Five months. That’s how long it took Donald Trump to get the United States into another Middle East war after he had told everyone he would “stop the chaos in the Middle East.” Trump, who proclaimed upon his inauguration he wanted to be remembered as a “peacemaker,” couldn’t even wait a half a year into his term to do the thing that he had told everyone he wouldn’t do, and which he built his entire political brand on opposing.

But Trump’s big adventure into the Middle East is likely to go even worse than George W. Bush’s. The mood of the American people is nothing like it was in 2003, and Trump’s White House has not even made a half-hearted effort to make it so. Bush was hugely popular, with approval ratings in the seventies and eighties, when he decided to invade Iraq. Thanks to a year-long, well-orchestrated propaganda campaign, a large majority of Americans backed his war and the lies that undergirded it.

Trump, by contrast, has been underwater with voters for almost his entire term and is only becoming less popular, while his bare minimum attempt to convince the public Iran had to be attacked means most of the country bitterly opposes this, even majorities of Republicans and his own voters. Trump’s shrinking approval may help explain why he decided to make this foolish and illegal decision — war is the oldest trick for a flailing leader desperate for a popularity boost. But this move is not likely to go his way any more than the other high-stakes policy gambles he’s taken in the interest of projecting strength. The most recent case in point: his decision to send troops onto American streets to quell protesters in Los Angeles, which has rebounded spectacularly on his political standing.

We are only at the start of what could be a long and destructive spiral. It is not Trump or his three underlings standing behind him as he announced this decision on TV that are going to be fighting this war. They have made this foolhardy, reckless decision while gambling with the lives of more than 40,000 US troops scattered throughout the region, who will now be the targets of any reprisals that comes next.

Based on public statements, Trump and his team seem to think their strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites last night are going to be a one-and-done — what they call in Washington a “limited” strike, short of full-scale war. They’ve warned Iran not to retaliate, and that they will be hit even harder if they do. That’s that. Close the file.

The problem for Trump is that he and US foreign policy for at least the last year have created every disincentive for Iran to retaliate in a measured, restrained way. Iran’s is a repressive, theocratic regime that isn’t anyone’s model for admirable government, but it’s inarguable that it has responded to repeated, major provocations with what foreign policy circles call “restraint” — meaning, major violence by anyone’s definition of the term, but far less than what they were hit with, and in ways designed to avoid a larger war from breaking out.

Iranian leadership did this because it seemed to be in their self-interest: all-out war wasn’t worth it, both to preserve the continued existence of the Iranian state, and because viable talks to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal that Trump ripped up in 2018 were meant to be somewhere down the pipeline.

But Iran has gotten exactly zero benefits from taking this approach, with Israel responding to restraint with more provocation, and Trump finally using the nuclear talks as a ruse to soften Iran up for yet another Israeli attack — and now, a US one, too, all as the Iranian government battles for its very survival.

Restraint would be a tall order in this situation at the best of times. But it will now look especially unappealing to Iran’s leadership,  who may well look back at the relatively restrained choices they made as having gotten them to this disastrous point, and will look at Trump’s actions over the past few weeks, which have caused a total collapse of trust in Washington and render Western calls to return to the negotiating table unpersuasive.

What happens next will depend on how they decide to respond. Iran’s leaders could well choose the less destructive of their many options. But even if they do, we’ve crossed over into a new, more dangerous world.

The chances for a US-Iran deal seem to have been detonated along with whatever Trump’s bombs destroyed, which was decidedly not Iran’s nuclear program, as Israeli and US officials are quietly admitting the morning after. Instead, Trump’s strikes gave us the worst of all worlds: failing to meaningfully set back Iran’s enrichment program but likely persuading its leadership that they have no choice but to actually sprint toward a nuclear bomb, since Trump and Israel’s behavior has given them every incentive to do so, just as US intelligence warned it would in advance of this attack.

Meanwhile, nuclear non-proliferation was nice while it lasted: who knows how many governments have now watched this, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the destruction of Libya and Iraq, and have come to the rational but alarming conclusion that being armed to the teeth like North Korea — a country brutally sanctioned and isolated, but never attacked since it started stockpiling and testing WMDs — is better protection than the international law and norms that Israeli and US officials spent the twenty-first century shredding.

Then again, Iran could also just as well choose the most destructive option and retaliate against the tens of thousands of US troops whose lives Trump has decided to gamble with. If so, there is no way Trump will allow any American deaths to stand without his own retaliation. And even if he was inclined to do so, he would come under irresistible pressure from his own advisors, the press, and the entire political class to make good on his threat to hit back even harder, which has included a threat to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader. This is the risk: that Trump’s “limited” strikes start a cycle that ends with thousands of American families somewhere in the Midwest getting their children back in flag-draped coffins — to say nothing of the likely far more gruesome consequences for the

Trump had absolutely no legal authority to do this. The Constitution couldn’t be clearer that it’s Congress that starts wars, not a king-like figure plunging the country into conflict on his personal whim. Trump didn’t even bother so much as gesture at the only possible legal justification for this attack, that of an imminent threat to the United States. Instead, in his speech announcing the attack, Trump, tellingly, mentioned only “erasing this horrible threat to Israel.”

Americans may well start to wonder how it is they keep electing presidents to end wars and focus on problems at home, but keep getting the wars they didn’t want, and seemingly worse and more dangerous ones each time, fought on behalf of a foreign country’s interests no less. The answer is a political system that is more and more insulated from the wishes and interests of the people it’s meant to serve, and which is awash in corruption. Besides its behind-the-scenes power, the Israel First lobby has put tens of millions of dollars into US elections the last few years to swing the results its way, choking out even the wisps of political courage in Washington to defy Israel’s wishes on this or any other matter.

The other answer is Trump, whose actions here should put to bed the absurd claim that he is an antiwar president. The fact that Trump can even make that claim is the result of dumb luck, narrowly avoiding a war with Iran in his first term that he pointlessly nearly started. In reality, aside from when he’s campaigning for something, Trump’s instincts have always tended toward the pro-war side of things: he backed the Iraq War at the time before later realizing there was more political mileage in bashing it, supported the toppling of the Libyan government before flip-flopping multiple times on the question, and his first impulse when Russia invaded Ukraine was for the United States to get into a nuclear standoff with Moscow. And he was consistently for exactly this war with Iran, before he was very briefly this year against it.

Trump was also able to get away with it thanks to his woeful opposition. A decade into his political career, the Democratic Party still hasn’t figured out how to do anything but posture as more war-hungry than Trump,  allowing him to cynically posture as a peace candidate and eat their lunch each election.

Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer spent this year actively goading Trump to start this war, and promoting the lies that Israeli officials have used to manipulate him into it. As Trump geared up for this attack, most prominent Democrats were completely, shamefully silent, with only a few dozen of the party’s elected officials signing on to a bipartisan push for a War Powers Resolution that would have stopped him.

This and whatever bloody mayhem follows it is Trump’s war, but it is also Washington’s war. It is the culmination of two decades’ worth of everything the US public hates about the goings on on Capitol Hill: Bush’s Middle East–reshaping delusions of the 2000s, arms manufacturer-funded lobbies’ obsession with war for Iran, a media that has conditioned Trump to believe military attacks are his pathway to respectability, and a cabal of neoconservatives that never went away after their spectacular failure in Iraq but have wormed their way back into Trump’s good graces, as well as into the ranks of his political opposition. Many hands pulled this trigger.

What’s done is done, and the world now has to do the best it can to weather the chaos that follows until we reach the other side. Given the past few years, and with another three-and-a-half of this presidency to go, it’s hard to feel good about what’s waiting for us there.