The Trump-Netanyahu War is already a political achievement so spectacularly stupid, so breathtakingly reckless, that it deserves its own category in the annals of strategic incompetence. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have managed to turn the Islamic Republic of Iran into a legitimate victim of international aggression. We are witnessing a masterclass in how to hand your enemy the one thing they could never earn on their own: moral credibility.

This is by no means a defense of Tehran, lest the usual suspects jump onto that bandwagon. Iran is a nightmare. It’s a theocratic horror show that executes thousands of people a year, polices women’s bodies like they’re state property, terrorizes LGBTQ+ people, crushes dissent with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine, and calls the whole bloody and deadly enterprise divine justice. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented this brutality in excruciating detail. The arbitrary detentions, the torture, the persecution of minorities, the jailing of Nobel laureates for the crime of speaking truth.

By early 2026, estimates of protestor deaths in Iran by human rights organizations varied wildly, some suggesting over 6,000 to 7,000 fatalities, with other reports claiming as many as 20,000 to 30,000. The Iranian government itself confirmed 3,117 deaths. Additionally, thousands have been arrested and injured during the crackdown, and many face the possibility of death penalties.

No one in their right mind views Iran as a misunderstood government with a PR problem. This is a regime that beats women for showing their hair and then lectures the world about dignity. It sponsors proxy violence across the Middle East, props up dictators, and the United States has designated it a state sponsor of terrorism for decades. That designation reflects actual policy, actual violence, actual bodies, despite the increasing lack of credibility of the ill-suited, self-appointed arbiters.

Iran is what it has always been. A misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic theocracy with a talent for exporting violence and packaging it as resistance.

Trump and Netanyahu launched an illegal war that violated international law so flagrantly, so arrogantly, that it rearranged the entire moral landscape. War does that. It shoves certain facts into the spotlight and pushes others into the shadows. Before the strikes, Iran was the villain everyone could identify without needing a graduate seminar. After them, Iran gets to stand before the international community as a sovereign state attacked by two nuclear-armed powers, one of them the global superpower, the other already radioactive from its appalling conduct in Gaza and its contempt for international law.

The UN Secretary-General condemned the escalation, stating that the use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran undermined international peace and security. UN experts went further, warning that unlawful military intervention isn’t a solution to Iran’s nuclear program, terrorism, or human rights abuses, and that international law can’t be cherry-picked by Washington and Jerusalem to load their plates with the parts they like and toss the rest in the garbage.

Despite the euphemisms and ridiculous attempts to frame the Trump-Netanyahu War as anything but a war — a targeted operation, a military excursion, a surgical strike, an intervention, a fight, a skirmish, a tiff, or a brouhaha — no matter how you slice it, the United States joined Israel in initiating a large-scale military operation against Iran without required authorization from Congress or the UN Security Council. International law scholars published a letter describing the initiation of the campaign as a clear violation of the UN Charter and raising concerns about possible war crimes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Israel launched attacks on several Iranian nuclear facilities, and that the United States conducted attacks on three more. The agency had to stop verification activities and withdraw inspectors for safety reasons. Bombing the problem didn’t magically produce more transparency. It blew up the mechanism by which the world could verify what Iran was doing with its nuclear program.

The Strait of Hormuz, which carries about a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, and major volumes of liquefied natural gas and fertilizers has become a geopolitical chokepoint. The war has disrupted shipping. Armed actors have attacked vessels. Gasoline prices in the United States have surged by more than 50% in some states. Ordinary people who didn’t vote for ayatollahs, Trump, or Netanyahu are paying for this insecure masculinity exercise in overcompensation at the pump, in shipping costs, in inflation, and in instability.

Trump’s expectation that NATO allies would blindly do America’s bidding in support of a poorly planned pre-emptive war that violated international law and Trump launched without consultation reflected a gross miscalculation and demonstrated a fundamental ignorance of the nature of a defensive alliance. Not to mention the failure to predict Iran’s response, from closing the Strait of Hormuz to the threat Iran posed to allies in the Middle East. No one in his administration appeared any the wiser. His flagrant insults of world leaders, including Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, didn’t help either. Nor his attempts to belittle Volodymyr Zelensky. And carry water for Russia.

America’s unreliability and aggression under Trump have shifted the global balance of power. Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met with world leaders at the European Political Community summit, a gathering focused on strategic co-operation in politics, security and infrastructure. Canada is the first non-European country to attend the summit, which has taken place twice a year since it began after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Canada pledged $270 million to help Ukraine secure critical military capabilities in its defence against Russia’s full-scale invasion. America was notably absent.

As Trump and Netanyahu continue to wreck America and Israel’s global standing, there is nothing to show for it beyond the strategic idiocy of the whole enterprise. Iran’s regime thrives on siege psychology. It tells its citizens that the West wants to destroy them, humiliate them, starve them, bomb them, and dictate their future. Then Trump and Netanyahu, with all the subtlety of belligerent drunks operating bulldozers, provide the fucking B-roll.

Every missile becomes a recruitment poster, as does every unhinged screed or Pulp Fiction recitation by Pete Hegseth. Every dead civilian becomes a martyr. Every illegal strike lets Tehran launder its domestic barbarism through the language of sovereignty, resistance, and victimhood.

The world hasn’t suddenly forgotten Tehran’s crimes. However, every absurd effort to shape the narrative, whether by using gamer slogans such as Epic Fury and Operation Freedom, or repeated declarations of victory and announcements of ceasefires, serves as a distraction. And while it may appear incompetent and chaotic, every frenzied, see-sawing shift from ceasefire to apocalypse and back again provides an opportunity for some mysterious entities to make bank on trades that suspiciously coincide with moments when insider information would be most valuable. These diversions enable the supposedly weakened or destroyed Iranian leadership to engage diplomatically with the likes of China and reposition itself as a responsible. aggrieved global actor.

At the same time, Iran’s embrace and mastery of AI and social media to mock and taunt the United States, capture the imagination of younger generations, and shape narratives at home and abroad. (On Tuesday night, the speaker of Iran’s parliament mockingly termed an effort by the USA Navy to escort stranded ships “Operation Trust Me Bro.”) These tactics allow the regime to obscure its repressive theocracy. Its nimble, effective use of Shahed drones and low-cost weaponry has caught its adversaries by surprise and is changing perceptions.

The endgame, which changes by the hour and depends on which member of the administration you’re asking, appears to now be opening up the Strait of Hormuz, as it was before the war began, but now enabling Iran to generate revenue, dictate terms and exercise leverage that it didn’t have before.

That’s the grotesque achievement of this war. It hasn’t liberated Iranians from their oppressive government. It hasn’t destroyed their nuclear ambitions nor eliminated the threat in any meaningful way. It hasn’t restored Israeli security. It hasn’t strengthened American credibility. It hasn’t stabilized the region. It hasn’t fortified international law. It hasn’t clarified the nuclear issue. It hasn’t isolated Tehran.

It has done something far more perverse: it has allowed one of the world’s most repressive regimes to wrap itself in the torn fabric of international law and pose, however cynically, as its defender. It stirred nationalism and solidarity among many Iranian citizens who were willing to put their lives at risk to topple the regime before the war started. And just as disastrously, it has exposed America’s over-reliance on an increasingly ageing and bloated industrial-military complex, the weaponry it produces, and the pace at which it can replenish it. The war has similarly exposed Israel’s myth of invincibility as it struggles to neutralize Lebanon, let alone Iran.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration has instructed commercial satellite companies to restrict, withhold or delay the release of imagery that would reveal the extent of the cost, consequences and damage to Iran, Lebanon and America’s military bases in the Middle East. Officials bombard us daily with such bullshit that we are in the extraordinary position of having to parse any communication from the United States, Israel and Iran with equal skepticism.

This is what happens when corrupt leaders prioritize performative machismo over strategy, when they mistake violence for strength, when they’re so bloated with arrogance that they can’t see past their own egos to the consequences of their actions, and if they could, wouldn’t give a shit.

Iran remains what it has always been. A theocratic nightmare that deserves every bit of condemnation, isolation and opposition directed at it. But Trump and Netanyahu have handed Tehran a gift it could never have earned honestly. The appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of a world increasingly skeptical of American power and Israeli conduct.

It’s a strategic obscenity that’s as much a moral failure as a policy one.

And for which we’re all paying the price.