From
‘peace president’ to Operation Epic Fury: Donald Trump’s road to war
Julian
Borger in London and Andrew Roth in Washington
In
reality, US president’s opposition to foreign entanglements had only ever been
partial
Sat 7 Mar
2026 09.00 GMT
Donald
Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while on
board Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus
Christi, Texas.
Trump was
on his way to the port city to give a speech titled American Energy Dominance
and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texas Republican politicians
including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, about his
options in Iran.
Also
present on the plane in the countdown to Operation Epic Fury was a veteran film
star, Dennis Quaid. At some point in the flight, Cruz filmed Quaid sitting next
to Trump and persuaded the actor to reprise his role as Ronald Reagan in a 2024
reverential biopic, so that Cruz could frame the encounter as “two great
American presidents”.
Speaking
as Reagan, Quaid declared Trump was “like me on steroids”. It was a highly
stylised passing of the flame from the patron saint of Republican hawks to
their current hero.
Not
mentioned was the fact that Quaid had also played a slapstick version of George
W Bush in a 2006 film, American Dreamz, as a clueless good-ol’-boy president
manipulated by war-hungry and oil-thirsty aides into invading Iraq, unaware
there were more than “two kinds of Iraqistanis”.
The
shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the
events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone
unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House.
Trump
had, after all, campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars”
begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built
on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of
2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
In the
space of a few months, however, the “peace president” became the first US
leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary.
The
factors behind this apparent transformation in the run-up to Operation Epic
Fury are many and various, and include Trump’s long-proven susceptibility to
persuasion by foreign strongmen, his showman’s knack for stirring up sensation
to distract from problems, a stubborn adversary and the sheer momentum of a
vast military machine once it is set in motion.
In
reality, the road Trump had to travel was shorter than it appeared. His
opposition to war had only been partial. He was against large-scale infantry
wars, but has shown himself ready to use the US military’s overwhelming
superiority in air power to punish enemies. He risked all-out war with Iran in
his first term by assassinating its most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani, in
January 2020, and bombed Iran’s nuclear sites last June in Operation Midnight
Hammer.
In his
second term, Trump has seemingly become intoxicated with the overwhelming
military capabilities at his disposal.
A key
date in the path to war with Iran was 3 January this year, when US special
forces pulled off an extraordinary operation in Venezuela, abducting its
recalcitrant and heavily guarded leader, Nicolás Maduro, in the middle of the
night without a single US fatality.
It was a
close-run thing. One of the helicopter pilots flying special forces into
Maduro’s stronghold was shot repeatedly in the lower body but managed to keep
control of the aircraft. If it had crashed, killing everyone on board, the
operation could have been aborted, and Trump would have very likely lost his
appetite for military action.
As it
happened, the Maduro kidnapping was, for Trump, a made-for-television success,
a tale of heroics that diverted attention from gathering threats at home, most
importantly the pressure on his administration to release all its files on
Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier who ran a child sex-trafficking ring.
The president is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the files, and possibly
far more. He has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the matter.
However
desirable the distraction of foreign military operations must have appeared,
the decision to opt for an all-out assault on Iran intended to fatally weaken
the regime, rather than targeted strikes on nuclear and military targets, still
represented an enormous gamble for Trump.
The
president alone would be able to determine the time and circumstances of the
start of the war, but others would have a say over when it ended, most
importantly the Iranian regime itself.
Benjamin
Netanyahu played a leading role in bringing Trump around to the cause of regime
change. The Israeli prime minister visited Trump in the “winter White House” at
Mar-a-Lago in late December, reportedly asking for US approval for more Israeli
strikes on Iranian missile sites.
Trump
gave his support, but over the next few weeks that pledge ballooned into a
commitment to a joint onslaught to bring down Iran’s Islamic Republic.
The
successful Maduro operation clearly played a role in raising Trump’s military
aspirations, but so did events inside Iran. When protests over dire economic
conditions spread across the country, Trump used his social media platform to
promise the demonstrators that the regime “will pay a big price” and that “HELP
IS ON ITS WAY.” At the time, however, it was a pledge he was not in a position
to back up.
The US
had no aircraft carriers in the region, limited numbers of warplanes, and its
40,000 troops spread around bases in the Middle East did not have adequate
protection against the inevitable Iranian missile retaliations.
The scale
and ferocity of the protests changed the CIA and the Mossad’s assessments of
the weakness of the regime. According to reports in the US and Israeli media,
the two intelligence agencies became more confident that it could be brought
down. Even if it meant that power flowed to the generals in the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps at the expense of the ayatollahs, the agencies
thought a more secular leadership could ultimately be more pragmatic, and
willing to do a deal.
Meanwhile,
another important switch in the Middle East had turned towards war. According
to the Washington Post, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, made
multiple private phone calls to Trump over the course of February, privately
urging him to attack Iran, while publicly insisting on a peaceful solution.
By the
time Netanyahu returned to the US a few weeks later for a White House meeting
with Trump on 11 February, regime change in Iran had become the preferred
option.
Joint
planning by the US and Israeli militaries had already been under way for weeks,
and it would take another fortnight for the preparations to be complete, in
particular for a second US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, to arrive in
the region from the Caribbean, where it had been involved in ousting Maduro.
Publicly
at least, Trump insisted he would prefer a diplomatic solution to the threats
supposedly posed by Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes – threats Trump
claimed to have “obliterated” in June but was now arguing had been
reconstituted.
Trump’s
negotiators, Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, met
Iranian diplomats three times in February. Opinions differ on whether the
process was a sham from the outset, intended to give the US and Israel time to
complete their military buildup, but the gaps between the two sides’ starting
positions were anyway too wide to be bridged.
At the
final meeting in Geneva on 26 February, Iran and the Omani officials acting as
broker pointed at unprecedented concessions Tehran had floated, such as giving
up its entire stock of highly enriched uranium, a strategic asset. But Trump
wanted far more, including a permanent cessation of Iran’s uranium enrichment
and steep curbs on missiles. Witkoff told Fox News the president could not
understand “why they haven’t capitulated”.
By the
time the delegations met in Geneva on Thursday last week, the US had amassed
the biggest military force in the Middle East since Bush led the invasion of
Iraq 23 years earlier. To have accepted a diplomatic solution short of
surrender would have looked like weakness.
The sheer
scale of joint military planning with Israel, to the extent that much of the
orders were put out in English and Hebrew, and the sheer detail of the
targeting plans, assisted by AI tools that Israel had used extensively in Gaza,
created a forward momentum of its own.
The US
secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told reporters on Monday that Washington was
aware Israel was going to launch an attack and that Iran would immediately
strike back against US bases in the region, forcing US forces to strike
pre-emptively.
“We knew
that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said. “We knew that that
would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we
didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would
suffer higher casualties.”
That
version, part of a wider incoherence over war aims, was hastily denied by
Trump. The scale of the US commitment and close joint planning make it unlikely
that Washington was taken by surprise.
The
strikes were originally scheduled for 25 February, according to some reports,
then delayed to allow for the Geneva meeting the next day, and then put off
again, after intelligence reports that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, would be at his compound in central Tehran on Saturday morning, along
with key defence and security leaders.
Trump
gave the order on Air Force One at 3.38pm for the attack to commence.
“Operation
Epic Fury is approved,” the order said. “No aborts. Good luck.”
When he
landed at Corpus Christi less than 20 minutes later, he fended off questions on
whether he had made a decision.
“I’d
rather not tell you,” Trump said. “You would have had the greatest scoop in
history.”
After his
speech about US energy dominance, the presidential entourage flew on to
Mar-a-Lago.
The
defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and Gen Dan
Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, had already landed unannounced
at Palm Beach and were in Mar-a-Lago’s improvised parallel situation room –
where Trump had watched the Maduro operation in awe the previous month.
In his
first term, Trump had launched missiles at Syria while China’s Xi Jinping was
visiting the Florida resort, and the two leaders then ate what Trump described
as the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”. Among
some, the place had become known as War-a-Lago.
As the
sun set over Florida last Friday, partygoers in ballgowns and tuxedos were
dancing at a black-tie fundraiser, and Trump made an appearance in a dark suit
and white trucker hat emblazoned with “USA”.
He told
his guests that a planned charity auction might have to be cancelled as he was
busy with Iran. “Have a good time,” he said. “I gotta go to work.”
He then
passed through layers of security into the situation room draped in black
curtains, where an operational map showing US deployments across the Middle
East had been set up on an easel.
A video
link had been established with the situation room in the White House, where the
vice-president, JD Vance, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi
Gabbard, were. They were longstanding opponents of foreign wars and regime
change who had recently been brought round to the cause. On this occasion, they
were presented only as observers.
The
operation began at 1.15am Florida time, 9.45am Iran time. Khamenei had already
made preparations for his death and chose not to flee Tehran. He clearly
preferred martyrdom to surrender, but may not have been expecting a strike that
morning. The regime assumed that the attack would come at night.
It was as
if the regime was laying its head on the block for decapitation. As many as 30
air-launched Israeli missiles converged on the supreme leader’s compound,
killing him and dozens of senior officials in seconds.
More than
100 US aircraft also took part in the initial onslaught, as well as
sea-launched Tomahawk missiles.
“This was
a massive, overwhelming attack across all domains of warfare, striking more
than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours,” Caine said.
Trump
presented the massive assault as an opportunity for the Iranian people to throw
off the 47-year-old regime and take over the government. “It will be yours to
take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” the president
said.
The
administration has since scaled down the regime change talk, but Trump has
continued to insist on his steadfastness in pursuing war, pointing to his
“virtually unlimited supply” of weapons.
“Wars can
be fought ‘forever’ and very successfully,” he said, marking the complete
turning of the wheel, from forever wars to the “peace president” and back
again.
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