Quincy Institute's co-founder and executive vice president of programs Trita Parsi debated Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies today on CSPAN's Washington Journal program.
The two sparred a bit over today's presidential elections in Iran, the nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions on Tehran. They also took call-in questions. Watch below:
In a startling Truth Social post overnight on Monday, President Donald Trump defied reality and claimed that U.S. weapons were "unlimited" and the U.S. could fight "forever" with "these supplies."
Of course by all measures, every measure, this is not true. It would never be true, but in the case of today, after four years of emptying our stores for Ukraine, and then more than two years for Israel, fighting the Houthis, defending Israel twice, Operation Midnight Hammer in June, and now Operation Epic Fury — well you remember the nursery rhyme: Old Mother Hubbard, the cupboard is bare, and soon we won't be able to give the dog a bone.
Perhaps what is the most absurd about Trump's words, other than the lack of truth (he did not "rebuild" the stockpiles in one year following President Biden's departure; the missiles were still being sent to Ukraine under previous agreements and then he told the Europeans they could buy them, depleting the stores even further). But then his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan "Razin'" Caine, also warned too, that an operation, especially an extended one, could be risky. From the Washington Post last week:
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.
Trump immediately went to Truth Social to contradict the story, saying the opposite was true. But this concern does not come from nowhere. As we reported here the military was already "razin" the alarms last summer about the "shocking" number of missiles that had been depleted from the stockpiles. According to a deep dive by defense writer Mike Fredenberg, along with all the other diminished capacity, the standard missile (SM-3) variant was down 33% and those cost $12.5 to $28 million a piece.
And with each interception attempt requiring at least two missiles, and often more than that, thwarting a few missiles can easily end up costing more than it does to buy an F-35, making missile defense against a peer adversary seem unaffordable. Now that is truly alarming.
This was of course just SM-3s. According to reports, the U.S. used a quarter of its THAAD missile interceptors during the 12-day war in June alone. The Guardian reported in July that the U.S. only had 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it would need for the Pentagon’s future military plans — with many already sent to Ukraine (and more promised).
Indeed, we knew back in 2024 during the fighting with the Houthis that the U.S. was expending overpriced, ridiculously expensive missiles to counter cheap Houthi weaponry. According to reports we were expending Tomahawk cruise missiles, air to air, and air to surface missiles at an amazing clip. That is likely one of the reasons Trump ended that conflict so abruptly.
Don't think that experts haven't already warned that Operation Epic Fury could be limited by these realities. On March 1, one day after Trump announced his war, the Wall Street Journal quoted several who said just that.
“The Trump administration has fired TLAMS (Tomahawks) at an extraordinary rate in operations around the globe, in the Middle East against Iran and the Houthis as well as in Nigeria on Christmas Day,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “When we wargame, TLAMS are some of the first munitions to go within that first week of a U.S.-China conflict."
While tons of money has gone into the industry to start rebuilding the stockpiles we know that will take years to happen, especially for the more "high end" stuff, as Trump refers to it.
"We have a peacetime defense industrial base, and we've had that for decades…we're not really set up to quickly produce things,” Fredenburg told RS back in October. “We don’t know how much more capacity they can squeeze out of existing facilities.”
Having Israel as a "partner" in the war is no help either. The WSJ quotes officials who say they are low on supply too, particularly Arrow 3 air-defense interceptors, and air-launched ballistic missiles — "a weapon it used to take out Iranian missile launchers this summer and to attack Hamas leaders in Qatar last year."
Suggesting the U.S. has enough weapons for a "forever" war is wrong and Trump must know he is gaslighting everyone who ever voted for him because he said he would never get America into another forever war. But what he is doing is ultimately destructive to our military and national defense too. He is signaling that he would be willing to bleed the stockpiles dry to prove a point. He might just end up doing it.
In the months that led up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to convince the world of the need to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Leading officials laid out their case in public, sharing what they claimed was evidence that Iraq was moving rapidly toward the deployment of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. When U.S. tanks rolled across the border, everyone knew the justification: the U.S. was determined to thwart Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction, however fictitious that threat would later prove to be.
In the months that led up to the Iran War, the Trump administration took a different tack. President Trump spoke only occasionally of Iran, offering a smattering of justifications for growing U.S. tensions with the country. He claimed without evidence that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program after the U.S.-Israeli attack last June and even developing missiles that could strike the United States. But he insisted that Tehran could make a deal with seven magic words: “we will never have a nuclear weapon.”
It has now been a day since the U.S. and Israel launched a bombing campaign aimed at overthrowing the Iranian regime. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, as are many of his highest-ranking deputies. Iran sits at its most significant historical turning point since the revolution of 1979.
Yet the reasons behind the extraordinary turn of events remain unclear. So why, exactly, did the administration launch a regime change war in Iran? For Harrison Berger of the American Conservative, the answer is clear: because Israel wanted it to. “There's nothing about this that was done on behalf of the United States,” Berger said during a Sunday panel sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel organization. “This was all on behalf of Israel.”
The arguments for war amount to “putting Israel first,” Berger argued, saying that Iranian missiles pose no direct threat to the U.S. Multiple non-nuclear-weapon states have civilian enrichment programs, he added, but the U.S. only demands an end to the civilian program in Iran. “The only reason we hear that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to the United States is to provide a pretext for the war that we're now doing,” he said.
Most Americans oppose war with Iran, but pro-Israel media figures like David Ellison or “oligarchs” like Trump megadonor Miriam Adelson pushed the administration to embrace the conflict, Berger argued. “That's why we're seeing this action.”
Bolstering this case is a recent piece from the Washington Post, which reported that Israeli and Saudi officials led “a weeks-long lobbying effort” to persuade Trump to launch the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestured at this himself when he said Sunday that, by attacking Iran, Trump has helped accomplish “what I have yearned to do for 40 years.”
But pinning all the blame on Israel “kind of lets the U.S. off the hook,” argued Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). For Duss, the real problem is a “faction in the United States and in Israel that share a vision of a U.S.-Israel relationship that supports continuing U.S. military hegemony in the Middle East.” This group “sees Israel as essentially the U.S.'s sheriff in the region,” he said.
Speaking to RS after the panel, Duss acknowledged that “Israel's concern about the ballistic missiles” was the proximate cause for the attack. “They don't threaten the U.S.; they threaten Israel,” he said. “But I think just putting it all on Israel is analytically wrong.”
Amy Rutkin, a former adviser to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), put it in starker terms. While Democrats are right to oppose the war, “it is super dangerous for anybody to suggest, no offense, that Iran didn't present a material threat,” Rutkin said. “We are deeply vulnerable to Republican attacks when we don’t talk about that.”
This debate will take on increased importance in the coming days as Congress debates whether to rein in Trump’s military campaign through a war powers resolution. Republicans largely appear opposed to the resolution, while most Democrats have expressed support for it.
But some Democratic lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have kept open the possibility that they will back the war if Trump can provide a clear rationale for it based on U.S. interests. Given the razor thin margins in both houses, these members could decide whether the war powers resolution fails.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) made the case for why Democrats should oppose the war in a speech at J Street’s conference on Sunday morning. “We should not be sending Americans to war for the political ambitions of [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and the Saudi crown prince,” Van Hollen said.
“President Trump put American lives at risk and lost American lives on this huge roll of the dice,” he continued. “Americans are dying and people need to be held accountable for their votes for this war of choice.”
In the aftermath of the new U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, the transatlantic alliance has offered a response that confirmed what many both in the West and outside knew all along: that for London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, the "rules-based international order" has been reduced to a simple, brutal premise: might makes right, provided the might is Western.
The joint statement from the E3 — France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — is a master class in evasion. "We did not participate in these strikes, but are in close contact with our international partners, including the United States and Israel," they declared. The text also lists all the references and rationalizations used by Iran hawks — “nuclear program, ballistic missile program, regional destabilization and repression against its own people.”
Not a single reference to the international law that explicitly prohibits aggression. It is particularly Orwellian that the European leaders “urge the Iranian leadership to seek a negotiated solution,” when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was literally doing exactly that the day earlier in Geneva.
By failing to condemn the strikes, the E3 has given the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government a blank check. They frame the crisis not as an act of war against a UN member state, but as a natural consequence of Iran’s failure to unconditionally accept its capitulation. The logic is perverse; the target is blamed for the attack, and the aggressors are seen as restoring order.
To understand this political and strategic abdication, one must examine the motivations driving European leaders — not to justify them, but to expose the cynical calculations behind their cowardice.
First, there is Ukraine. Desperate to keep Washington engaged in Europe's own security crisis, Brussels and most European capitals have calculated that picking a fight with Washington over the Middle East, or, in fact, anywhere in the Global South is a luxury they cannot afford. This follows the EU’s similarly spineless reaction to the U.S. attack on Venezuela less than two months ago.
Not only that, but some European leaders appeared to be, in fact, emboldened by the ease with which the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, hoping that, perhaps, the same could be replicated in the case of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In fact, it is entirely reasonable to suggest, as the Stimson Center's Emma Ashford did, that the Venezuelan operation played a major role in encouraging Trump to think that changing the regime in Iran would prove to be similarly smooth.
Second, there is genuine animosity toward the Iranian regime — and not without reason. The brutal suppression of protests in January 2026, support for Russia in its war in Ukraine, and the persistent use of dual nationals as diplomatic hostages have all rightfully earned the Islamic Republic few friends in European capitals.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that European leaders refuse to confront: disliking a regime does not justify condoning illegal war against it. International law is not a reward system for good behavior. It is a set of constraints designed precisely for moments like this — when powerful states convince themselves that the target is so odious that the normal rules should no longer apply.
The West has made this mistake before. The invasion of Iraq was justified by demonizing Saddam Hussein. The bombing of Belgrade was preceded by the framing of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic as a uniquely monstrous actor. In each case, the short-term gratification of "doing something" about a despised regime gave way to long-term strategic catastrophe — the erosion of international legal norms that protect all states, including Western ones.
One leftist member of the European Parliament from Belgium put it far more bluntly than any foreign ministry dared: "The EU condones the US-Israeli illegal and unprovoked war of aggression on Iran. European failure to stand up for basic principles of international law legitimizes rogue state behaviour and endangers lives throughout the world. Shameful. Dangerous."
Indeed, by refusing to call the U.S.–Israel attack for what it is — an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression — the EU is not neutral. It is actively dismantling the very legal architecture it claims to uphold, and on which its own security ultimately depends. It tells Tehran and the Global South that diplomatic negotiations are merely an inducement to lower their guard, a deception to be respected only until the hegemon decides it is ready for a military action.
Indeed, in a striking repeat of the 12-Day War last June, these strikes occurred as U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, mediated by Oman, were reportedly showing progress. The message is unmistakable: there is no point in engaging with the U.S. as it does not negotiate in good faith, and its European allies will always be available to provide Washington diplomatic cover.
One case of dissent in Europe, however, offers a glimpse of a path not taken. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, alone among the leaders of major European countries, rejected the "unilateral military action of the U.S. and Israel" for contributing to "a more uncertain and hostile international order."
Similarly, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide rightly noted that so called preventive strikes violate international law unless an attack is “imminent." These leaders understand that international legal norms are not optional, and their selective application undermines Europe’s case where it matters most for the continent: Ukraine.
Yet, it is Spain and Norway that are the outliers. The mainstream, represented by the E3 and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is consumed with managing the consequences of the aggression — not only having utterly failed to do anything to prevent it through a diplomatic settlement between the U.S. and Iran, but also exacerbating tensions by deploying snapback of the UN Security Council sanctions against Iran. Von der Leyen's response is to convene a "special Security College" on Monday to discuss Iran's "unjustified attacks on partners," effectively treating the escalation as a problem caused by the target's retaliation.
As the seasoned European foreign policy expert Nathalie Tocci put it, in reaction to von der Leyen’s feckless statement: "Any views on the illegal military attack by the US/Israel? I guess it can't even be defined as hypocritical. In hypocrisy there's at least the pretense of considering norms important. The only consolation is that on the Middle East we've become totally irrelevant."
Hard to disagree with this ruthless epitaph for European foreign policy. Not even hypocrisy remains —just irrelevance. As the Middle East teeters on the edge of a new, extensive war, history will not be kind to those who failed to contribute to any diplomatic solution to prevent it, then endorsed it hitting the last nail in the casket of the “rules-based international order.”
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