Be a part of the story
Why we should all view the Iran strikes as part of Trump's failing autocratic attempt
Hi friends - You haven’t heard from me in a while. Part of that is due to 2025’s various shocks to the system and wondering how I can best respond. Part of it is that we have a new baby in the house. And I’m also launching a new product soon and thinking about the best role for my newsletter to play in it. Anyway, fear not, Substack Andrew has not disappeared — I may just be evolving into something else.
The events of the past week, though, inspired me to write.
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I am sure that like many of you I am feeling sick to my stomach at Trump’s decision to bomb Iran. For me, the attack feels particularly painful because it recalls the primal wound of my political experience, the Iraq War.
I remember the sense that my agency as a citizen was slowly slipping away as the Bush administration built its propaganda campaign for the war, then the numbness that came as we watched the situation unravel in exactly the way us peaceniks had predicted. It created in me a feeling of being an outsider in American political life that has never completely gone away, except perhaps for a few happy months in the early Obama administration. I vote, I march, I call my legislators, but at the same time I feel like my political philosophy is just stuck screaming, “What are these morons doing?” Moreso on hot days like these, which our kids will remember as the coolest summers of their lives.
Yet the feeling of being an outsider is also useful when resisting a totalitarian regime. One of the ways totalitarianism works is by shifting the sense of what is normal or acceptable. This is perhaps the only project at which Trump has been undeniably successful, as he and his cronies embrace tactics that would make Karl Rove blush, yet attract relatively little social shame. While it can feel crazy-making, it is essential for all of us to retain our ability to say, “This isn’t normal! This isn’t reasonable! This isn’t right!”
Meditating on this idea helps me shake off my numbness and get back to work. And it made me consider a concept that I think might help you do it too.
What is the Iran attack a part of?
In the social innovation method I developed with my friend Jeff Leitner, we used six lenses to help folks view social problems through new eyes. The weirdest of these lenses was parthood. When we look through the parthood lens, we ask, “What larger problem is my problem a part of? And what it is not a part of?” Of course in reality everything in our universe is connected, but changing the frame through which we view a problem can open up new insights and solutions.
There are many contexts in which to view the Iran attack. What I want to do here is to argue that for American citizens, the best way to view the bombing is as one aspect of Trump’s autocratic attempt.
Let me make my argument clearer through contrast.
There are lots of ways to look at any war. My favorite counterintuitive take on all war is to look at it through the lens of climate change — war is one of the most carbon-intensive activities undertaken by human beings. It has victims who have yet to be born. We can’t forget that.
Many people are also necessarily looking at this attack through the lens of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. Morally, that is a perspective I could never deny. But tragically, neither climate impacts nor the lives of Palestinian children have counted for much in the political rhetoric of the United States.
Instead, what seems to be prevailing among elites is an analysis of the Iran attack as a normal act of foreign policy. The best/worst place to read this kind of thinking is The New York Times. Here are two samples.
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken:
The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded. That’s the paradox for many former officials like me who worked on the Iran nuclear problem during previous administrations.
Foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman:
To paraphrase something my friend Nahum Barnea, an Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, said to me the other day: I will unapologetically resist Netanyahu’s annexationist agenda, his refusal to even consider a Palestinian state under secure conditions and his attempt to overthrow Israel’s Supreme Court, as if Israel were not at war with Iran. And I will unapologetically praise Netanyahu for taking on this terrible Iranian regime, as if Israel were not in the grip of its own Bibi-led Jewish supremacists who threaten a more inclusive Middle East in their own way. I will unapologetically praise Trump for efforts to shrink Iran’s nuclear-bomb-making capabilities, as if he were not engaged in a dangerous autocratic project at home. And I will resist with all my might Trump’s autocratic moves at home as if he were not taking on Iran’s autocracy abroad. All are true and need to be said.
One of the great benefits of thinking like an outsider is that you can listen to rhetoric like this and cry: “Bullshit!”
Yes, foreign affairs often requires subtle moral reasoning. Yes, previous presidents carefully contemplated the actions they took against Iran. Yes, in theory, this recent series of events could even change the Middle East in ways that open new opportunities for peace.
But none of that has anything to do with the way Donald Trump thinks, talks, or acts. His attack should not be viewed as part of that rational world.
Instead, we must all remember that every political event in American life is now a part of our own struggle against autocracy. We need to think of this event as a part of that story. For people who don’t have heads of state on speed dial, this is the most relevant way to act in response to these events. They must be viewed as part of Trump’s ongoing assault on the Constitution and our way of life.
What we should think about when we think about Iran
In that context, here are the most important points to consider:
• Trump did not seek our consent. The bunker-buster bombs do not belong to Donald Trump. They belong to you and me, whether you like it or not. Unlike George Bush in the 2000s, Trump did not even pretend to justify the war to the public. He did not make a case to the international community or the U.N. Security Council. The briefing of Congress was sloppy, haphazard, and partisan — far short of what the moment demands.
In case you forgot, the Constitution demands that only Congress can declare war. Disrespecting this principle became normal long before Trump, but even in the 9/11 era, no president has treated the ability to make war as an individual prerogative so thoroughly as Trump has. He does this in the face of polling clearly showing that most Americans, including many Republicans, are against another war in the Middle East. People of all political stripes need to reckon with the fact that Trump just doesn’t care what we think.
• Trump acted impulsively and out of sync with the rest of government. The great fiction of this moment is that there was some ticking time bomb that Israel and the United States went to war in order to defuse. In fact, no credible expert agrees with this. (Click here for a detailed assessment by nuclear proliferation expert Joe Cirincione made before the U.S. entered the war.) Even if Iran had a stockpile of weapons-grade nuclear material (which it still might), its ability to convert that material into a usable weapon is severely limited.
But even if you don’t believe me, the good news is that in addition to the largest military in the world, American citizens pay for a vast intelligence apparatus capable of delivering multiple perspectives on any subject to the president. What does it mean when the president simply chooses to ignore this intelligence, as Trump appears to have done in the case of his Director of National Intelligence? What does it mean when he insists upon facts radically different from those on which the military must rely?
We need to take more seriously the idea that Trump’s motivations for war are coming not from rational security concerns, but instead from the political imagery that dominates his way of thinking. Trump tried to appropriate military power to put down protests in Los Angeles and failed. Trump tried to aggrandize his own image through a totalitarian-style military parade and failed. Trump has asserted that he can end international conflicts through force of will, then failed.
Is it really so unreasonable to imagine that this is merely another attempt to project an image of dominance on a recalcitrant reality? That’s no reason to go to war.
• Trump has no plan for war or peace. One of the strangest aspects of this moment is that there is a real sense in which Trump does not seem to understand what a war is. I wish I meant this in a metaphorical or poetical sense that gave me an excuse to quote “Dulce et Decorum Est.” But I mean it quite literally.
In the first administration, Secretary of Defense James Mattis reportedly had to remind Trump, “The enemy gets a vote.” If only there were someone whispering that in his ear now. In his rhetoric toward Iran, Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” before the strike. To whom? To what terms? Less than 24 hours after the strike, he called for peace, despite being a man who has never forgiven a slight in his life. His vice president says the United States is “not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” a piece of sophistry if there ever was one.
Now, as with Ukraine, Trump is pouring his energy into endless talks and cease-fire “deals.” (Except that he also asserts he “doesn’t care.”) But can a man with no concept of how war works ever build a genuine peace? Instead, what Trump the totalitarian seeks is not peace but control. As with his trade policy, he wants every nation to constantly return to him to validate their well-being, like a sort of reverse George Washington for whom entanglement is a core principle. Presidents like Washington and Eisenhower warned against war because they knew what war was. Trump doesn’t have a clue.
• And as always, Trump is lying without consequence. For better or worse, I have tried to explain some things about the times in which we live to my four-year-old son. I have told him that in America we choose our leaders, and that this time the people chose a bad one. His most persistent question about this, as you might imagine, is “Why?” Why did the people choose a bad president? In my answers, I have not tried to explain economic forces or political polarization or even racism. I have told him, “Because the bad president lied to them.”
We can never lose sight of the fact that lies are at the heart of Trump’s political project and that the heart of our resistance is truth. Every political event based in his lies should be treated as an opportunity to hold him accountable to the truth.
Turning tyranny back against the tyrant
It’s easy to look at all these facts and say, “But Andrew, I already know Trump is a bad person. So what? What can I do?”
This is where parthood becomes important. This isn’t just about Trump being a lying jerk. We must remember not only that Trump is in the midst of an autocratic attempt against American democracy, but also that we now see signs that the autocratic attempt is failing. The people are building a movement. Institutions are finding their spines. New resistance leaders are appearing. While I don’t yet know how it will happen, I believe we are going to win, and Trump will join the Confederacy, McCarthyism, and COINTELPRO as internal enemies to democracy whose perfidy was ultimately exposed.
We need to rethink this foolhardy attack as one more step in how that happens. There are many ways in which Democrats and Congress could use this event to put the tyrant’s feet to the fire. And we should put their feet to the fire until they do so.
A first step would be to demand a basic description of Trump’s decision-making process. The real process, not the tweets. (Needless to say, Pete Hegseth’s contemptuous press conference this morning was totally inadequate.) What matters isn’t how many B-2 bombers we used, but instead where this fits into an overall story of how to keep Americans safe. We have barely begun to demand this, when We the People deserve a minute-by-minute account.
The problem with Trump’s story, as I see it, is Israel. I believe that by his own account, Trump would say that the reason we went to war with Iran is that Israel discovered Iran was close to achieving a nuclear weapon, started a war to pre-empt this possibility, but then couldn’t complete its mission without our bunker bombs. So we intervened militarily to help Israel and hasten the end of the conflict. This story is: “Israel had to win to keep America safe.”
But upon closer inspection, none of that makes sense, even if all the parts of the story are true. Let’s temporarily allow the validity of a “ticking time bomb” scenario where Iran has achieved nuclear capability and the only moral option is to stop them. If that were the case, the logical response would be a sudden attack by the United States and/or Israel based on shared intelligence and military capabilities.
So why would Israel go in first? If they had intelligence we did not have, why was their intelligence superior and how do we know that? If our intelligence was the same, why were we not involved in the attack from the start? If we believe our intelligence was superior and the danger was not imminent, why would we get involved in the war at all? All this suggests that the war was not, in fact, morally necessary but instead a campaign of convenience.
This is where Trump’s rhetoric might shift from “stop the Iranians” to a strange story he is telling about hastening Israeli victory in the war to achieve peace for both sides. But unless the nuclear situation was urgent, that shifts the aim of the war from American national security to some sort of lopsided regional peacekeeping mission. I believe most Americans are with me in rejecting this as a legitimate use of our military might. It would also fall far outside what Trump is allowed to do under the War Powers Act, which centers on threats to our citizens, not our allies’.
And… has American life gone so strange that we cannot say, “Airstrikes are an extremely weird way to achieve peace”?
Many observers have looked at these facts and concluded, “Netanyahu manipulated Trump into helping him win his war.” I think that is a bit too simple. Again, this is where we need to return to the context of Trump’s authoritarian attempt. Even if Netanyahu used all of Trump’s internal psychodrama against him, the most relevant fact for Americans is that we went to war because Trump felt like it. I feel confident that no matter what role Netanyahu played, an investigation of the decision to go to war would reveal not a detached consideration of American interests, but Trump’s notions of his own personal strength and weakness in the world, which he treats as most real than the state of the nation.
That is authoritarianism. That is what it actually is. And it must be brought to the light.
What we do now
That isn’t just a job for Congress and journalists. For those of us who have been involved in the movement against Trump from the start, this is an opportunity to bring in people who are on the fence. The CNN and CBS polling on the strikes not only show that Democrats and independents disapprove, but that even Republican opinion is shaky. Americans do not feel the strikes have made us safer, do not trust Trump to manage the war, do not want a drawn-out war in the Middle East, and do want more Congressional oversight. In the coming weeks, I believe they will also demand transparency on whether we know the attacks were effective or not.
None of this is going to de-radicalize your MAGA uncle. But it might get to your nephew or your aunt. Because war is unlike the issues that become endlessly distorted in our culture war kaleidoscope. There is a reason Americans soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a reason why otherwise straight-ahead MAGA legislators are questioning Trump’s decision. The commander-in-chief role is central to our notions of who the American president and how he or she ought to behave. And Trump’s deep alienation from the concept of military service has always been one of his chief weaknesses as an authoritarian, as a political, and as a human being.
So let’s talk about this war in the streets and with our families and even with strangers. Let’s make people pay attention and care. Let’s make it part of the story about how this tyrant fails.