This article examines the claim made by the Trump administration to justify the attack carried out against Iran on 28 February 2026, citing the “imminent threat” posed by Iran as the reason. It argues that it was not the “imminent threat” to Israel and the US that led to the attack. Rather, it is a ‘war of choice’ driven by strategic calculations, the belief that there was a window of opportunity to take control of Iran and eliminate its allies and vassals in the Axis of Resistance, given the changing regional power dynamics, US interests in the Middle East, and the broader quest to reclaim global hegemony that led the United States and Israel to attack. 

                                                                                             

INTRODUCTION

Iran has been a core target of Western powers’ adventures in the Middle East because of its rich energy resources and its geostrategic location, particularly during the Cold War, when it was the theatre of the ‘Great Game’ between the US and the then Soviet Union. Ronen Bergman, in his book The Secret War with Iran, writes about the depth of clandestine strategic cooperation between Israel and Iran before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, in which Israel had reportedly committed to providing Iran with ballistic missiles with a range of around 700 km, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. (Bergman 2009, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Covert Struggle for Control of a Rogue State, Oneworld Publications) In 1967, the United States (US) also provided Iran with a nuclear research reactor, sowing the seeds of its nuclear technology as part of President Dwight D Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme—an initiative aimed at providing countries with peaceful civilian nuclear technologies in the hope that they would not pursue military nuclear programmes and could be drawn closer to Washington during the Cold War. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/us-iran-nuclear-program.html)