A War Begun on Instinct

The president is trusting his gut, not Congress.

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In Othello, the villain Iago gives varied and constantly shifting reasons for why he wants to destroy Othello. Shakespeare scholars have generally interpreted that to mean that although none of the individual explanations are all that convincing, the sentiment behind them is crushingly powerful. Iago’s will to destroy has simply gathered so much momentum that it can no longer be stopped.

President Trump’s reasons for striking Iran are similarly shifty and unpersuasive. Is it nuclear weapons? Ballistic missiles? The killing of protesters? A response to a move by Israel?

No explanation alone quite adds up, except one: “a new element of Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine that we’re seeing here, because he and the people around him are willing to take risks and they’re willing to kind of go with their gut in a new way,” says Missy Ryan, an Atlantic staff writer who covers national security and has worked in the Middle East.

“Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday, without offering evidence. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

The advantage of a gut-driven war decision is that it can yield sudden dramatic results. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been a brutal Iranian dictator for nearly four decades. Past American presidents have weighed taking him on, and then decided against it. After Trump ordered strikes, Khamenei was dead within 24 hours. The disadvantage is that following your gut doesn’t account for the past or the future. Trump did not confer with most of our allies, and barely alerted Congress, let alone sought their approval. He did not seem to think through who would succeed Khamenei, or at least, what would happen if certain successors aren’t available. (“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.) The administration didn’t even have adequately prepared U.S. personnel stationed in countries that might be in danger of attack, according to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Missy about what Trump did and did not consider in starting this war. And we talk to Senator Shaheen about how Democrats can responsibly act as a check on the president now that the war has started.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:  The two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies—uncontested airspace.

Hanna Rosin: “Operation Epic Fury” continues, with more casualties, more Middle Eastern countries being drawn in, and more swagger from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth:  Flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli airpower, every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.

[Music]

Rosin: The administration seems to have a great appetite for describing the theater of war in the moment: leaders killed, warships sunk, airspace conquered—

Hegseth: Death and destruction from the sky, all day long.

Rosin: But much less so for the more abstract questions of the war: Why did the U.S. go in in the first place? Why is American blood and money worth the cost? And what is the ultimate goal?

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Later in the show, I talk to Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, about what legislators can do to get answers.

President [Donald] Trump, after all, took the U.S. to war without Congress’s approval, barely notifying them.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the Hill on Monday, he made it seem like Israel had more say in the matter than the branch of the U.S. government that has the actual power to declare war.

Although when Trump was asked the following day if Israel had forced his hand, he replied, essentially, that he had a gut feeling that this was the right moment.

President Donald Trump: We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were gonna attack first. They were going to attack—if we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.

Missy Ryan: It’s been out there for many years that Israel wanted to take care of the Iranian threat, as they thought about it.

Rosin: Atlantic staff writer Missy Ryan.

Ryan: But there’s been a lot of reticence from U.S. leaders in the past because of the fears of the potential effects of unleashing this conflict.

Rosin: Missy spent years as a foreign correspondent based in Baghdad, covering the war in Iraq. She now writes about defense and foreign policy for the magazine. I talked to her about how Trump got past that reticence.

Rosin (in interview): Missy, welcome to the show.

Ryan: Thank you.

Rosin: Were you surprised that we struck at all, or were you surprised that we coordinated this closely with Israel?

Ryan: I don’t think either of those things was particularly surprising, given the months of lead-up that we’ve seen on a military level. There’s been a shifting of military buildup. They’ve had two aircraft carriers. They positioned extra air defenses, extra planes, extra ships in the region.

And President Trump himself has been kind of hinting that it was time that they “do something,” as he said, to take care of Iran’s nuclear threat, which is a little confusing ’cause he did strikes last year that he said, at that time, completely “obliterated” their nuclear capability.

But larger than that, he also said we can’t let Iran be this bad actor in the world in the way it’s been in past decades. And that was a reference to the long history of shadow war between the United States and Iran, and the attacks dating back to the 1980s on American personnel and assets.

It wasn’t surprising that this happened, because we had kind of the prologue in the first administration, where the president would occasionally talk about doing something against Iran. But there were kind of constrainers around him at that time, and that’s no longer the case.

I think it’s also important to mention that President Trump, at this time, is kind of feeling his oats in terms of foreign policy. He has a lot more confidence in his second term in his instincts. And so after the success in the 12-day war last year, where the United States and Israel struck Iran, struck nuclear sites; after the success in toppling Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela; I think Trump comes to the situation—this conversation between him and the Israeli leadership about whether or not to strike [Iran]—he comes to it with a lot of confidence in what American military might can do, about what he personally can do. And I think it’s just a very different moment for his presidency and for him as a leader than we saw in the first term.

Rosin: It’s interesting because some senators and some critics have characterized Israel as controlling or driving the foreign policy. It sounds like you don’t necessarily think Israel had as great a role as people are saying today.

Ryan: I think they do have a role in kind of making the case for this being the moment.

Trump has a complicated relationship with [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, like most American presidents before him have had.

On one hand, Trump has acted strongly and kind of broken with past precedent repeatedly on U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel. In his first term, he recognized the Golan Heights. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He has had a very different position vis-à-vis the whole question of the West Bank than the Biden administration, which was constantly kind of trying to constrain Israeli action in the West Bank and chide the Israelis publicly for what they were doing in the West Bank and in Gaza after the Gaza war began in 2023.

So he has been very supportive of Israel in most ways, but at the same time, he’s also occasionally shown publicly that he gets annoyed with Bibi. I think he felt like Israel has, at times, undermined his agenda, and his agenda was striking big sweeping deals that he could claim as victory.

So I think, clearly, it’s a close relationship and they see shared interest, but I think that Trump also had his own reasons for wanting to do this. I think he sees it as showing himself to be the president that other presidents were too afraid to be: The ayatollah and the Islamic Republic has been a thorn in the side of the United States for decades, and no other president could do it, and Trump did.

Rosin: Just because Israel’s role in this decision making is likely to be very closely scrutinized by a lot of different factions on the right and the left, I just want us to listen to what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said and analyze it, keeping in mind the caveat that Trump himself at a press conference said, No, they didn’t force my hand. If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. So keeping in mind that Trump forcefully denied it, I just wanna listen to what Marco Rubio said and get your brain on dissecting it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

Rosin: Can you analyze that? Because it sounds both like, Yes, we did hit Iran because of Israel, and they forced our hand, but, No, we were doing our own thing, and it’s not because of Israel. So—

Ryan: Yeah, it is a little confusing, to be honest, and it’s interesting to me because how can it be an imminent threat if the imminent threat is your partner that you’re doing this with? And the administration is pushing back strongly on that.

And Rubio is hanging most of the urgency around this as what he’s describing as a tipping point for Iran’s ballistic-missile capability and what he is saying is a buildup, where they’re adding hundreds of missiles every month. And he’s describing it as a tipping point in terms of they’re getting more and more powerful every month, not just on the drones, which they kind of now, at this point, have an endless supply of, but ballistic missiles.

And he says that, at a certain point, the U.S. and Israeli ability to produce enough air-defense interceptors to keep up with the Iranian production, that their ability to do that will slip out of their hands.

Rosin: I need one more level of interpretation. So to a Pentagon person, is that convincing? Are you following the logic, or is it a strain?

Ryan: I follow the logic because, actually, my colleague Nancy Youssef and I reported, in an article that posted this week, the United States does have a problem in terms of its air-defense supplies. It has only a finite number of air-defense interceptor missiles, which are the missiles that you fire up to kind of collide with the incoming enemy missiles.

And Iran has something in the order of 2,000 medium-range ballistic missiles that can reach Israel and 6,000 to 8,000 short-range ballistic missiles that can reach the Gulf. And the United States’ stockpile of air-defense missiles, the number is classified, but it is much smaller than those numbers.

And so the United States has some other systems it can use for drones, but there is a deficit that the United States already has, and the production of those interceptors, which are very high-tech, is much slower.

And so it is true that they have this deficit, but the thing that was puzzling to me is the Iranians have been building up their ballistic-missile supplies for a long time now. And that was before October 7, before the wars that came after that. That was before they got into this kind of cycle of conflict with Israel and then the United States, where they were actually expending a lot of those missiles.

So you would think that they maybe have less now than they did; I don’t know that to be the case. But in any event, the calculus there is somewhat confusing, but we are not privy to the intelligence and the precise numbers on each side, and you have to think the United States has pretty precise numbers.

So that’s the argument that Rubio is making. But I will add, it’s interesting because he kind of pivoted to the ballistic missiles following this briefing that he did for congressional leadership. But Pete Hegseth was talking about the nuclear program. Trump himself has talked about the nuclear program. And then Hegseth also was talking about “retribution” for attacks that the Iranians launched in Iraq against U.S. forces back in the day.

So there’s this whole panoply, cornucopia of different reasons, and none of them feel to me immediate.

Rosin: Like, none of them answer—’cause, as you’re talking, I’m counting five. We’ve got nuclear weapons, ballistic weapons, a worry about our own munitions. We haven’t mentioned regime change yet.

Ryan: (Laughs.) Regime change and also defending protesters and—

Rosin: Oh, right. And Israel and a preemptive launch. So what do you make of this constantly shifting menu of rationale?

Ryan: I think that they were ready to do it and that the circumstances were right for Trump. This may not have been the ideal time from a purely military perspective in terms of when is Iran at its weakest.

It’s no doubt Iran is much weaker than it was in 2022 or the beginning of 2023. That’s for sure. Its proxies are decimated. Israel has talked a lot about the volume of missile launchers that it’s taken out, missile sites, all of that. It’s very true that it is a conducive time from that perspective.

At the end of the day, I think this is more about President Trump and him feeling more ready to use the American military and use military force in a way that other presidents haven’t wanted to and in a way that he thinks is shaping his legacy.

This is, I think, a new element of Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine that we’re seeing here, because he and the people around him are willing to take risks and they’re willing to kind of go with their gut in a new way. And they don’t have the people like [former Defense Secretary] Jim Mattis, they don’t have the people like [former Defense Secretary] Mark Esper being like, Sir, I think we need to think about the second- or third-order effects here. You’re seeing those impulses come to life in a different way.

Rosin: You have covered American wars in the Middle East for such a long time. The idea of war with Iran has always been hanging out there in the background, sort of Iran as an actor. Now that it’s happened in, I would say, a somewhat abrupt way—we knew about the buildup, but it’s not like we got a long explanation, a long debate—how does it land with you?

Ryan: Yeah, it’s interesting because I actually felt—it feels a little bit more familiar because Israel already assassinated, killed, struck Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, the Hezbollah commander; the United States already sent the Delta Force into Caracas to take Nicolás Maduro. So I kind of feel like I’m like the boiling frog a little bit in that none of it is as shocking as it might’ve been if you hadn’t had this kind of incremental lead-up over the course of several years.

But really, this is, like, the big one that we all talked about and feared for so long. I remember being in Iraq in 2007, 2008, 2009. People would talk about, Oh, the Bush administration really just wanted to keep going and go to Tehran, and that just seemed kind of so out of the realm of possibility to be absurd because it would just be so crazily risky, and now you have a scenario that isn’t quite there but very close to it.

Rosin: Right. If someone had told you this in 2010 in Iraq, would it have felt surreal or possible?

Ryan: Oh, yeah, 100 percent. That’s why I feel like the boiling frog, because on one hand, I was, at that time, living with the impacts of a huge use of American military force. When I first went to Iraq, there were, like, 180,000 American troops in Iraq. And we’re not doing that. And so it’s not like there hasn’t been a big, very risky, and ill-conceived use of the American military in the Middle East before, ’cause there has been.

But this is a different setting. It’s a different country. And also, we learned a lot from that war—or we thought we learned a lot—and there are figures within the Trump administration, including J.D. Vance, who fought in those wars and came home and were like, No, those were dumb. My friends died for no reason.

And so I think that their hope, clearly, is that they’re doing it in a smarter, more prudent, less direct risk to Americans type of way, but we obviously just can’t know how it’ll play out.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, I talk to New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen. I ask what, if anything, Congress can do now that the U.S. is already involved in this conflict with Iran.

[Break]

[Music]

Rosin: Hours before the Senate voted against the War Powers Resolution this week, which would’ve tried to limit President Trump’s power to use military force without explicit authorization from Congress, I talked to Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

Rosin (in interview): Senator Shaheen, welcome to the show.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen: Thank you.

Rosin: She’s the top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and I started out by asking her if she’d received any kind of advanced warning about the strikes in Iran.

Shaheen: Well, I didn’t get any. There was a briefing with the so-called Gang of Eight last week, before the strikes happened over the weekend. And my understanding from talking to some of the people who were in that briefing is that there was no clear explanation of what was coming, but just a hint that some action might be taken.

Rosin (in interview): And how unusual is that? Just put that in some historical context for us.

Shaheen: Well, that has not been the case at any time since I’ve been here, and whether it was Republican or Democratic presidents, the history and tradition has been to brief at least the leaders of the House and Senate and the relevant committees before an action like this is taken.

Rosin: Right. So the one time when an explanation came is when Marco Rubio came to the Hill after the war had started, and that’s when he mentioned Israel’s role in the attack on Iran to the press. Were you surprised by that explanation?

Shaheen: I was. But, as you know, a number of explanations have been given by the president and by other members of the Cabinet about the reasons for the war. And I think that’s one of the things that raises real concerns, not just in Congress but among the American people, about what the strategy is, what the endgame is, what we’re trying to do.

I don’t think anyone—or, at least, nobody I know—is concerned that the ayatollah is no longer in charge. So I don’t think that anyone mourns his loss. The question is: What happens next? What’s the endgame? What are we trying to do? And are we in charge of our foreign policy, or, as Secretary Rubio suggested, are we responding to Israel and what they want for their foreign policy?

Rosin: So when you said the American people would be concerned, you had put it, who controls America’s foreign policy, what do you exactly mean? What did you make of that rationale that we were responding to Israel?

Shaheen: Well, it’s a concern. The question is: Did we ever try to dissuade Israel from taking this action? Were we as prepared as we should be? I’m looking at scenes coming from the Middle East from Americans who have been stranded in countries across the Middle East, and it doesn’t seem like there’s been any provision for the fact that that was going to happen or plans for how to evacuate Americans as attacks have increased.

So I think all of those are concerns and also just transparency with the American people, with Congress about why President Trump thought this was necessary, again, what he’s trying to accomplish. Now, they’ve given some limited military goals of the campaign, but no real explanation for why now, why this was necessary, and what the endgame is, what the strategy is we’re trying to accomplish.

Rosin: Right. So when you said the American people would be concerned, the concern is that we’re doing another country’s bidding or putting another country’s concerns before our own?

Shaheen: Well, I think the American people are concerned because Donald Trump campaigned saying he was gonna end “forever wars.” Right now, my constituents are concerned about the cost of living. And what we’re seeing as the result of this action is not only are we spending a lot of money in the Middle East, but now gasoline prices are also going up, so people are going to be feeling even more strain.

Again, none of that has been explained to the American people in a way that says, You need to sacrifice in order to do this because America was under threat of attack. There’s no intelligence that I’ve seen that suggests that America was under threat of attack by Iran.

Rosin: So do you have a sense of what the president actually does want from this war and why now?

Shaheen: No, no. And again, I think we’ve heard a lot of different explanations, but there’s been no overriding explanation to the American people or to Congress about what he’s trying to do here.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So now we’re in this war, so I wanna talk more about the role Congress could play now: the vote on the War Powers Resolution. Why is that important at this moment, given that the war’s already started, we’re in it, there are casualties, the Ayatollah is gone?

Shaheen: Well, when our Founding Fathers and Mothers set up our government in the beginning and wrote the Constitution, one of the things they did was give the power to declare war to Congress, not to the president, because there was real concern about whether we should give that kind of power to one individual leader or whether it should be the result of the will of the people of the country, who are reflected in the Congress.

And unfortunately, this president hasn’t been willing to come to Congress not only to brief us about what his actions are but to ask for an authorization for use of military force, as has been done in the past. So I think it is appropriate for Congress to take action to reign in this president who doesn’t seem to be concerned about what Congress and the American people think about his actions with respect to going to war.

Rosin: It feels important—it’s something we write about at The Atlantic all the time—but it also feels abstract at this moment, given that we’re in it. So I’m wondering what would constitute a responsible check on the president’s power now? What would that actually look like? Would it be about the future of the war, how the war unfolds, or do you think of this as a symbolically important vote?

Shaheen: Well, sadly, I think it’s not gonna pass, so it is only gonna be a symbolic vote. But Congress has another ability to reign in the president, and that’s the appropriations process. We have not yet heard how much this war is costing, but it’s very clear it was not budgeted for. And so, at some point, the president’s gonna have to come back to Congress and ask for funding, and at that point, or before, we have the ability to get our questions answered.

Rosin: I see. So responsible check on presidential power would look like postwar engagement about expenses, about what we are willing to do in Iran, to have sort of buy-in from the American people?

Shaheen: Well, a responsible check on the president’s power would be if the majority in Congress were willing to take back what is Congress’s authority to declare war. And unfortunately, we haven’t seen a willingness from our Republican colleagues to do that.

Rosin: Yeah. It’s not the first time that Congress and the president have struggled over a war declaration—

Shaheen: Right.

Rosin: —the War Powers Resolution grew out of Vietnam. I’m wondering what’s different now about how the current executive branch is handling war and what Congress’s oversight role is.

Shaheen: Well, one thing that’s different is we have all three branches of government controlled by the Republicans. It’s very difficult for the opposition to be able to move legislation or to raise concerns. What else is different is that this White House is not briefing Congress—not only are they not briefing Democrats, they’re not briefing Republicans, either. So it appears that this White House doesn’t think they need to talk to Congress at all.

Rosin: Are there other ways you think the Democrats could be fighting that they’re not?

Shaheen: Well, I think the most important way we can be fighting is by making sure that we elect enough Democrats in November to take back the House and to make gains in the Senate—I’d love to have us take back the Senate, too, because that’s the way we’re gonna curb this president’s power.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Do you have a name for his foreign policy? What would you call it? We seem to be going in, extracting leaders, and sort of that’s the extent of it. How would you describe what the foreign policy is now? It’s not noninterventionist; we’re intervening. I’m just wondering how you think of it.

Shaheen: I think of it as very inconsistent. On the one hand, the administration talks about the greatest threat to the United States is the competition from China, the military threat from China, and yet we just heard from the undersecretary of policy at the Department of Defense, who was before the Armed Services Committee, talking about how we need to come to some sort of a mutual understanding with China. He used different language, but that was essentially what he was saying.

Well, that’s inconsistent. And when this president is making policy decisions around things like shutting down our whole foreign-assistance program, shutting off our global-health programs, and allowing China to come in and pick up those programs and present to our former countries we were working with that China’s the reliable ally and people can’t count on the United States, that is not a consistent foreign policy that benefits the national security of the United States.

Right now, the White House has said there are 14 countries that Americans need to leave in the Middle East. In those 14 countries, we only have six ambassadors, and only four of them have career and diplomatic experience. We have two ambassadors in Lebanon and Israel who are political appointees who have no diplomatic experience. And yet we’ve got Americans all across the Middle East who are saying, I need help to get out of here. I’m being told to leave. I can’t get flights. There’s no evacuation plan. And we have nobody in the embassy to help them.

So that is not in America’s interest. That is not consistent American foreign policy that benefits the national security of Americans and makes us safer.

Rosin: Well, Senator Shaheen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Shaheen: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.