President Donald Trump’s Pentagon is reportedly preparing a potential military assault on Iran. Washington and Tehran are set to resume Omani-mediated talks on Thursday, but the threat of war is rising nonetheless. This month, the White House and Pentagon have repeatedly met with Israeli leaders who are lobbying against a deal with Iran and are in favor of launching an attack on the country of more than 90 million people.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will go forward with military action, but the White House is feeling confident after its January attack on Venezuela.

Trump recently told Israeli media that ​“either we reach a deal” with Iran ​“or we’ll have to do something very tough.” Whenever Trump speaks, it can be challenging to tell what is bombast, what to take seriously, what is pure fiction, and what is reality.

So here are five realities to keep in mind as White House officials escalate their threats.

1: Trump says he’s trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But it’s the United States and its allies that are the greatest nuclear threat.

The United States, not Iran, is the country setting the worst example in promoting nuclear weapons in the world today — and making nuclear-armed conflict more possible.

Trump just let the START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia lapse, resulting in no existing bilateral agreements regarding nuclear weapons between the two countries in the world with the most warheads. The U.S. is giving unconditional backing to Israel — the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons. And the Trump administration is now supporting the launch of a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia.

Regarding Iran, Trump pulled out of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) during his first term, which had required Iran to limit its uranium enrichment and accept extensive monitoring by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency — and for the U.S. to lift some of its harsh, devastating sanctions in exchange. Iran was abiding by the terms of the deal — which ensured that its nuclear program continued developing materials only for civilian use, not weapons — and the UN certified that Iran was in compliance.

But Trump still abandoned the agreement in 2018 in favor of what he called the ​“Maximum Pressure Campaign,” in which the U.S. re-imposed sanctions and deployed more troops and weapons to the Middle East to threaten Iran. Then, in 2020, the U.S. assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani—a key figure in Iran’s foreign policy and a popular political leader.

If the hope is that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons, Trump’s policy is pushing the country in the opposite direction. Trump’s escalation of sanctions and military hostility despite Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal only bolsters the claim of Iranian leaders who are skeptical toward negotiations that the country needs nuclear weapons as the only deterrent against aggression.

2: Trump is contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranians, not rescuing them.

The Iranian government is carrying out a brutal crackdown on protesters and critics. Experts now put the toll at more than 7,000 killed — although given the government’s control of media and the internet, it is impossible to know the extent of the killing.

Trump has claimed that the U.S. is ​“coming to the rescue” of Iranians who are challenging their government. But in reality, his actions have put countless Iranians in harm’s way.

Last September, Trump deported 55 people back to Iran in a deal his administration made with the Iranian government — the same government the president is now decrying — after detaining them for months and threatening to deport them to Somalia or Sudan. In December, Trump deported 55 more back to Iran.

In January, Trump even deported a dozen people to Iran during the government’s crackdown.

Meanwhile, Trump is maintaining the decades-long U.S. policy of economic sanctions on Iran, which has crashed the country’s currency and isolated it in the world economy. This has devastated the country’s population — especially women, children, the sick, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable people. And last June, Washington joined Israel in its air war on Iran, which killed more than 1,000 people—including children — and wounded more than 5,000.

A policy that is actually guided by concern for Iranians would involve stopping the detention and deportation of Iranians in the U.S., lifting the sanctions against Iran, and refraining from further military attacks on the country.

3: The United States has shown that it is an unreliable negotiator.

Iran entered the JCPOA with the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China, and complied with it, but Trump unilaterally withdrew from it anyway. His successor, former President Joe Biden, did not seriously pursue a return to the nuclear deal while he was in office.

So how could Iran — or any country — now take the U.S. seriously at the negotiating table? What is the point in entering an agreement if the next U.S. president is going to walk away from it and return to a hostile posture?

Since Trump took office for his second term last year, his administration has vacillated between the longstanding U.S. position that Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon, and the notion that Iran cannot have any nuclear program at all, including the kind of civilian nuclear power program explicitly allowed to all non-nuclear weapons states by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The latter, more extreme position has long been held by Israel, whose government Trump has been in close contact with throughout the negotiations with Tehran.

In its current negotiations, the U.S. keeps moving the goal posts, going from the demand that Iran not develop a nuclear weapons to saying that the country’s nuclear program, its treatment of dissidents, its relationship with regional allies, and its ballistic missile arsenal would be on the negotiating table, but without clarity about what the administration meant. As Trump put it bizarrely in an interview with FOX News, the deal he wants should have ​“no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things that you want.”

4: The United States is aggressively threatening Iran, not the other way around.

On February 3, a U.S. fighter jet from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln shot down an Iranian drone that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said was ​“acting aggressively.” But it is Trump’s deployment of the Abraham Lincoln itself—along with 5,700 additional U.S. troops and other warships and planes—that constitutes an act of aggression.

Trump has moved these weapons and troops to the Middle East to join the tens of thousands already stationed there. This is coming after the U.S. bombed Iran last June and carried out a major military operation in Venezuela in January, all raising the threat level of what military actions the U.S. was prepared to take. Trump has deployed a second aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford—with its thousands of troops, dozens of warplanes, accompanying warships, and more — to the waters off Iran to join the USS Abraham Lincoln already deployed there.

Iran does have a recent history of deploying its military forces in the Middle East — participating in Syria’s civil war, for example. But Iran never attacked Israel directly before April 2024 and has never been anywhere close to matching Washington’s military capacity or breadth of power projection in the region. Iran’s allies have been decimated by Israel’s assaults over the last several years, and Iran’s own military power has been set back by the June 2025 Israeli-U.S. attack.

U.S. military bases across the region surround Iran with troops and weapons, but there are no Iranian troops or military assets anywhere near the United States. There is no question that the most aggressive Middle Eastern power at the moment is Washington’s ally Israel — which continues its genocide in Gaza and has attacked six countries in the last year alone — all enabled through military assistance, arms transfers, and political protection by the United States.

5: Trump’s threats against Iran — and his aggressive foreign policy generally — are unpopular with Americans.

The majority of Americans — 61 percent—disapprove of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy in general. Almost half of all Americans — 48 percent—disapprove of the U.S. attacking Iran, while only 28 percent approve. Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it.

The first year of this Trump administration has involved a rampage of militarism — from masked, armed ICE agents storming communities across the United States to bombings and other attacks in Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, the Caribbean, and Venezuela. Trump has threatened Greenland and armed Israel’s violence against Palestinians.

Whatever criticisms one could have of Iran’s government, they do not justify an assault by the United States military, which would only compound the suffering of innocent Iranian civilians. As the White House beats the drums of war, we should keep in mind that it is the U.S. that is threatening the world, not Iran.

This article was jointly published by FPIF and In These Times Magazine. Email