Trump’s Iran chaos is not a bug. It’s a feature.

March 3, 2026 2

“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” – Herbert Hoover

This nation is at war again. Or perhaps more precisely: Donald Trump is at war again.

It is stunning to think that in a record-setting State of the Union address, for all of his baiting and bloviating, for all of his lies, this president did not dare to make the case before the American people that his administration had deemed Iran an imminent threat to our national security.

The confirmation of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death counts as this administration’s second removal of a head of state — straight regime change from a president who campaigned on an “America first” policy that would not engage in regime change or the painstaking nation-building that often is required in its wake. Iran and Venezuela also represent a specific front against Trump’s billionaire oil buddies, but that is another matter.

What we are witnessing is not merely another military action or an oil-heist money grab disguised as American compassion for the citizens of a nation under dictatorial rule. It is the ongoing execution of a primeval directive, a governing instinct that privileges chaos over stability, disruption over diplomacy, spectacle over substance.

War is primitive. It always has been. Even as we stream it in 4K on our phones, even as drones and satellites render it hyper-modern, war remains the oldest form of politics.

And yet, within this administration, war is not simply reactive. It is strategic disorder.

THE MAGA OBJECTIVE

MAGA’s regressive domestic vision is mirrored in its foreign policy. This administration has systematically unraveled alliances and destabilized regions once managed through diplomatic equilibrium. For the architects of this worldview, chaos is not collateral damage; it is infrastructure.

Autocrats, oligarchs, and billionaires thrive in the disorder created by this primeval impulse. Markets fluctuate. Resources that the people need become less and less accessible. Privatization thrives, and the billionaire class reaps the lion’s share of the profits.

And Iran, long destabilized and targeted, becomes once again the testing ground.

To speak honestly about Iran requires some historical clarity. In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. His offense? Nationalizing Iranian oil, which the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had long controlled.

The UK and the United States, vying for control of Iran’s vast oil reserves, responded with Operation Ajax, a CIA- and MI6-assisted coup that removed Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah.

That CIA-assisted regime change did not simply alter a government. It reshaped Iranian political consciousness. It animated decades of distrust. It taught Iranians that Western democracy was conditional and only welcome so long as it did not threaten Western corporate interests.

Porochista Khakpour, the critically acclaimed Iranian American novelist and essayist who came to the United States in the early 1980s on the heels of the Iranian hostage crisis, put it plainly when I spoke with her:

“Iran is a really, really sad case. It’s a devastating case, and you have to know your history all the way to even before Mossadegh and the regime change in 1953, when Iran really had a chance at being a democracy. We had a real chance at a democracy, and then the history of Iran has just been devastating. It’s been monarchy to theocracy.”

THE TWISTED TALE OF IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Monarchy to theocracy. The Shah’s authoritarian modernization, backed by U.S. arms and intelligence, eventually gave way to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, followed by the hostage crisis, American imperial rage and Iranian repression.

But even the nuclear issue requires historical honesty. The United States supported the early development of Iran’s nuclear program under the Shah as part of the “Atoms for Peace” initiative ( as is often the case, the Orwellian memes make themselves). Washington once saw nuclear technology in Iran as a form of modernization. Only after the revolution did the same program become an existential threat.

Predators change language, not appetite. Khakpour’s own family history intersects with that paradox: “My great uncle, Akbar Etemad… was called the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.” The nuclear story has never been as simple as good guys vs. bad guys.

Please remember that the United States is still the only nation to have ever used nuclear bombs in combat, massacring hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The global nuclear story is entangled in Cold War calculations, oil politics, regional rivalries, and broken promises.

Khakpour does not romanticize the Islamic Republic. She was unequivocal in our interview: “I also don’t pretend that I love the Islamic Republic’s regime. I mean, they are murderers… mandatory hijab is already against Islamic law. You can’t require anyone to do anything. I’m very frustrated with both halves of my hyphen,” she tells me.

For Khapour, “Iranian exceptionalism is a lot like American exceptionalism.” And yet, she rejects the logic of annihilation: “It’s just the most devastating situation. It’s just like predators targeting a country that’s already been devastated by generations of predators.”

Iran has endured monarchy, coup, theocracy, sanctions, assassinations, cyberwarfare, proxy battles, and now direct strikes. And within the country, movements have risen saying “no” to both monarchy and theocracy: “All sorts of people in Iran are saying no to the Islamic Republic, but also no to monarchy,” says Khapour. “They don’t want to be told what to do by outsiders.”

This is the part that war erases: the internal struggle for democratic possibility. Instead, bombs fall. Khakpour was distraught on news of the early reports after the first strikes: “Already we know today that dozens and dozens of schoolgirls were killed… They’re killing little girls — literally. And just wait… It’s going to be devastating.”

War’s first victims are never the men who declare it. Herbert Hoover’s quote echoes across every battlefield, across the globe.

People of color now make up approximately 43% of the United States military. Brown people killing brown people so that the ultra-wealthy can leverage instability in oil markets, reconstruction contracts, and geopolitical dominance.

It is a financial empire sustained by economic asymmetry and racialized labor.

Khakpour sees the class dimension clearly: “I think it’s very important that people do highlight that this is Israel and the U.S.’s war and the billionaire class is very much a part of this whole scheme… they’re the people that obviously profit from this.”

WHY GO TO WAR NOW?

War is never only about ideology. It is about markets. And Iran is no minor player.

“Look at where Iran is located on the map. Strategically, it’s a very desirable country…” says Khapour.

Geography is destiny in imperial thinking. Oil corridors. Shipping lanes. Regional dominance. Expansionist ambitions, whether acknowledged or denied, hover in the background.

Khakpour also warns about the politics of the Iranian diaspora. “Unfortunately, a lot of the loudest people we’ve had in our diaspora… have been conservative right-wing voices.”

And through these over-platformed voices, there has been a consistent weaponization of minority fears inside Iran: “Iran has so many minorities… Kurds or Azeris or Baluchis… Reza Pahlavi is making these posts that try to ignite more phobias… This is also very vile.”

Pahlavi is the former crown prince, the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Shah and Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, who is positioning himself for power in Iran as he publicly applauds the fall of the Ayatollah. Khapour lifts up figures like Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned yet resolute: “These brilliant women that have been put in prison and still in prison… are fighting a good fight.”

Iran is not a cartoon villain. Nor is it a utopia. It is a nation of 93 million human beings navigating the wreckage of history. Some of her friends inside Iran, in moments of despair, have said: “At this point, I don’t even care who bombs us. I don’t want to be alive.”

Despair is not consent. Trump’s triumphant boasts in June 2025 about “completely destroying” Iran’s nuclear program was less about fact and more about performance. But the deeper directive is chaos. They’ve worked to unravel NATO, undermine global climate agreements, attack international courts, escalate trade wars and more.

Khakpour fears the inevitable escalation: “From my perspective, it’s going to end in war and more devastation… I think it’s going to be a very bloody war.”

And she warns Americans, too: “I think Americans are also in the form of danger themselves… you have these generations of people seeing their entire families… destroyed. And they know where it comes from. It comes from the West.” Blowback is not mythology. It is historical pattern.

Perhaps her most radical statement was also the simplest: “All of them are bad… All the leaders in the Middle East are bad. All the leaders here in the West are bad. Just stop looking to be led… Community organizers… sit with us. They’re with the people.”

This is where the primeval directive can be interrupted, by solidarity against the xenophobia and militarism that so often feed each other. When Khakpour arrived in the United States in the early 1980s, anti-Iranian sentiment was loud and unapologetic: “When I came to this country in the early 80s, they were very loud about hating Iranians… I never felt secure in this place.”

If there is a primeval directive animating this administration, it is the belief that destabilization strengthens power. But history suggests otherwise. It breeds cycles. It breeds resentment. It breeds violence. And it leaves nations devastated.

The question is not whether leaders will continue to declare war. They will.

The question is whether we will continue to follow them.