No liberal can feel any regret over the demise of Iran’s Supreme Leader, if he really was as ‘evil’ as Trump claims he was. (I have no reason to doubt that; but we know how persuasive false propaganda can be these days.) Of course I would have preferred him to have been captured and tried in a court of law, rather than bombed to death; but even if that were practicable, we know that it’s not how the Americans do these things. (It’s why they carry guns.) Nonetheless, ‘good riddance’ is probably the overwhelming response with which most of us in the West greeted the news of Khameini’s killing yesterday; apparently shared by much of the population of Iran, if the scenes of rejoicing in the streets of Teheran we are currently seeing on television are to be believed.

That really is our problem with it. We would rather it had been done less forcibly, and directed by someone other than Trump. We distrust his motives for the strike, suspect that he has no clear plan for the future government of Iran, and fear that any good it does might unravel, leaving a worse situation behind – as did the earlier American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also notice how this action appears to run counter to the clear promises Trump gave to the American people at the time of his election: that his ‘America First’ administration would finally put an end to America’s ‘never-ending’ foreign wars. This, remember, is the second of his foreign wars, after Venezuela.

On the question of motives, one can’t dismiss the possibility that one of Trump’s was a domestic political calculation: that a war would boost his popularity in the upcoming mid-term elections, at a time when opinion polls seemed to show it declining. (As a Brit, I thought back to our Margaret Thatcher in 1982, whose  invasion of the Falklands gained her an enormous electoral boost, at a time when the support for her government was waning. Cynics said then that this was her motive.) Then of course there’s oil, which was a motive in the Venezuela case; and was also the main one back in 1953, when the US and the UK together ousted a relatively liberal government in Iran in the interests of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Could also it be part of the equation today? And lastly, of course, there’s Israel; the US’s (only) partner in the current war, and with motives of its own.

More broadly, America’s attack on Iran is yet another clear signal that Trump is reverting to the foreign policy of the Neo-Con years: rejecting post-1945 internationalism in favour of the more nationalistic – ‘might is right’ – and imperialistic policies of the past. Pete Hegseth – the ‘War’ Minister – gave a speech shortly after the event, which endeavoured to distance it from former American wars (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/02/pete-hegseth-iran-attack/88942488007/), but unconvincingly. Internationalism, co-operation and diplomacy don’t seem to be part of the Trump administration’s armory; as is perhaps to be expected of an ex-capitalist property developer, whose ‘ideology’ – if you can call it that – centres around ‘deals’, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and no other ‘principles’ at all. Yesterday Trump was undoubtedly the ‘winner’ – for the time being. We’ll see what good it does for him; and of course for the 80 million-plus people of Iran.