The firm rebuke by the Supreme Court vis-a-vis his whimsical Tariffs made an attack on Iran more likely. Moreover, there was sharp decline in popularity graph in the run up to the midterm elections.
There has been a powerful third influence too.
The cloud of suspicion over Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has not been dispelled despite the best efforts of the justice department to ration the flow of revelations about the sex-offending financier’s child-trafficking operations.
Donald Trump’s likely casus belli for an attack on Iran – which would be the largest US intervention since the Iraq war – is fraught with contradictions, and his top advisers have been left to cover for him as the White House makes the case for intervention.
Despite bravado of solving or ending seven wars; Trump Sarkar 2.0 has been marred by gross failures and antagonism.
Trump, who said during the 2024 presidential campaign that he could solve the war in Ukraine in one day, has so far been unable to end the nearly four-year-old conflict.
"I thought this was going to be one of the easier ones," Trump said on August 18, 2025. "It's actually one of the most difficult."
More than one million people have been left dead or wounded in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Trump's views on how to best bring peace have swung from calling for a ceasefire to saying a deal could still be worked out while fierce fighting continued. He imposed sanctions on Russia's two biggest oil companies in October.
His claims on ending India-Pakistan conflict in May 2025 is more of a comic relief.
A ceasefire was announced on May 10 (2025) after four days of fighting. But it addressed few of the issues that have divided India and Pakistan, which have fought three major wars since their independence from the United Kingdom in 1947.
Days after the ceasefire, Trump said he used the threat of cutting trade with the countries to secure the deal.
India has repeatedly and strongly disputed that US pressure led to the truce and that trade was a factor.
Iran’s stockpile of missiles, the largest in the region, according to US intelligence estimates, does threaten Israel as well as a number of US bases in the region, including Al Udeid airbase in Qatar.
During the 12-day war, Iran fired more than 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 one-way attack drones, testing both Israeli and US missile defenses. About 43 were said to have penetrated the defense systems to hit their targets.
Trump tried something called The Board of Peace.
But the fact is the attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US.
In an attempt at justification Trump spoke in generalities, denouncing the Tehran leadership as “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” and 47 years of enmity between the US and the Islamic Republic.
The Board of Peace was pushed for the UN Security Council (UNSC) in November as the only path to ending the slaughter in Gaza, but it had been clear long before the first missiles were fired at Iran, that it was a “bait-and-switch” scam.
The UN thought it was buying one thing but it was sold something quite different: a rival body to the security council, but one in which Trump would be in charge, says an article in 'The Guardian'.
Israel and the United States have calculated that the Islamic regime in Iran is vulnerable; dealing with a severe economic crisis, the fallout from the brutal crackdown on protesters at the start of the year and with defences still badly damaged by last summer's war. Their conclusion seems to have been that this was an opportunity that should not be squandered.
It is also another blow to the tottering system of international law, wrote British journalist Jeremy Bowen in a piece for the BBC.
"In their statements, both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran was a danger to their countries – Trump said it was a global danger. The Islamic regime is certainly their bitter enemy.
But it is hard to see how the legal justification of self-defence applies given the huge disparity of power between the US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other," says Bowen.
For Trump, who had far more success as a reality show character than a property developer, war began to look like a better distraction than peace. He was thrilled by a daring and successful raid on Venezuela in January, in which US special forces whisked the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, out of the country without a single casualty, goes a piece in London-based 'The Guardian'.
American Congress, which in theory has the constitutional prerogative to decide whether America goes to war, has been almost totally sidelined.
Eight congressional leaders from both parties were briefed on classified information a few hours before the State of the Union speech by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
But Democratic senators emerged saying that they had not been given a good reason why the country had to go to war now.
ends
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