremism, not through Shia Iran. Treating this war as a natural extension of the War on Terror asks the public to collapse a distinction that Iran's own enemies within the jihadist movement have never collapsed themselves.

The human cost of this war is not abstract, and I don't want to treat it that way. As of the most recent Central Command figures reported publicly, 18 American service members have died in the conflict since it began on February 28, 2026, with more than 680 more wounded, according to the most recent CENTCOM and Defense Casualty Analysis System figures.[30] U.S. Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson, confirmed to reporters that the vast majority of those injuries were minor and that most of the wounded have since returned to duty. That does not make the losses smaller for the families of the eighteen who did not come home.

Some of those names are part of the public record. Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan and Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor were among the service members killed on March 1, 2026, during a strike on the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait.[31] Army Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington's remains were received at Dover Air Force Base on March 9, 2026, one of the earliest instances of a dignified transfer during this conflict.[32] Sergeant Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York, was confirmed in July 2026 as a casualty of a July 17th attack on Jordan's Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, closing out what had been an unresolved missing service member case for weeks.[33] Six Air Force crew members were also killed on March 12, 2026, when a KC 135 Stratotanker supporting the operation crashed in western Iraq, a loss some official channels have classified as non hostile even as public reporting has generally counted it as part of the war's toll.[34]

The war has not stayed contained to Iran. Iranian retaliatory strikes have hit American and allied positions in Kuwait, where seven U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens wounded, and in Saudi Arabia, where American forces have also taken casualties defending against Iranian drone and missile attacks aimed at regional oil infrastructure.[35] Allied nations, including Italy and Canada, have also had forces engaged in the region, though as of the most recent reporting neither has suffered fatalities. Overall estimates of total war dead, combining military and civilian losses across all sides, have been reported in the range of several thousand to over ten thousand depending on the source, figures that remain contested given the incentives both Iranian state media and Israeli defense sources have to shape the number in their own favor.[36]

I raise these figures because I think it's easy, sitting comfortably in the United States, to let a war become a headline instead of a cost. Eighteen American families have already been given the worst possible news because of a war whose stated purpose has moved at least three times since it began. That number will likely grow the longer this continues, and I don't think anyone in Washington has offered a clear answer for why it should.

I think it's worth putting real numbers to what the United States has committed to Israel, because the scale of it gets lost in abstraction. The current Memorandum of Understanding, signed in September 2016 and covering fiscal years 2019 through 2028, commits the United States to 38 billion dollars in military assistance over that decade, 33 billion dollars in Foreign Military Financing grants and 5 billion dollars for cooperative missile defense programs, the largest security assistance package the United States has ever extended to any country.[37] That figure does not include supplemental appropriations passed outside the MOU, including a billion dollars in 2022 and 5.2 billion dollars in 2024 specifically to replenish Iron Dome and David's Sling interceptors.[38] In total, the United States has provided Israel roughly 174 billion dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding to date, according to the Congressional Research Service.[39]

I raise the resource question because I think it's relevant context, not because I think it settles the argument by itself. Israel has historically lacked significant domestic oil reserves and, for most of its modern history, has not been a resource exporting nation in the way many of its neighbors are. Offshore natural gas discoveries since 2009, primarily the Tamar and Leviathan fields, have changed that picture somewhat in recent years, and I don't want to overstate the no natural resources framing beyond what's currently accurate. But even accounting for that, Israel's gas exports do not come close to explaining or offsetting the scale of American funding it receives, and the original premise, that this is not an alliance built on America securing access to resources it needs, still holds.

On intelligence sharing specifically, the actual documented record is more complicated than a simple story of Israel withholding what it promises. What's better documented is a relationship that has occasionally run in the opposite direction, with friction over how intelligence flows both ways. The United States has, at points, restricted intelligence sharing with Israel, including a documented suspension of a live drone feed over Gaza during the Biden administration over concerns about how the information was being used.[40] On the other side, Israel has its own documented history of intelligence friction with Washington, most notably the case of Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel after providing it with a substantial volume of classified American material. A June 2026 piece in Responsible Statecraft, citing a former senior CIA official, described the relationship in blunter terms, arguing Israel has functioned as much like an intelligence rival to the United States as a partner at various points, and noted the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency had reportedly raised its counterintelligence threat assessment involving Israel.[41]

I want to be careful here and not overclaim. The intelligence relationship between the two countries is not one of simple, one directional Israeli failure to deliver. It is a more complicated, occasionally adversarial dynamic sitting underneath a public alliance, and I think that complexity is itself worth surfacing, because it complicates the clean narrative of unconditional, reciprocal trust that's often used to justify the scale of American funding.

Opinion I'm 25 years old, and I think it's fair to say a lot of people my age are asking harder questions about this relationship than previous generations did. We're the ones who will be paying down the interest on this war's costs, we're the demographic most likely to be asked to serve if this escalates further, and I don't think it's unreasonable to look at 38 billion dollars in guaranteed funding, a documented history of intelligence friction running in both directions, and a war we were pulled into on shifting justifications, and ask what exactly the United States is getting in return. I don't think that makes me anti Israel. I think it makes me someone asking my government to justify its spending the same way I'd ask it to justify any other expenditure of this size.

I want to lay out, as plainly as I can and grounded in what's actually documented, what Israel stands to gain from this conflict, because I think it's the clearest of the strategic pictures in this entire war.

Israel entered 2026 having already spent roughly two years dismantling the network Iran built around it. Israeli operations in 2024 significantly degraded Hamas as a governing military force in Gaza and killed much of Hezbollah's senior leadership in Lebanon between September and November of that year, an operation that also helped enable the fall of the pro Iran Assad government in Syria.[42] By the time the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, that surrounding network, the ring of fire of Iran aligned proxy groups meant to pressure Israel from multiple directions at once, had already been substantially weakened.[43] The February strikes and the broader war that followed extended that same campaign directly into Iran itself, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeting the country's ballistic missile program, naval capacity, and nuclear infrastructure.

The strategic logic from Israel's side is not hidden or speculative. CSIS analysis from May 2026 noted that even after months of strikes, Iran likely retained enough highly enriched uranium to construct a small, rudimentary nuclear weapon, meaning locating and removing that material remained central to actually completing the stated goal of eliminating the program.[44] Israeli defense officials, in reporting from August 2026, described the operation in more modest terms than total elimination, characterizing it as having bought Israel time against the nuclear threat and pushed the danger further out than either the original 2015 nuclear deal or the pre war status quo had managed, while acknowledging Iran had since worked to reestablish some of its severed connections to Hezbollah.[45] Israeli officials have also expressed concern in that same reporting about the U.S. potentially constraining Israel's ability to strike Iran again in the future, a dynamic that did not exist to the same degree before Washington became this directly and militarily involved.

What this amounts to is a war in which Israel receives the core strategic benefit, a degraded Iranian nuclear program, a weakened missile and proxy network, and additional time before that threat can fully reconstitute, while the direct military cost of achieving it, in dollars, equipment, and American lives, has been substantially absorbed by the United States. Israel has certainly borne its own costs in this war, including missile and drone strikes that have killed civilians and disrupted daily life inside the country. I don't want to minimize that. But the strategic outcome Israel sought against Iran's nuclear and proxy infrastructure is one the United States fought to help deliver, at a price paid in significant part by American service members and taxpayers rather than Israeli ones.

I think there's a piece of this that deserves its own attention, because it complicates any simple story about who the good guys are in this broader regional realignment. The same degradation of Hezbollah that helped tip the balance in Israel's favor also removed a key prop underneath Bashar al Assad's government in Syria, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, led by Ahmed al Sharaa, moved into Damascus and toppled Assad in December 2024 as a direct result.[46]

Al Sharaa's history is not a matter of dispute. Under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al Jolani, he founded and led al Nusra Front, al Qaeda's official branch in Syria, after being radicalized as a fighter for al Qaeda in Iraq and spending five years in U.S. military detention at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.[47] The United States placed a 10 million dollar bounty on him in 2017 and formally designated him a terrorist.[48] Verified footage places a woman's 2015 execution, carried out by firing squad on charges of corruption and prostitution, under the authority of a court system operating within al Nusra's territory while al Sharaa led the organization, the same official later named Syria's interim justice minister under his government.[49]

Despite that record, the United States has extended significant recognition to al Sharaa's government since Assad's fall. President Trump met with him in Riyadh in May 2025 and announced the lifting of American sanctions on Syria.[50] The United States formally removed al Sharaa's own terrorist designation shortly afterward, and the U.N. Security Council lifted its sanctions on him the same week.[51] By November 2025, al Sharaa had visited the White House, the first Syrian head of state ever to do so, where Trump praised him personally and extended sanctions relief further.[52]

Opinion I think it's worth saying plainly, this is a man whose formative years were spent fighting for al Qaeda, whose organization carried out public executions under his leadership, and whose own justice minister presided over one on camera, and the United States has now welcomed him to the White House as a partner. I don't say that to argue Assad was preferable, he wasn't, his regime's brutality is well documented and outside the scope of what I'm arguing here. I say it because I think it's fair to ask whether a war fought partly to weaken Iran's regional network ended up trading one set of bad actors for another, and whether Washington's willingness to embrace al Sharaa this quickly says more about geopolitical convenience than it does about any actual commitment to the principles it claims to be fighting for.

I don't think this war can be fully evaluated without looking past the Middle East entirely, because two of America's principal global rivals are benefiting from it in ways that have little to do with Iran itself.

Start with Russia. Moscow entered 2026 in a difficult fiscal position, having built its federal budget around an assumption of roughly 60 dollars per barrel of oil while absorbing years of Western sanctions tied to its war in Ukraine. The eruption of war in the Gulf sent Brent crude surging toward 120 dollars a barrel, and in some reporting as high as 126 dollars.[53] CSIS analysis estimates Russia could accrue between 45 billion and 151 billion dollars in additional budget revenue in 2026 as a direct result of that price spike, revenue that flows straight into funding Moscow's ongoing war effort in Ukraine.[54] This is not a side effect anyone in Washington intended, but it is a direct and quantifiable consequence of a war the United States chose to enter.

Russia's involvement has not been limited to passively collecting a windfall. U.S. officials report that Russia has provided Iran with intelligence, including satellite data on American warship and aircraft positions in the region, assistance that has reportedly enabled more precise Iranian retaliatory strikes against U.S. forces.[55] Sourced reporting on Russia's role in the conflict describes this as consistent with a broader pattern of military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran that intensified during the Ukraine war, with Iran supplying drones and missiles to Russia in exchange for advanced systems like S 400 air defenses.

China's position is more cautious but no less self interested. Beijing has continued purchasing sanctioned Iranian oil throughout the conflict and has provided Iran with dual use technology, including missile components and geospatial intelligence, while avoiding any direct military commitment.[56] The United States has sanctioned Chinese companies specifically for processing Iranian crude and allegedly supplying satellite data used to target American and allied forces. China has used its diplomatic position to coordinate with Russia at the United Nations while publicly condemning the U.S. Israeli strikes, all without spending a single dollar or losing a single soldier.

Defense analysts have been direct about what this adds up to. A Small Wars Journal analysis from August 2026 describes Russia and China as quietly converting Washington's exertion into strategic advantage, and multiple outlets, including CSIS, frame the war as accelerating the consolidation of a Russia China Iran alignment at precisely the moment American resources, military attention, and diplomatic credibility are consumed in the Gulf.[57] One analysis specifically ties this to the broader U.S. China rivalry, noting that a Middle East where Iran can rely on Chinese and Russian backing gives Beijing a way of stretching American focus and military capacity across multiple theaters simultaneously, a dynamic with direct relevance to any future crisis involving Taiwan.[58]

Opinion I think this is the part of the calculus that gets the least attention in the domestic debate over this war, and it shouldn't. Every dollar of additional oil revenue funding Russia's war in Ukraine, every piece of intelligence China and Russia feed to Iran to help it kill or wound American service members, and every ounce of diplomatic capital Beijing gains by watching Washington overextend itself in the Gulf is a cost of this war that has nothing to do with Iran's nuclear program and everything to do with handing our actual long term rivals a strategic gift. If the goal was ever to weaken adversaries and strengthen American standing in the world, this war has, so far, done the opposite for the two countries that matter most.

I've laid out the pieces individually across the last several sections. I want to put them side by side here, because I think the asymmetry only becomes fully visible when you see it all at once.

Israel benefits. Its most significant regional threat network, built around Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran's broader axis of resistance, has been substantially degraded, and its most dangerous long term threat, an Iranian nuclear weapon, has been pushed further out of reach, even if not eliminated entirely. Israel absorbed real costs of its own in missile and drone strikes, but the core military campaign against Iran's nuclear and missile infrastructure, the most expensive and dangerous part of this fight, was carried out substantially by the United States military, funded by American taxpayers, at the cost of American lives.

Russia benefits. A war it had no hand in starting has driven global oil prices high enough to hand Moscow tens of billions of dollars in unplanned revenue, funding a war in Ukraine that directly opposes stated American interests, while Russian intelligence assistance to Iran has contributed to the deaths and injuries of American service members in the Gulf.

China benefits. It has continued purchasing discounted Iranian oil, deepened its economic and military relationship with Tehran, and watched American military resources, political attention, and diplomatic capital consumed by a conflict thousands of miles from Taiwan, the actual long term flashpoint most likely to determine the future of American influence in Asia.

Now look at who has not benefited. The Muslim majority nations in the region that host American forces, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia among them, have taken Iranian retaliatory strikes on their own soil, including strikes that killed and wounded their own soldiers and citizens, for hosting a war that was never theirs to begin with. These are countries with no stake in whether Iran's nuclear program advances or collapses in the way the United States or Israel does, and no vote in the decision that put their territory in the crosshairs.

And the United States itself has not benefited, at least not in any way the numbers support. Eighteen American service members are dead. Hundreds more are wounded. The war's stated objective has shifted at least three times since February. Global oil markets have been destabilized in a way that hurts American consumers alongside everyone else. A majority of the American public opposed this war from its opening weeks and continues to oppose it now, five months in, according to nearly every major pollster tracking it. And two of the three countries with genuinely global strategic ambitions, the two America should be most focused on outmaneuvering over the next several decades, have used this war as an opportunity to strengthen their own positions at America's expense.

I don't think this is a complicated picture once it's laid out plainly. This is a war where the benefits flow disproportionately to one ally and two rivals, and the costs flow disproportionately to the United States and to regional partners who had no say in the matter. That is not a foreign policy success by any definition I'm familiar with. It's a transfer of American blood and treasure into outcomes that serve everyone's interests except America's own.

Opinion Everything I've laid out in this piece points to the same conclusion, and I want to state it directly rather than leave it implied. This war does not serve American interests. It never did, and five months in, the case for it has only gotten weaker, not stronger.

Opinion We were told this war was about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. By the administration's own account, that objective was substantially achieved months ago. We are still fighting. The mission moved to eliminating Iran's leadership, then to reopening a strait Iran hadn't even closed until our continued strikes provoked it to. Each time one justification lost its footing, another took its place, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it's what happens when a war doesn't have a real, fixed objective in the first place, when the objective was always going to be whatever kept the war going.

Opinion We were told, implicitly if not explicitly, that this was a continuation of the fight against the kind of terrorism that has actually threatened Americans at home. It isn't. Iran is a Shia nation, and the terrorism that has reached our shores for a quarter century has overwhelmingly come from Sunni extremist ideology that has, more often than not, treated Iran as an enemy rather than an ally. That distinction was never explained to the public, and I think it should have been, because it undercuts one of the emotional pillars this war has leaned on.

Opinion We were told to trust that this alliance, and the tens of billions of dollars we've committed to it, rests on a foundation of mutual benefit and shared intelligence. What I found instead was a more complicated, occasionally adversarial relationship that doesn't match the simple story we're usually given, sitting underneath a war where Israel gets the strategic benefit and America absorbs the military cost.

Opinion And we were never told, because I don't think anyone in Washington wanted to say it out loud, that Russia and China would be among this war's biggest winners. Not Iran. Not us. Two of the countries most invested in seeing American power decline, cashing in on higher oil prices and a distracted, overextended United States, while we bury eighteen of our own.

Opinion I am 25 years old. I did not choose this war, and neither did most of the people my age who would be the ones asked to fight it if it escalates further. I don't think that makes me naive, and I don't think it makes me unpatriotic to say that loving this country means asking it to spend our lives and our money on things that actually serve us. This war has not done that. It has enriched Moscow, extended a strategic gift to Beijing, and secured Israel's regional position, all while asking American families to bury their sons and daughters for a mission that keeps changing its name.

Opinion I don't have a tidy solution to the broader instability in the Middle East, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But I know what withdrawal from a war without a fixed purpose looks like, because I watched us finally do it in Afghanistan after twenty years, and I watched what that cost us in credibility and blood along the way. I would rather we learn that lesson now, five months in, than twenty years and a trillion dollars from now. This war was never ours to fight. I think it's past time we said so.