Why War With Iran Would Repeat America's Worst Foreign Policy Mistakes

posted on: Feb 4, 2026

By: Ghassan Rubeiz / Arab America Contributing Writer

At the time of this writing, the chances for an imminent US attack on Iran, possibly coordinated with Israel, appear disturbingly high. Americans have been bombarded with arguments that defeating the unpopular and autocratic Iranian regime would bring about reform, but the chances of this happening are low. The question we must ask is not whether regime change in Iran is desirable, but what military intervention would actually achieve.

The timing alone defies logic. How can Washington launch a new war in one part of the Middle East while claiming to start implementing a very challenging United Nations-type peace strategy in another part, namely Gaza? More puzzling still is Trump’s apparent belief that he can simultaneously manage conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Ukraine while threatening Venezuela, making territorial claims on Greenland, and issuing ultimatums to Cuba and Canada.

This foreign policy chaos unfolds as his administration grapples with an equally overloaded domestic agenda involving separation of powers, the national debt, tariffs, immigration, press freedom, Federal Reserve independence, conflicts with state governors and city mayors, street demonstrations, Justice Department autonomy, foreign aid cuts, and climate policy. Even granting Trump extraordinary competence, the sheer volume of crises he faces makes strategic coherence impossible.

The fundamental question remains: Is Iran the kind of country that should or could be disciplined militarily? The answer is emphatically no. Consider first the glaring double standard: attacking Iran for a suspicious nuclear defense program after having enabled Israel to develop and stockpile a nuclear arsenal over decades. Similarly, condemning Iran for being an Islamist regime while blessing Israel as a Jewish state—in a largely Islamic region and with twenty percent of its citizens being non-Jewish.

Is Iran the only source of state terror in the region? Critics would argue that accusing Iran of supporting “terrorist proxies”—like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—rings hollow when the United States itself uses Israel as a mega-proxy throughout the region to serve Western interests.

Beyond these moral contradictions lie practical realities that make military intervention deeply problematic. Iran remains powerful and could cause tremendous devastation locally and regionally before collapsing.

Iran has no unified opposition capable of assuming power if the government of the Islamic Republic falls. The country’s political landscape could fragment into secular parties, the Kurdish minority and other ethnic separatist groups, competing Islamist factions, monarchist movements, and communist remnants. The absence of a cohesive alternative creates conditions for chaos that would most likely prove far worse than the current regime.

History repeatedly teaches us this lesson: external powers that topple governments through military force rarely produce the outcomes they promise. More often, populations rally behind nationalist forces, even authoritarian ones, when faced with foreign invasion.

A US attack on Iran would likely trigger a protracted conflict that could shatter the country entirely. With a population of over ninety-two million, an Iranian state collapse could unleash displacement on a scale that would dwarf current refugee crises worldwide. Civil war could take place.

The charge that Iran bears primary responsibility for Middle Eastern instability reflects a fundamental misreading of regional dynamics. Not a single state in the region governs by the people for the people. Regional insecurity largely stems from the artificial borders and imposed governments that created these states. It is also related to the difficulty of reforming Middle Eastern countries one by one, in isolation. Lasting stability requires regional integration comparable to the European Union or the federal structure of the United States. Nationalism, far from being a path to security, has become an obstacle to the cross-border cooperation that peace demands. Targeting Iran while ignoring these structural realities guarantees dangerous uncertainties.

If genuine democratic change is the goal, the path forward involves supporting Iranian civil society through peaceful political measures: moral support, technical assistance, and economic and diplomatic engagement. The shortest route to favorable regime-change runs through popular uprising and democratic election, not American or Israeli bombs. External military intervention could delegitimize any successor government and entrench anti-American sentiment within Iran and elsewhere for generations.

We must also confront an uncomfortable irony: the two countries most responsible for the catastrophe in Gaza and the wider Palestinian territories now claim the authority to solve larger problems elsewhere in the region. The United States and Israel need to be held accountable for what they have done, especially the devastation they have inflicted in Gaza, before presuming to remake Iran. Their credibility as agents of positive change has been shattered by their actions in Palestine.

Military attack on Iran would produce more harm than good, create chaos rather than order, and strengthen authoritarianism rather than advance democracy.

Trump must recognize that American power, however vast, cannot bend every country to Washington’s will through force. The costs of attempting to do so in Iran would be borne not just by Iranians, but by Americans, the entire Middle East, and a global order already strained to its breaking point. This is a war that must not happen.

Ghassan Rubeiz is the former Middle East Secretary of the World Council of Churches. Earlier, he taught psychology and social work in his country of birth, Lebanon, and later in the United States, where he currently lives. He has contributed to political commentary for the past twenty years and has delivered occasional public talks on peace, justice, and interfaith topics. You can reach him at rubeizg@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.

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