March 2, 2026

The most telling thing about the Trump administration’s legal argument for going to war with Iran is that, as a practical matter, it does not exist.

When President Donald Trump announced Saturday morning that we were now at “war,” he claimed that the United States was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,” but he did not identify any. The best that Trump could muster was to point to decades-old incidents — the takeover of the U.S. embassy that ended in 1981, the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, which Trump claimed that the Iranian government “knew [about] and were probably involved [in]” — all while maintaining that the U.S. had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” last summer. The administration, meanwhile, has provided no evidence for its claim that Iran posed an imminent threat.

It is also notable that Trump now seems intent on explicitly targeting foreign leaders; the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei comes less than two months after he sent troops in to seize Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. This is new territory for Trump.

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