Donald Trump sees himself among a line of historical figures in which foreign-policy gestures of punitive, yet “just”, power cohere into a single narrative. One can speak of an emerging imperial narrative—and of the United States as the heir to Europe’s traditional values, as Donald Trump and his team remind the Old World, writes Natalia Tsvetkova, Acting Director of the Arbatov Institute of the USA and Canada at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The US military campaign against Iran in 2026 is often explained by pressure from Israel, the broader logic of containing Tehran, and Donald Trump’s desire to bring Middle Eastern oil resources under control. The domestic political situation in the United States also pushed the president towards a military solution. A broad coalition of lobbyists took shape, interested in a hard line on Iran. It included the pro-Israel Republican wing with its donor and lobbying networks, evangelical supporters of the MAGA movement, right-leaning think tanks—above all the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 programme—a segment of conservative commentators in major media outlets, Republican hawks in Congress, certain representatives of the Iranian émigré elite who sought to persuade Washington that external pressure would accelerate the regime’s collapse, and representatives of the defence industry, for whom war meant increased demand for armaments.
However, the key factors, in our view, were not lobbying pressures, but those directly tied to the political and personal ambitions of the US president himself. Above all, this concerns President Trump’s—and his inner circle’s—drive to consolidate personal power in its imperial form, as well as concern over the outcome of the midterm congressional elections. As a result, the Iranian campaign has been transformed into an instrument through which the White House seeks to weaken the traditional separation of powers and secure for itself the exclusive right to make decisions within the country.
Let us examine the principal motives that pushed the president towards the decision on Iran.
During his second term, the president’s entourage proved markedly more loyal than in his first, intensifying the “groupthink” characteristic of closed circles in decision-making. This factor ensured that the president’s preferences did not encounter the customary institutional counterbalance from the bureaucracy of specialised agencies.
At the same time, the policy of “draining the swamp” and the purge of the bureaucratic apparatus created institutional channels through which the decision for war could be taken without the usual internal resistance. Those dismissed were replaced by new appointees personally indebted to the president and disinclined to utter the word “no”. If, during Trump’s first term, bureaucratic restraints against military options in Iran still operated in many agencies, by his second term they had largely been dismantled. For instance, in 2019, John Bolton’s request for strike options against Iran met resistance in the Pentagon and the State Department, and Trump himself cancelled the strike minutes before the operation began, citing the disproportionate nature of the potential casualties.
In the second term, this system of checks has been dismantled even further. In a single day in January 2025, Trump dismissed 17 inspectors general across federal agencies responsible for oversight of institutions involved in foreign policy. The president’s advisers have been steadily expanding the White House’s authority to dismiss disloyal experts and bureaucrats occupying, in the language of executive orders, “policy-influencing positions”. This affected approximately 50,000 federal employees who, at various levels, could have used administrative obstruction as a tool to restrain presidential decisions. It is worth recalling that in February 2025, the president, together with the Secretary of Defense, replaced key figures, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and military lawyers. By the time negotiations with Tehran began in the spring of 2025, the decision-making system had virtually no officials left who, by status or authority, could slow the move towards a military option on Iran.
If, during the first administration, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Herbert McMaster, and John Bolton presented the president with a competing set of options, by the beginning of the second term a so-called “Yes Sir” cabinet had formed around Trump: advisers could express concern, but not oppose the president. The Iranian campaign thus became not only the result of external pressure, but also the product of an administrative apparatus in which loyalty replaced interagency contestation.
Trump’s appeal to history acquired fundamental significance. When the president publicly began to portray Iran as a state that had humiliated the United States 47 years earlier by seizing and holding 52 American diplomats for 444 days, advisers could discuss only the tactics of strikes, not challenge them. Trump’s invocation of this 1979 episode lends the military campaign the flavour of deferred justice, in which a historical grievance receives its answer. This is neither good nor bad—it is the objective reality of the White House. Historical analogies articulated by the president serve as a powerful motive in decision-making and, for external observers, as an indicator of the direction of his thinking and the likely trajectory of policy.
Another strand of the domestic political motivation behind the Iranian campaign may be described as imperial—and today it need no longer be understood merely as a metaphor. The accumulated evidence suggests that the president has not simply become absorbed in redesigning the White House interior, new architectural projects, promoting his image as a saviour-president on social media, or attempts to draw closer to European monarchies and the Vatican. Trump sees himself among a lineage of historical figures in which foreign-policy gestures of punitive, yet “just”, power form a unified narrative. This also includes his appeal to lost European traditions and certain historical coincidences. Trump’s election to a second term by the Electoral College on 17 December 2024 nearly coincided with the 220th anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation (2 December 1804); in 2026, the United States celebrates its own 250th anniversary. At the intersection of these two dates, a symbolic bridge emerges. One may speak of an evolving imperial narrative—and of the United States as the successor to Europe’s traditional values, a point Trump and his team emphasise to the Old World.
The Iranian campaign is also fuelled by the weakness of Congress, which is losing its struggle with the White House. After Congress was notified on 2 March 2026, the sixty-day period prescribed by the War Powers Resolution expired on 1 May. By that date, the White House had neutralised the resolution’s “sanctions” mechanism. The administration asserted that a ceasefire constituted the “completion” of the campaign, interpreting the truce as a “pause” in the sixty-day countdown. The law itself has not been repealed, but its practical effect has been nullified in all but name. Moreover, from March to the end of April 2026, Congress attempted no fewer than eight times to restrict the military campaign against Iran: six such initiatives failed in the Senate, and two in the House of Representatives. Neither chamber approved the war, yet neither could muster a majority to halt or limit it. Congress proved capable of producing votes, but not decisions. Each new failure demonstrated that the legislative branch’s institutional ambitions in matters of war and peace had been suppressed. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson publicly asserted that the United States was “not at war” and that this was a “specific, clearly defined mission and operation”. This formulation spared the Republican majority the need to choose between supporting the president and defending Congress’s prerogatives. Congress records what the president has already done, thereby becoming a passive accomplice in the expansion of presidential power.
The logic of these processes raises the question of what exactly Trump will demand of domestic America after victory—whether real or imagined. The White House will demand recognition of a new norm whereby the president has the right independently to determine the price of victory, to revise the War Powers legislation, and to present the economic costs to society as the price of military operations. The elite will have to accept that the concept of America First does not signify a rejection of imperial ambitions, but their personalisation in the figure of the president. Each group within the American political spectrum will be required to take its assigned place in the new hierarchy. Congress will be asked to acknowledge the fait accompli; Republicans will be expected to go into elections with the thesis of the right of force, rather than excuses for the state of the economy; isolationists will have to accept that the formula “no new wars” now signifies not a rejection of limited strikes, but merely the absence of prolonged occupation; Democrats will be forced to lose the argument over an Iranian “failure”, which the president will present as a national victory. The external campaign thus becomes an instrument for the rapid expansion of the boundaries of presidential power within American politics. Finally, the ideological dimension of this transformation deserves particular attention. The MAGA movement receives a clear signal: the monopoly on the ideological reinterpretation of “America First” is vested personally in Trump. In this new version of the concept, military force is not excluded, provided the war can be presented as victorious coercion.
For this reason, the White House is conducting the Iranian campaign not as an endless escalation, but as the rapid production of outcomes that can be presented to society as a series of victories.
