Leon Kouider: Trump’s war on Iran is killing America’s global image
It is no secret that the United States and its strategic outpost Israel have, for quite some time, been salivating over the prospect of toppling the Islamic Republic of Iran and restoring its prior status as a Western puppet state, or at the very least a docile and submissive state which displays indifference to Tel Aviv’s regional hegemonic aspirations.
This reckless and openly imperialist vision was kicked into a higher gear in the early hours of February 28th as the US and Israel launched a “pre-emptive” (unprovoked) joint offensive on Iran. In the first Pentagon press conference since the start of the military campaign, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asserted that “this is not a so-called regime change war” but rather a campaign to destroy Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
However, even if we take this flimsy narrative at face value as the justification for war, it simply does not hold up. Trump claimed in his statement announcing the joint offensive that “last June, we obliterated the [Iranian] regime’s nuclear programme at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.”
Oman’s top diplomat, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was responsible for mediating the indirect nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran, revealed that the latter had agreed never to stockpile enriched uranium. In other words, Iran swore off all efforts towards nuclear armament. Al Busaidi stated that “A peace deal is within our reach… if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”
Despite this unprecedented concession by Tehran, far exceeding those made in the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) which was scrapped during Trump’s first term, the US President defaulted once more to blatantly lying about Iran’s compliance by stating that the oil rich nation has “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”
The vast discrepancy between reality and Trump’s rhetoric demonstrates that the US was on the war path against Iran from the outset, and that negotiations functioned solely to grant Washington plausible deniability by claiming that its naval build-up in the Arabian Sea was merely a sabre-rattling tactic to intimidate Tehran into broader nuclear concessions – which it did.
The near deterministic hawkishness spearheading Washington and Tel Aviv’s foreign policy establishments is still celebrated by small circles of neoconservatives and Iranian monarchists purely because regime change and coerced liberalisation, in their eyes, represents the most noble and just cause of all, even more so than nuclear non-proliferation.
The vast discrepancy between reality and Trump’s rhetoric demonstrates that the US was on the war path against Iran from the outset, and that negotiations functioned solely to grant Washington plausible deniability.
According to The Washington Post, Trump claimed during a 4am call with one of its reporters at the outset of the offensive that “all I want is freedom for the people [of Iran]”, side-lining the nuclear narrative in favour of a humanitarian angle. In a televised announcement of the initial strikes, he even urged Iranians living in Tehran to rise up and “take over” the government.
While it is irrefutable that Iranian’s suffer considerably under the highly repressive and excessively cruel theocratic Islamic Republic, it would be pure folly to presume that this is an emancipatory war. Trump and Netanyahu’s unprovoked belligerence has undermined this pretence.
Furthermore, any honest analysis of the global geopolitical status quo within which Washington has curated a network of alliances to sustain its hegemony would highlight that the US rarely shudders at the prospect of cosying up to brutal authoritarian regimes which treat their citizens’ rights with contempt.
For example, in November 2025 the United States signed a “landmark” Strategic Defense Agreement with long-time ally Saudi Arabia; a country where women are effectively imprisoned for “disobedience” and dissident journalists are assassinated overseas. The deal included a $142 billion arms package and approval for the sale of F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom, making it “the largest defense cooperation deal in US history.”
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For decades, this technique of selective empathy disseminated from White House press briefings and parroted by European leaders sustained the illusion that American global militarism functioned as a universally applied baton wielded to coerce authoritarian regimes into democratisation, benevolently liberating the worlds’ masses from tyranny through just wars.
Cold War politics did a lot of covering for this consensus as strategic US interventions could easily be justified by invoking the fight to contain the spread of communist despotism. This pretext was used to overthrow several democratically elected leaders who refused to comply with Washington’s economic interests. Subsequently, they were almost always artificially replaced by loyal dictators – or “friendly authoritarians”, as neocons called them – who conformed to US interests and terrorised their own citizens.
This of course was inflicted on Iran itself when the CIA and MI6 installed the repressive Shah after deposing the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 for daring to nationalise Persian oil reserves.
In the 21st century however, the US’ status has been mortally wounded by its very own foreign policy. If the three humanitarian catastrophe’s it caused in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya to secure regional interests has cast doubt on the US’ reputation as global policeman, its near unconditional support for Israel’s abhorrent genocidal war on Gaza has comprehensively shattered it.
Trump, who claimed on March 9th that “we have won in many ways” in the war against Iran but now clearly realises he is way out of his depth, sought military aid from European leaders by requesting they send warships to pry open the Strait of Hormuz.
However, it looks as if the American interventionist playbook has expired. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas refused Trump’s request, stating that “Europe has no interest in an open-ended war” and that “nobody wants to go actively in this war”, a sentiment shared by the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan.
Even German officials, who have been too petrified by their own historical guilt for Nazism to take a principled stand against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and elsewhere, have expressed contempt for a war that the US started “together with the Israelis”, according to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.
It remains to be seen if Europe will continue to resist the Trump administration’s pressure or if it will capitulate and march into yet another destructive war in the Middle East on corporate America’s behalf. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: war weariness has set in, and the perpetrator is not lost on Europe’s leaders.
As the world watches footage of an American missile pulverising over 170 Iranian schoolgirls, as brent crude oil prices surge by 40% and counting, as the prospect of a second major global economic crisis in under twenty years looms large, and as formerly unwavering US allies pivot to China to strategically diversify, Washington’s status is well and truly shifting from a perceived symbol of freedom towards a predatory exporter of chaos and violence.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Leon Kouider is a news editor at Maghrebi.org and founder of The Digital Dissident. You can follow him on X: @lkouider24
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