Washington, DC – As the US and Israeli militaries expand their strikes on Iran, the administration of US President Donald Trump has alternated its justification for the war between preventing immediate attacks and countering the long-term existential threat of a nuclear Tehran.
This was on full display on Monday, with Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth appearing to make the case that the culmination of Iran’s regional policies in the 47 years since the Islamic revolution, coupled with the future of its ballistic and nuclear programmes, represented an immediate threat to the US.
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, argued that Washington’s close ally Israel was planning to attack Iran. In which event, the administration expected Iran to strike US assets, therefore justifying launching a preemptive attack, he said.
To date, the administration has offered little clear evidence to support any of its claims, according to advocates and analysts, as well as Democratic lawmakers who have recently attended classified briefings.
“The reality is, they’ve put forth very little evidence, and that’s a huge problem,” Emma Belcher, the president of Ploughshares, a group that advocates for denuclearisation, told Al Jazeera.
“It says, one: They don’t think they need to [make the case] for the war; that they won’t necessarily be held to account for it,” Belcher said. “But it also says to me that the evidence quite possibly isn’t there, and that they want to avoid particular scrutiny.”
Republicans have largely coalesced around the administration’s messaging, even as Democrats have pledged to force votes on war powers legislation to assert constitutional authority over the president’s military action.
Still, the administration remains in a tenuous political position as Trump’s Republican Party stares down midterm elections in November. Early public polling indicates little outright support from the US public, even as Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base has been staid in its response.
But the more days that pass, and the more US service members are killed, the more likely that Trump will be confronted with the contradictions to his past anti-interventionist promises.
“The longer it goes on and the more costly it is in terms of lives… the more the lack of evidence becomes an albatross around the neck of the administration – one that it will have to account for come November,” according to Benjamin Radd, a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center’s international relations department.
A kaleidoscope of claims
Speaking from the White House on Monday, Trump praised the “obliteration of Iran’s nuclear programme” in US strikes last June. But moments later, he claimed that efforts to rebuild that programme, coupled with Iran’s ballistic missile programme, represented a menace to the US.
“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people,” Trump said. “Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.”
Trump also said that, if not for US and Israeli attacks, Iran “would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America”.
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Washington, DC-based Arms Control Association (ACA) said any claims of immediate or middle-term threats posed by Iran in terms of their ballistic and nuclear power are not supported by available evidence.
That is significant, as such “imminent threats” are required for a president justify attacks on foreign countries under both US domestic law and international law, save for approval from Congress.
“Iran did not possess, prior to this attack, the capability to quickly enrich its highest uranium to bomb grades, and then to convert that into metal for constructing a bomb,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.
“At the soonest, it might have taken many, many months to do that, but Iran does not have access to its 60 percent highly-enriched uranium. Its conversion facility is damaged and idle. Its major uranium enrichment facilities have been severely damaged by the US strikes in 2025.”
He explained that despite having “significant conventional short and medium range ballistic missile capabilities”, Iran has said it has imposed 2,000km (1,200-mile) limits on its ballistic missile range, and is not near having an intercontinental ballistic missile capability.
The “latest [US intelligence] assessment is that Iran could, if a decision is made, have an ICBM capability by 2035. So Iran is nowhere close to having an ICBM threat that could be called imminent,” he said, referring to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have a range of at least 5,000km (3,400 miles).
Democrats say no new intelligence
Secretary of State Rubio on Monday said there “absolutely was an imminent threat” presented by Iran.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he said. “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.”
But top Democrats who received classified intelligence briefings in recent days said they had not been provided with evidence to justify the attack.
“I’m on two committees that give me access to a lot of classified information; there was no imminent threat from Iran to the United States that warrants sending our sons and daughters into yet another war in the Middle East,” Senator Tim Kaine, who sits on both the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Saturday.
Senator Mark Warner, who was briefed on classified intelligence related to Iran last week as part of the “gang of eight”, a collection of the top lawmakers from both parties in Congress, told the network: “I saw no intelligence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America”.
Several sources speaking to both the Reuters news agency and the Associated Press, following a closed-door briefing of congressional staff on Sunday, said the administration presented no evidence that Iran was planning a preemptive strike, and had instead focused on a more generalised threat posed by Iran and its allies to US troops and assets in the region.
Trump looking for quick success
All told, the Trump administration appears to be arguing that “Iran has been a national security threat to the United States since 1979… that Iran was responsible for more American lives being killed than any other state or non-state actor; that Iran has never been held to account for this”, according to the Burkle Center’s Radd.
Trump, therefore, appears to be taking the position that given the totality of Iranian actions, including during recent indirect nuclear talks, the US “has no choice but to perceive Iran as an imminent threat”.
Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated the talks, had pushed back on the administration’s characterisation, maintaining that “significant progress” had been made before the US-Israeli attacks.
Radd noted that under the War Powers Act of 1973, a US president has between 60 and 90 days to withdraw forces deployed without congressional approval. Therefore, Trump appears to be saying, “We’re not obliged to prove to Congress any of that if we can conduct and execute this operation within the 60 to 90 day window,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ploughshare’s Belcher said that the administration’s own actions led to the current situation with Iran.
She pointed to Trump’s withdrawal of The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, which had seen the US impose maximum sanctions on Iran, and Iran, in turn, begin enriching uranium beyond the levels laid out in the agreement. Trump also derailed nuclear talks last year by launching attacks on Iran.
“We’re in this situation precisely because President Trump gave up on an agreement that was negotiated by his predecessor,” Belcher said. “He gave up on diplomacy.”
‘America First’ war?
In his speech on Monday, Hegseth, in particular, appeared to try to frame the war within Trump’s political worldview, pledging to “finish this on America First conditions”.
He drew a contrast with the US invasion of Iraq, describing the attacks on Iran as a “clear, devastating, decisive mission”.
“Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy – no nukes,” he said.
He also sought to draw a distinction between a “so-called regime-change war” and US attacks that happened to lead to regime change. As of Monday, US strikes had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several top officials, but the ruling government has remained intact.
Hegseth said that the US is unleashing attacks “all on our terms, with maximum authorities, no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars”.
It remains unclear how the message will resonate with the US public.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll released on Sunday suggested dismal approval for Trump’s strikes, but also indicated that large swaths of Americans were unsure about the conflict.
That could create opportunities for those challenging Trump’s actions and his justification for them.
“I think it does seem as though the narrative is still up for grabs,” Belcher said.
