This Is How an Autocrat Goes to War

 

Opinion

Michelle Goldberg

This Is How an Autocrat Goes to War

 

Feb. 20, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/opinion/trump-iran-public-opinion.html

Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

 

I never imagined I’d miss being lied to by George W. Bush and his henchmen.

 

When the Bush administration wanted to go to war with Iraq, it undertook a full-court press to propagandize the American people. Administration officials leaked false information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a deceptive presentation at the United Nations. In Congress, many Democrats, succumbing either to relentless public pressure or their own hawkish instincts, joined with Republicans to authorize an invasion.

 

This mendacious campaign was shameful and despicable, and helped create today’s national atmosphere of corrosive cynicism and nihilistic paranoia. But it was, in retrospect, a tacit acknowledgment that public opinion mattered, that a president couldn’t start a war without convincing Americans it was necessary. It was a manipulation of democratic deliberation rather than a negation of it.

 

Compare that episode to Donald Trump’s threatened war with Iran. On Wednesday, Axios’s well-sourced reporter Barak Ravid warned, “The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. It could begin very soon.” America has undertaken the largest air power buildup in the region since the Iraq war. Outlets including The New York Times have reported that the military has given Trump the option to strike as soon as this weekend.

 

Not only has Congress not authorized such a war, it has barely even debated it. The administration has not bothered to explain, either to Congress or the American people, why it might bomb Iran or what it hopes to achieve. “There haven’t been any briefings about a military strategy,” said the Democratic representative Ro Khanna, who is working with his Republican colleague Thomas Massie to force a vote on an antiwar measure.

 

Most reporting indicates that the White House is planning for a campaign far more intense and sustained than last year’s bombing of Iran or the abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. But we don’t know if Trump and his team are after regime change, and if they are, what they think comes next. This is how an autocracy goes to war, without even a pretense that the consent of the governed matters.

 

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At the center of the conflict between America and Iran is Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump claims he destroyed eight months ago, at the close of Israel’s 12-day war. Back then, a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that America’s bombing campaign set Iran’s program back by less than six months. But to this day, a page on the White House website proclaims, “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise Are Fake News.” The administration apparently feels no need to justify a potential war to end a program that it claims it already eliminated.

 

The administration is also reportedly demanding that Iran curtail its ballistic missile program and end its support for regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. It is unclear whether these demands are serious or simply a negotiating tactic, but they seem to be red lines for Iran.

 

“I don’t know whether it’s pretextual or genuine,” Rob Malley, Joe Biden’s special envoy for Iran, said of the Trump administration’s conditions. Given that Iran was probably bound to refuse, he said, the Trump team’s position could be “simply part of a Kabuki game to be able to say, ‘We tried diplomacy.’”

 

So far, the administration has scarcely bothered to elaborate the reasoning behind these demands. After all, Iran’s missiles, and the militias it supports, threaten Israel far more than they do the United States. If you take the administration’s stance at face value, it’s hard to square it with Trump’s America First campaign rhetoric.

 

To be clear: I don’t think Trump would go to war to protect Israel. Rather, I assume Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedeviled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, which he’s subjecting to a devastating fuel blockade. “He is now enamored with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said Malley.

 

If that’s true, there are parallels to Bush’s drive toward Iraq: By many accounts, he wanted to outdo his father, to be the president bold enough to eliminate Saddam Hussein after others had failed. His combination of narcissism and resentful insecurity made him think he could and should remake the world.

 

The Iraq war’s most devastating consequences were, of course, in the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of people died. But the war’s wreckage also contributed to increasing derangement at home, including a resurgence of antisemitism, as people like Tucker Carlson blamed Zionists for tricking them into supporting an invasion. Should Trump pull America into a needless war with Iran, the fallout could be worse. Trump would, after all, be betraying his isolationist campaign promises for reasons no one quite understands in order to fight a war that benefits Israel, at a time when conspiracy theories about Jews are raging through the American populace.

 

Trump’s last two significant military interventions, in Iran and Venezuela, both went smoothly, perhaps increasing his confidence that he can bomb other countries without consequence. But Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, fears this time may be different. “You have a regime that is cornered and it is very likely to lash out, because it feels an existential angst,” he told me.

 

Iran responded with restraint when Trump, during his first term, killed the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani. It responded with restraint when Trump bombed it last year. The administration might conclude from this that Iran is too weak to strike back. Vaez thinks that’s a miscalculation. Iran, he said, has concluded that “restraint only invites more aggression. And so this time around, they want to respond, and they will respond, in a way that is marked not by restraint, but by recklessness.”

 

Americans are not prepared to accept casualties in this arbitrary war, or to make any sacrifices at all. As Jack Hunter notes in Responsible Statecraft, in March 2003, a Gallup poll showed 72 percent of Americans supporting war with Iraq. By contrast, in recent surveys, fewer than 30 percent of respondents back military action in Iran.

 

Trump isn’t trying to persuade the country that war is in their interests. All that matters is whether he thinks it’s in his.