> If Iran has nukes, then a nuke race will start in the middle East
A fair concern, but it is interesting that although "estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads" [1], we are not concerned about those warheads as much as we do about the ones Iran might have. Should US bomb Israeli nuclear plants? No. Should they have bombed the Iranian ones? Why?
I think this attack makes it more likely they’ll get nukes, not less. They moved all their enriched uranium already, and now they know that there’s no longer any point in diplomacy.
The next facilities they build will be a few times deeper, and I have no doubt we’ll soon be hearing that ground troops are the only way to stop them.
And that's something we will have to accept, that Islamic populations will always have nukes.
How do you plan to handle a world with Islamic populations having nukes? Because that's something you will have to plan for. You have no choice. They will not let you not let them have nukes. They will make sure they will have nukes. That's just given.
The US is the leader of the liberal empire which depends on the middle east allowing trade. Iran is standing in the way of this and wants to push back the empire's control away from the middle east... but they have their own plans to establish another empire of their own.
I know "empire" is maybe an outdated term but I'm just illustrating there are bigger incentives than at the national level. Ironically it is conservative nationalists (who are hated by the Left) that want the empire to shrink and for the US to pull back from this leadership position. The risk here is it could also destabilize the entire world, but that's a different matter.
In short, this move is an attempt to strengthen the status quo that began after WW2.If the status quo is maintained it directly benefits the US.
This is the opposite of how I see it. This move is a complete repudiation of the post-ww2 order that emphasized the system of international laws and treaties developed by the UN. For the US to blindly follow Israel into a war with a sovereign country without even taking it to the UN or Congress is preposterous and signals the end of the post-ww2 and American domestic order. Both the UN Charter and the US Constitution are trashed and we won't recover from it in our life times. There's a reason Bush W sent Colin Powell to the UN, we still paid lip service to the rule of law 20 years ago. We don't even pretend anymore. We are trashing our laws and institution all at the behest of some a tiny racist religious extremist country.
People who were born into, grew up in, and live the current western bubble take it for granted and genuinely believe it is something natural rather than carefully built and expensively maintained - for extraordinary benefit.
Keeping the Arab world from building their own nuclear weapons has long been contingent on Iran not having a nuclear weapons program. It only benefits the US to the extent it prevents the situation where half the countries in the Middle East having nuclear weapons.
Good lord, it benefits far more than just America if the broader middle east doesn't enter into a rapid nuclear weapons proliferation stage. Iran is considered to be a very serious enemy throughout much of the middle east. A nuclear armed Iran is a very bad idea.
the dude needs a PR win of some kind. I guess he gave up on the Nobel prize and decided to try something else. Aside from that, could really be a chance to end the nukes there and try to topple the regime, who knows what's going to happen, but time-wise now is the best opportunity.
Why do you highlight that the theocracy "believes in jihad" and not that the theocracy has issued a religious decree opposing weapons of mass destruction?
If this was about the benefit to the United States, then we would have had months of public buildup and debate like we did with the war in Iraq. It is hardly an example of a good decision, but history shows that it was at least a popular one; the majority of poll respondents and of legislators were both in favor of the initial invasion of Iraq. I was only eleven at the time, but I remember most moderate Democrats and independents who I knew (including, particularly, my seventh-grade history teacher, who was no fan of Bush) were in favor of the war.
Contrast that to the situation today, when polls show Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to involvement [1] and even some prominent Republican legislators (Gaetz, IIRC) were against the war. This is the Trump show: it's motivated by his ego and hopium. He's more erratic than ever. Historically, American presidents almost never started a major war without popular support (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were all popular when they started, and I think Libya and Kosovo were too). I can't even think of a case where the country was dragged into a war that was opposed 60% to 16% in favor. I would be very interested to hear if there ever was one.
This is my honest assessment of the calculus of the move. Please don't interpret any of this as me personally supporting or approving of these motives. I'm just trying to have a genuine intellectual discussion about the potential thought processes of our collective leaders.
* Quick, victorious wars can be incredibly popular domestically, regardless of whether surveys say that only 16% of the US population supports the war. Trump needs an approval ratings boost. The global tariff shock was a PR disaster. A quick, victorious war is a tried-and-true approval rating booster over the last 200-300 years. The key, of course, is actually keeping the war truly short and victorious. If it drags on, or if people start asking "have we truly won?", then that's a whole different matter.
* We have moved out of a unipolar geopolitical world and into a multipolar one. The USA is checking the ambitions of the rival powers. Want to invade Ukraine? Sure, go ahead and try, but it will be a multi-year slog. Want to go for years maybe developing nuclear weapons, maybe not, and making US antagonism a central part of your political platform? Watch us systematically attack your nuclear program and and air power and do highly targeted assassinations of your political elites over the course of two weeks. Want to invade Taiwan? Look at what happened in Ukraine and Iran and maybe reset your expectations about how that will pan out.
* There has been a lot of questioning lately around whether the US will actually help their allies when they're in a pinch. This is sending a pretty strong message of reassurance to allies.
* Trump may actually want things to escalate to a point where he can reasonably declare martial law within the US. How do you stay in power when you've already hit your two-term constitutional limit?
Your question was "how does it benefit the US?" but I don't think that's answerable because everyone has a different take on what's best for the US. It's much more feasible to discuss "how does it benefit Trump?" or "how does it maintain US's position as a world power?"
I understand Iran is a headache to Israel, but did it have to be an enemy of USA? Isn't Iran's ambition, and its proxies, are all regional in nature? Have they ever attempted to harm an american living in America?
Israel has led an amazingly succesful campaign in presenting their problems (often arising out of their territorial ambitions) as a problem for the entire west.
The Netherlands and Germany both produce highly enriched uranium despite not having nuclear weapons programs. 60% enrichment is insufficient for use in nuclear weapons. Iran's enriched uranium is its main bargaining chip in the diplomatic negotiations that the US walked away from. Iran was assessed by the US intelligence community to not be developing nuclear weapons.
Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorist groups. The key word being “state”. There are many well known terrorist groups that are not sponsored by Iran.
Iran was willing to "come to a diplomatic negotiation" before Israel pre-emptively and unilaterally attacked. In fact, Iran and the US had found a diplomatic solution before Trump tore it up and promised to get a better deal (and then repeatedly failed to do so).
Iran did come to a diplomatic solution: the JCPOA [0]. Unfortunately, it was Obama who did it, so Trump tore it up in his first term. Why would Iran believe that any diplomatic outcome is meaningful?
Why must we stop Iran's terrorism? Their terrorism is directed at Israel, not America.
We can in fact just as easily support Iran's attacks against Israel. No reason to pick either side.
Right now the American people are coming to the consensus that Israel are the bad guys. Everybody under 50 already recognizes that, purely based on the thousands of Palestinian toddlers they see on Instagram that Israel kills and injures (the popular post today on Instagram is of a toddler with his legs severed). And the people over 50 will eventually die off, causing Israel's base of support to disappear.
There is no hope of Israel's permanent existence. We should remove our support for Israel immediately and prepare for the long term.
If they wanted to disrupt China's oil wouldn't they have hit the main export terminal on Kharg Island? More generally, you don't think its likely that, regardless of what you think of Israel, their main motivation is they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?
We don't need a second North Korea. Nor do we want to normalize every country starting a nuclear program.
Air strikes do not constitute boots on the ground, and the rules based norms around "you break it, you own it" ended with the last flight from Kabul. Most likely, we will conduct bombing raids, but take no part in nation building.
Ironically, South Korea wanted to do this to North Korea in 2003 (edit: 1993-94), but the Bush (edit: Clinton) administration pushed back because they were concentrating on Iraq and Afghanistan (edit: Yugoslavia).
Edit 1:
Nuclear weapons ALONE do not act as a deterrent anymore. Most nuclear countries have second/third strike capabilities and nuclear triad capabilities.
This is something that Iran has been working on for decades with a fairly robust ballistics and cruise missile program, and attempts at building a domestic nuclear submarine program.
More critically, just about every regional power in the Middle East has been investing in similar capabilities in case an Iran breakout happens. Going from 1 additonal country with nuclear weapons to 3-4 leads to a cascading domino effect (a nuclear Iran means a nuclear Saudi means a nuclear Turkiye means a nuclear Egypt...)
Edit 2:
For the downvoters - a country who's leadership explicitly chants "مرگ بر آمریکا" (Death to America) will unsurprisingly be viewed as a threat. Even our large rivals China or Russia do not normalize that kind of rhetoric.
> Ironically, South Korea wanted to do this to North Korea in 2003
Where did you get that info? Makes no sense. South Korea has been consistently against starting another war with NK for at least 30 years or so, and besides, in 2003 South Korea was ruled by Kim Dae-Jung, famous for he's staunch support of improving relations with North Korea (he got a Nobel prize for that), and then Roh Moo-Hyun, from the same party and largely following Kim's foreign policy.
Thanks to them we had no wars, and of course now we have some young whippersnappers complaining about their "pro-NK" policies, saying we could have totally bombed NK, starting a war, and burning the peninsula to the ground, but at least North Korea won't have nukes today!
Isn't it great when people take things out of context? In this case the context that wishing death is quite common in Iranian expressions of frustrations?
While I understand not wanting countries like North Korea and Iran having nukes, it does protect them from invasion. We've seen what happened after Ukraine gave up their nukes. Less we forget, the Neocons of the Bush era wanted to remake the entire Middle East, not just Iraq and Afghanistan.
The actions of the US and Israel are only proving an unfortunate trend of reality: The only deterrence against invasion from other countries is nuclear deterrence. We had a comprehensive deal with Iran to limit their nuclear program which Trump tore up in 2017 and which Israel is taking advantage of today.
Oil for starters. Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east. By proxy they are participating in every conflict.
A nuclear iran would be completely intolerable, never mind that their regime might just be lunatic enough to use them.
Add that war is bad for the whole world.
So the us benefits that it protects her economic (and strategic) interests in the ME, which are real and extremely important, at the low cost of a limited air campaign.
There are further moral arguments, but i'm answering your question in the most direct way.
It's seeming more and more like Israel, which propped up Hamas for example, is the principal destabilizing element in the region, and therefore really it's America, which spearheaded the original overthrow of Iranian democracy, alongside all its other middle eastern meddling for the last fifty years.
> Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east
Says Israel, the nation who tore up every single international laws, directly led campaign against UN and ICC, and whose right-wing (ones in power now) have been dreaming about a Greater Israel that threatens territorial integrity of like 10 different ME countries.
If we want their oil, we can buy it like reasonable people do. What you're referring to is armed robbery.
>Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east
Is this a joke? The country that has not started any wars in its 300 year existence is not the "destabilizing element". That would be the country that has attacked Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran this year alone.
kumarvvr|8 months ago
Iran getting nukes is the spark that will start a lot of chain reactions.
And islamic populations are radicalized enough that the possibility of a nuke on Israel increases dramatically.
selcuka|8 months ago
A fair concern, but it is interesting that although "estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads" [1], we are not concerned about those warheads as much as we do about the ones Iran might have. Should US bomb Israeli nuclear plants? No. Should they have bombed the Iranian ones? Why?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel
danenania|8 months ago
The next facilities they build will be a few times deeper, and I have no doubt we’ll soon be hearing that ground troops are the only way to stop them.
vFunct|8 months ago
How do you plan to handle a world with Islamic populations having nukes? Because that's something you will have to plan for. You have no choice. They will not let you not let them have nukes. They will make sure they will have nukes. That's just given.
nashashmi|8 months ago
jenny91|8 months ago
arandomusername|8 months ago
proc0|8 months ago
I know "empire" is maybe an outdated term but I'm just illustrating there are bigger incentives than at the national level. Ironically it is conservative nationalists (who are hated by the Left) that want the empire to shrink and for the US to pull back from this leadership position. The risk here is it could also destabilize the entire world, but that's a different matter.
In short, this move is an attempt to strengthen the status quo that began after WW2.If the status quo is maintained it directly benefits the US.
guelo|8 months ago
Workaccount2|8 months ago
macintux|8 months ago
hiddencost|8 months ago
jandrewrogers|8 months ago
PeterHolzwarth|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
Jtsummers|8 months ago
slv77|8 months ago
The third temple's holy of holies : Israel's nuclear weapons
https://dp.la/item/525bc46d51878c5e285d9069a80246d0
twelve40|8 months ago
Schnitz|8 months ago
CapricornNoble|8 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against...
Smeevy|8 months ago
scythe|8 months ago
Contrast that to the situation today, when polls show Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to involvement [1] and even some prominent Republican legislators (Gaetz, IIRC) were against the war. This is the Trump show: it's motivated by his ego and hopium. He's more erratic than ever. Historically, American presidents almost never started a major war without popular support (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were all popular when they started, and I think Libya and Kosovo were too). I can't even think of a case where the country was dragged into a war that was opposed 60% to 16% in favor. I would be very interested to hear if there ever was one.
1: https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/israel-iran-war-americans-p...
kaycebasques|8 months ago
* Quick, victorious wars can be incredibly popular domestically, regardless of whether surveys say that only 16% of the US population supports the war. Trump needs an approval ratings boost. The global tariff shock was a PR disaster. A quick, victorious war is a tried-and-true approval rating booster over the last 200-300 years. The key, of course, is actually keeping the war truly short and victorious. If it drags on, or if people start asking "have we truly won?", then that's a whole different matter.
* We have moved out of a unipolar geopolitical world and into a multipolar one. The USA is checking the ambitions of the rival powers. Want to invade Ukraine? Sure, go ahead and try, but it will be a multi-year slog. Want to go for years maybe developing nuclear weapons, maybe not, and making US antagonism a central part of your political platform? Watch us systematically attack your nuclear program and and air power and do highly targeted assassinations of your political elites over the course of two weeks. Want to invade Taiwan? Look at what happened in Ukraine and Iran and maybe reset your expectations about how that will pan out.
* There has been a lot of questioning lately around whether the US will actually help their allies when they're in a pinch. This is sending a pretty strong message of reassurance to allies.
* Trump may actually want things to escalate to a point where he can reasonably declare martial law within the US. How do you stay in power when you've already hit your two-term constitutional limit?
Your question was "how does it benefit the US?" but I don't think that's answerable because everyone has a different take on what's best for the US. It's much more feasible to discuss "how does it benefit Trump?" or "how does it maintain US's position as a world power?"
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
s5300|8 months ago
[deleted]
mslansn|8 months ago
[deleted]
andsoitis|8 months ago
[deleted]
shihab|8 months ago
Israel has led an amazingly succesful campaign in presenting their problems (often arising out of their territorial ambitions) as a problem for the entire west.
jjk166|8 months ago
logankeenan|8 months ago
standardUser|8 months ago
Buttons840|8 months ago
How much does Iran spend sponsoring terrorism?
dakiol|8 months ago
So tired of american bullshit.
fatbird|8 months ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
hiddencost|8 months ago
[deleted]
vFunct|8 months ago
We can in fact just as easily support Iran's attacks against Israel. No reason to pick either side.
Right now the American people are coming to the consensus that Israel are the bad guys. Everybody under 50 already recognizes that, purely based on the thousands of Palestinian toddlers they see on Instagram that Israel kills and injures (the popular post today on Instagram is of a toddler with his legs severed). And the people over 50 will eventually die off, causing Israel's base of support to disappear.
There is no hope of Israel's permanent existence. We should remove our support for Israel immediately and prepare for the long term.
tehjoker|8 months ago
they are also punishing iran for selling oil in their national currency
imperialism run amok
thinkcontext|8 months ago
alephnerd|8 months ago
Air strikes do not constitute boots on the ground, and the rules based norms around "you break it, you own it" ended with the last flight from Kabul. Most likely, we will conduct bombing raids, but take no part in nation building.
Ironically, South Korea wanted to do this to North Korea in 2003 (edit: 1993-94), but the Bush (edit: Clinton) administration pushed back because they were concentrating on Iraq and Afghanistan (edit: Yugoslavia).
Edit 1:
Nuclear weapons ALONE do not act as a deterrent anymore. Most nuclear countries have second/third strike capabilities and nuclear triad capabilities.
This is something that Iran has been working on for decades with a fairly robust ballistics and cruise missile program, and attempts at building a domestic nuclear submarine program.
More critically, just about every regional power in the Middle East has been investing in similar capabilities in case an Iran breakout happens. Going from 1 additonal country with nuclear weapons to 3-4 leads to a cascading domino effect (a nuclear Iran means a nuclear Saudi means a nuclear Turkiye means a nuclear Egypt...)
Edit 2:
For the downvoters - a country who's leadership explicitly chants "مرگ بر آمریکا" (Death to America) will unsurprisingly be viewed as a threat. Even our large rivals China or Russia do not normalize that kind of rhetoric.
yongjik|8 months ago
Where did you get that info? Makes no sense. South Korea has been consistently against starting another war with NK for at least 30 years or so, and besides, in 2003 South Korea was ruled by Kim Dae-Jung, famous for he's staunch support of improving relations with North Korea (he got a Nobel prize for that), and then Roh Moo-Hyun, from the same party and largely following Kim's foreign policy.
Thanks to them we had no wars, and of course now we have some young whippersnappers complaining about their "pro-NK" policies, saying we could have totally bombed NK, starting a war, and burning the peninsula to the ground, but at least North Korea won't have nukes today!
netsharc|8 months ago
Why don't you go die!
I don't mean it literally, read: https://www.mypersiancorner.com/death-to-america-explained-o...
Isn't it great when people take things out of context? In this case the context that wishing death is quite common in Iranian expressions of frustrations?
goatlover|8 months ago
fzeroracer|8 months ago
FridayoLeary|8 months ago
A nuclear iran would be completely intolerable, never mind that their regime might just be lunatic enough to use them.
Add that war is bad for the whole world.
So the us benefits that it protects her economic (and strategic) interests in the ME, which are real and extremely important, at the low cost of a limited air campaign.
There are further moral arguments, but i'm answering your question in the most direct way.
twixfel|8 months ago
komali2|8 months ago
shihab|8 months ago
Says Israel, the nation who tore up every single international laws, directly led campaign against UN and ICC, and whose right-wing (ones in power now) have been dreaming about a Greater Israel that threatens territorial integrity of like 10 different ME countries.
34679|8 months ago
If we want their oil, we can buy it like reasonable people do. What you're referring to is armed robbery.
>Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east
Is this a joke? The country that has not started any wars in its 300 year existence is not the "destabilizing element". That would be the country that has attacked Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran this year alone.