How Trump brought the United States into war with Iran

In a series of Crisis Room meetings, US President Donald Trump weighed his instincts against his vice president's deep concerns and pessimistic intelligence assessments. This is the inside story of how he made the fateful decision.

A black jeep carrying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House shortly before 11 a.m. on February 11. The Israeli leader, who had been pressuring the United States for months to agree to a major attack on Iran, was quickly ushered inside, almost unceremoniously, away from the gaze of reporters, ready for one of the riskiest moments of his long career.

American and Israeli officials first gathered in the Cabinet Room, next to the Oval Office. Then Netanyahu went downstairs for the main event: a highly classified presentation on Iran for Trump and his team in the White House Crisis Room, which is rarely used for face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders.

Trump sat down, but not in his usual place at the head of the room, at the conference table. Instead, the US president sat to one side, facing large screens set up along the wall. Netanyahu sat on the other side, directly opposite Trump. On the screen behind the prime minister appeared David Barnea, the director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, along with Israeli military officials. Visually arranged behind Mr. Netanyahu, they created the image of a warlord surrounded by his team.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, sat at the end of the table. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also served as national security adviser, took his usual seat. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and General Dan Kaine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who usually sat together in such circumstances, were on one side; they were joined by John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy who negotiated with the Iranians, rounded out the main group.

The meeting was deliberately kept small to prevent leaks. Other senior cabinet members were unaware that the meeting was taking place. The vice president was also absent. J.D. Vance was in Azerbaijan, and the meeting was called so abruptly that he could not return in time.

Netanyahu’s presentation over the next hour would be crucial in steering the United States and Israel toward a major armed conflict in the middle of one of the world’s most volatile regions. And it would then set off a series of previously unreported White House discussions over the coming days and weeks in which Trump weighed the options and risks before giving the green light for the United States to join Israel in attacking Iran.

This account of how Trump led the United States into war is based on reporting for the forthcoming book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump." It reveals how discussions within the administration have highlighted the president's instincts, the cracks in his inner circle, and the way he runs the White House. It draws on extensive interviews conducted on condition of anonymity to recount internal conversations and sensitive issues.

The reporting underscores how Trump’s belligerent thinking has for months been more in line with Netanyahu’s than even some of the president’s key advisers realized. Their close bond has been a constant feature of the two administrations, and that dynamic, as tense as it has been at times, has fueled strong criticism and suspicion on both the left and right of American politics.

And it shows how, in the end, even the more skeptical members of Trump's war cabinet, with the notable exception of Vance - the man in the White House most opposed to full-scale war - yielded to the president's instincts, including his overwhelming belief that the war would be swift and decisive. The White House declined to comment.

In the Crisis Room on February 11, Netanyahu aggressively made the case, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing confidence that a joint US-Israeli mission could finally bring about the end of the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played Trump a short video that featured a montage of possible new leaders who could take over the country if the hardline regime fell. Among those shown was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who tried to portray himself as a secular leader who could lead Iran toward post-theocratic rule.

Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions that they portrayed as indicators of a near-certain victory: Iran's ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it would be unable to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood of Iran striking American interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

In addition, Mossad intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would resume and that, with Israeli intelligence aiding in fomenting unrest and rebellion, an intensive bombing campaign could create the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also mentioned the possibility that Iranian Kurdish fighters would cross the border from Iraq and open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime's forces and hastening its collapse.

Netanyahu delivered the presentation in a confident, monotone voice. It seemed to make a good impression on the most important person in the room, the American president.

"That sounds good to me," Trump told the Israeli prime minister. To Netanyahu, that likely signaled the green light for a joint US-Israeli operation.

Netanyahu was not the only one who came away from the meeting with the impression that Trump had almost made up his mind. The president’s advisers could see that he was deeply impressed by the promise of what Netanyahu’s military and intelligence services could do, just as he had been when the two leaders spoke before the 12-day war with Iran in June.

Earlier during a visit to the White House on February 11, Netanyahu attempted to focus the attention of Americans gathered in the Cabinet Room on the existential threat posed by the 86-year-old Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

When others in the room asked him about the potential risks of the operation, Netanyahu acknowledged them, but made one key point: In his view, the risks of inaction outweighed the risks of action. He argued that the cost of action would only increase if they delayed the attack and gave Iran more time to ramp up missile production and create a shield of immunity around its nuclear program.

Everyone in the room understood that Iran had the ability to replenish its stockpile of missiles and drones at a much lower cost and much faster than the United States could produce and deliver the much more expensive interceptors to protect American interests and allies in the region.

Netanyahu's presentations, and Trump's positive response to them, created an urgent task for the US intelligence community. Throughout the night, analysts worked to assess the viability of what the Israeli team had told the president.

"Farsi"

The results of the US intelligence analysis were shared the next day, February 12, at another meeting in the Crisis Room, this time for US officials only. Before Trump arrived, two senior intelligence officials briefed the president's inner circle.

These intelligence officials had a deep knowledge of American military capabilities, and they knew the Iranian system and its actors in detail. They broke Netanyahu's presentation into four parts. The first was decapitation - the assassination of the ayatollah. The second was disabling Iran from projecting power and threatening its neighbors. The third was a popular uprising within Iran. And the fourth was regime change, with a secular leader installed to run the country.

US officials assessed that the first two goals were achievable with US intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Netanyahu's presentation, which included the possibility of the Kurds launching a ground invasion of Iran, were not realistic.

When Trump joined the meeting, Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment. The CIA director used one word to describe the regime change scenarios put forward by the Israeli prime minister: "farcical."

At that moment, Rubio interrupted him.

"In other words, it's bullshit," he said.

Ratcliffe added that, given the unpredictability of events in any conflict, regime change could occur, but should not be considered an achievable goal.

Several other attendees joined the discussion, including Vance, who had just returned from Azerbaijan, and who also expressed strong skepticism about the possibility of regime change.

The President then turned to General Kane.

"General, what do you think?"

General Kane replied:

"Sir, in my experience, this is standard operating procedure with the Israelis. They exaggerate, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, so they aggressively sell the story."

Trump was quick to weigh in. Regime change, he said, would be “their problem.” It was unclear whether he was referring to the Israelis or the Iranian people. But the gist was that his decision on whether to go to war with Iran would not depend on whether the third and fourth parts of Netanyahu’s presentation were achievable.

Mr. Trump seemed to still be very interested in accomplishing the first and second parts: assassinating the ayatollahs and top Iranian leaders and dismantling the Iranian military.

General Kaine, the man Mr. Trump liked to call “Raisin Kaine,” had impressed the president years earlier by telling him that the Islamic State could be defeated much more quickly than others had estimated. Trump rewarded that confidence by promoting the general, a former Air Force fighter pilot, to his top military adviser. General Kaine was not a political loyalist and had serious concerns about war with Iran. But he was very careful in how he presented his views to the president.

As the small team of advisers involved in the plans deliberated over the coming days, General Kaine presented Trump and others with an alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete America’s stockpiles of weapons, including missile interceptors, whose stockpiles were already strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. Kaine saw no clear way to quickly replenish those stocks.

He also pointed to the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran blocking it. Trump dismissed that possibility, assuming that the regime would capitulate before that happened. The US president seemed to think it would be a very quick war, an impression that was further reinforced by the tepid response to the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in June.

General Kane's role on the eve of the war reflected the classic tension between military advice and presidential decision-making. He was so insistent on not taking a position—repeating that it was not his role to tell the president what to do, but to present options along with possible risks and potential second- and third-order consequences—that it seemed to some in the audience that he was simultaneously representing all sides of an issue.

He kept asking, "So what?"

But Trump often seemed to hear only what he wanted to hear.

Kaine differed in almost every way from the previous chairman, General Mark A. Milley, who had feuded fiercely with Trump during his first term and who saw his role as stopping the president from making dangerous or reckless moves.

One person familiar with their relationship noted that Trump had a habit of mixing General Kane’s tactical advice with his strategic one. In practice, this meant that the general could, in one breath, warn of the difficulties of one aspect of the operation, and in the next, say that the United States had a virtually unlimited supply of cheap, precision-guided bombs and that, once it achieved air superiority, it could bomb Iran for weeks.

To Kaine, those were separate observations. But Trump seemed to think the latter probably negated the former.

At no point during the deliberations did Kaine directly tell Trump that war with Iran was a terrible idea, although some of General Kaine's colleagues believed that was precisely what he meant.

Trump as a hawk

As much as many of the president's advisers viewed Netanyahu with suspicion, the Israeli prime minister's views were much closer to Trump's than anti-interventionists on Trump's team or in the broader "America First" movement were willing to admit. And that's been the case for years.

Of all the foreign policy challenges Trump has faced during his two terms in office, Iran has been a special case. He has seen it as a uniquely dangerous adversary and has been willing to take great risks to limit the regime’s ability to wage war or acquire nuclear weapons. Moreover, Netanyahu’s rhetoric has aligned with Trump’s desire to dismantle the Iranian theocracy, which took power in 1979, when Trump was 32. It has been a thorn in the side of the United States ever since.

He could now become the first president since clerical rule took power 47 years ago to successfully bring about regime change in Iran. Usually unspoken, but always present in the background, was an additional motivation: Iran planned to kill Trump in retaliation for the January 2020 assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, who was seen in the United States as the driving force behind Iran's campaign of international terrorism.

Upon returning to office for a second term, Trump's confidence in the capabilities of the U.S. military has only grown. He was particularly encouraged by the spectacular commando operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in his compound on January 3. Not a single American life was lost in the operation, which was further proof for the president of the unparalleled power of American forces.

Within the cabinet, Hegset was the strongest advocate for a military campaign against Iran.

Rubio made it clear to his colleagues that he was much more ambivalent. He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated agreement, but he preferred to continue the maximum pressure campaign rather than start a full-scale war. Still, Rubio did not try to dissuade Trump from the operation, and once the war began, he presented the administration’s justifications with full conviction.

Wiles had concerns about what a new conflict abroad might mean, but in larger meetings she did not tend to get too involved in military matters; instead, she encouraged advisers to bring their views and concerns to the president in those circumstances. Wiles would exert influence on a number of other issues, but in a room with Trump and the generals, she remained on the sidelines. People close to her say she did not see it as her role to publicly air her concerns about military decisions to the president. And she believed it was more important for the president to hear the expertise of advisers like Generals Kaine, Ratcliffe and Rubio.

Still, Wiles told colleagues she feared the United States could be drawn into another war in the Middle East. The attack on Iran brought with it the prospect of soaring fuel prices months before the midterm elections, which could help decide whether the final two years of Trump’s second term would be years of achievement or a summons to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. But in the end, Wiles supported the operation.

Vence kao skeptic

No one in Trump's inner circle was more concerned about the possibility of war with Iran, nor did he do more to stop it, than the US vice president.

Vance built his political career opposing the very kind of military adventurism that is now being seriously considered. He described a war with Iran as "a huge waste of resources" and "terribly expensive."

But he didn’t stick to that position at all costs. In January, when Trump publicly warned Iran to stop killing protesters and promised help was on the way, Vance privately encouraged the president to enforce his red line. But what the vice president was pushing for was a limited, punitive strike, somewhat more along the lines of Trump’s 2017 missile strike on Syria for its use of chemical weapons against civilians.

The vice president believed that a war for regime change in Iran would be a disaster. He would have preferred no strike at all. But knowing that Trump would likely interfere in some way, he tried to steer him toward limited action. Later, when it seemed certain that the US president was determined to launch a large-scale campaign, Vance argued that it should be done with overwhelming force, in the hope that the objectives would be achieved quickly.

In front of his colleagues, Vance warned Trump that a war with Iran could cause regional chaos and countless casualties. It could also break up Trump's political coalition and be seen as a betrayal by many voters who believed his promise of no more wars.

Vance pointed to other concerns. As vice president, he was aware of the extent of America's ammunition problem. A war against a regime with an overwhelming will to survive could leave the United States in a significantly worse position to wage conflict in the years to come.

The vice president told aides that no military assessment could truly gauge what Iran would do in retaliation if the regime's survival was at stake. The war could easily take unpredictable directions. Moreover, he believed there was almost no chance of building a peaceful Iran afterward.

Beyond all of that, perhaps the biggest risk was this: Iran had the upper hand when it came to the Strait of Hormuz. If this narrow sea passage, through which huge amounts of oil and natural gas pass, were to be closed, the consequences in the United States would be severe, starting with higher gasoline prices.

Tucker Carlson, a commentator who has emerged on the right as another prominent skeptic of intervention, had come to the Oval Office several times over the past year to warn Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. A few weeks before the war began, Trump, who had known Carlson for years, tried to reassure him by phone.

"I know it worries you, but everything will be okay," the president said.

Karlson asked him how he knew that.

"Because it always is," Mr. Trump replied.

In the final days of February, the Americans and Israelis discussed new intelligence that would significantly accelerate their timeline. The ayatollah was scheduled to meet above ground with other top regime officials, in broad daylight and fully exposed to airstrikes. It was a fleeting opportunity to strike at the heart of the Iranian leadership, one that might not come again.

Trump gave Iran another chance to reach a deal that would block its path to nuclear weapons. The diplomatic effort also gave the United States additional time to move military assets to the Middle East.

The president, according to several advisers, had essentially made the decision weeks earlier. But he hadn't yet decided exactly when. Now Netanyahu was urging him to act quickly.

That same week, Kushner and Witkoff called from Geneva after their latest talks with Iranian officials. During three rounds of talks in Oman and Switzerland, the two tested Iran’s willingness to reach an agreement. At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of their program, a test to see whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was really about civilian energy or preserving the ability to make a bomb.

The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an attack on their dignity.

Kushner and Witkoff presented the president with a picture of the situation. They could probably negotiate something, they said, but it would take months. If Trump asked if they could look him in the eye and tell him they could solve the problem, it would take a lot, Kushner told him, because the Iranians were stalling and playing games.

"I think we have to do it"

On Thursday, February 26, at around 17 p.m., the final meeting began in the Crisis Room. By then, everyone in the room had a clear position. Everything had been discussed in previous meetings; everyone knew everyone else's position. The discussion lasted about an hour and a half.

Trump was in his usual place at the head of the table. To his right sat the vice president; next to Vance was Wiles, then Ratcliffe, then White House counsel David Warrington, then Stephen Chung, the White House communications director. Across from Mr. Chung sat Caroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary; to her right were General Kaine, then Hegseth and Rubio.

The war planning group was kept so tight-lipped that it excluded two key officials who would have to manage the biggest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, as well as Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.

The president opened the meeting by asking: Okay, what do we have?

Hegseth and Kane went through the order of attacks. Then Trump said he wanted to go around the table and hear everyone's opinion.

Vance, whose disagreement with the entire premise had long been no secret, addressed the president:

"You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I'll support you."

Wiles told Trump that if he felt it had to happen for the sake of America's national security, then it should.

Ratcliffe did not comment on whether he supported going to war, but he spoke of startling new intelligence that the Iranian leadership would soon gather at the ayatollah's compound in Tehran. The CIA director told the president that regime change was possible, depending on how one defined the term.

"If by that we just mean killing the supreme leader, we can probably do that," he said.

When it was his turn, Warrington, the White House legal adviser, said that was a legally permissible option, given how American officials had designed the plan and presented it to the president. He did not express a personal opinion, but when pressed by the president, he said that as a Marine veteran he knew an American soldier who had been killed by Iran years earlier. The issue remained deeply personal for him. He told the president that if Israel intended to move forward no matter what, then the United States should do the same.

Chung laid out the likely public relations consequences: Trump ran against new wars. People didn’t vote for conflicts abroad. The plans also ran counter to everything the administration had been saying since the June bombing of Iran. How would he explain eight months of insisting that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been completely destroyed? Chung didn’t say yes or no, but he said that whatever decision Trump made would be the right one.

Leavitt told the president that it was his decision and that the media team would handle it as best they could.

Hegseth took the position that the Iranians would have to be dealt with sooner or later, so it should be done now. He gave technical assessments: a campaign could be conducted within a certain time frame with a certain level of force.

General Kaine was serious, laying out the risks and what the campaign would mean for depleting ammunition supplies. He did not express an opinion; his position was that the military would carry out the operation if Trump ordered it. Both of the president’s top military leaders described in advance how the campaign would play out and how much the U.S. military was capable of reducing Iran’s military capabilities.

When it was his turn, Rubio was clearer, telling the president:

"If our goal is regime change or an uprising, then we shouldn't do that. But if the goal is to destroy Iran's missile program, that's a goal we can achieve."

Everyone had left it to the president's instincts. They had seen him make bold decisions, take unimaginable risks, and somehow emerge victorious. Now no one wanted to stand in his way.

"I think we have to do it," the president told the audience. He said they have to make sure that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons and they have to make sure that Iran cannot just fire missiles at Israel or across the region.

General Kaine told Trump that he still had some time; he didn't have to give final approval before 16 p.m. the next day.

On Air Force One the following afternoon, 22 minutes before the deadline set by General Kaine, Trump issued the following order:

"Operation Epic Fury has been approved. No hold-ups. Good luck."

TRANSLATION: S. STRUGAR