Opinion: How Can We End The Iran War?

“Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon” goes the refrain you hear from President Trump day in and day out when he is frequently called to justify the Iran War to anti-war voices on both sides of the political spectrum.

Ryan Murphy, Getty Images

The Iran Nuclear Deal

Yes, a nuclear bomb in the hands of an enemy is certainly an undesirable outcome, but is war the only way we can prevent them from acquiring one?

Diplomacy has worked before. In 2015, the Obama administration brokered an agreement between Iran and major world powers called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. Although I believe his administration was riddled by failures, this was an agreement I could get behind.

Iran promised to cut down its enriched uranium stockpiles by 98%, keep uranium enrichment at 3.67%, far below the 90% needed for a nuclear weapon, cut the number of working centrifuges by two-thirds, change the Arak reactor so it could not make weapons-grade plutonium, and allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect nuclear sites anytime.

The UN, EU, and US agreed to lift economic sanctions and allowed Iran to sell oil abroad and access frozen overseas money. The deal was a win-win! Iran would not acquire the bomb, and Iran had financial incentives.

The Withdrawal 

Three years later, President Donald Trump would make the most grievous error of his presidency when he withdrew our country from the deal. Trump criticized the deal mainly due to the fact that its strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program were temporary, Iran’s ballistic missile program was not addressed, which threatened U.S. troops in the region and regional allies, and the fact that unfreezing assets gave Iran the ability to fund terror groups throughout the region. Trump then reimposed severe economic sanctions, cutting off their oil exports. Iran, with zero financial incentive to follow the terms, began ignoring its commitments.

I think Trump’s concerns can be addressed by two factors. Number one is that although the deal was temporary, it did not mean it could not be renegotiated when that juncture was reached. Number two, although Iran funded terror and threatened regional stability, should America be involved in the region in the first place?

An 'America First' Middle East Policy 

We all know the Middle East is a mess, but what has America’s continued involvement gotten the United States other than to drain our treasury and further anger our enemies? Playing peacekeeper has benefited the United States zilch.

Trump’s Iran policy in both terms may prove to be the most fateful for his legacy. He drove Iran away from compliance and cooperation and further toward an aggressive posture toward the United States.

Nobody is arguing Iran is good. The repressive regime kills its own people for speaking freely and funds terror around the region, but just because a regime is bad does not mean it needs to be an enemy of the United States. The American government’s job is only to take care of the best interests of American citizens, not to be a human rights watcher in the Middle East.

When Trump entered the Iranian conflict in February, he entered a seemingly inescapable quagmire. Many of Iran’s nuclear sites are in unknown locations or buried deep underground where U.S. bunker busters cannot reach. This core objective of the war could not be achieved without a massive influx of ground troops—something America is just not in for.

The situation has forced America to continually degrade Iran’s surface military capabilities and slowly starve them out with an economic blockade. Meanwhile, Iran holds leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, which has become a massive economic pinch for Americans.

Yes, it is true that Iran cannot hold out forever, but would negotiation help quicken a settlement? If Iran was willing to give up its nuclear weapons capability for financial benefits, we have no reason to think it won't again. Of course, Iran will continue to destabilize the region with terror, but is that necessarily our concern?

Why don’t we use this war as a lesson to put away our hubris and pull out of a region that has given us nothing but headaches?

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“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”—Donald J. Trump, 2nd Inaugural Address (2025)