Resource Competition With China Lay Behind Trump’s Iran War
The US war on Iran may have seemed like an irrational move by a president who is as reckless and impulsive as he is destructive. But there was a geopolitical logic behind the attack, based on Washington’s desire to deny China access to vital resources.
The resource wars between the US and China have accelerated the determination of both sides to escape their dependencies on each other. The two great powers are dismantling the integrated economy they spent fifty years building together. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
On the morning of February 23, 2026, Benjamin Netanyahu called Donald Trump from Jerusalem with intelligence that would change the course of their war on Iran. Senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, were scheduled to gather at a compound in Tehran that Saturday, vulnerable to a single airstrike. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago when the call came through.
Two weeks earlier, Trump and Netanyahu had met in Washington for three hours in a session described by those present as grave and grim, planning a coordinated operation in great detail. Even before the two leaders met, Trump ordered a massive deployment of troops to the Middle East following an uprising in Iran that its leaders drowned in blood. The president was certainly thinking about attacking Iran, but he had not made up his mind about the timing.
Following his telephone conversation with Netanyahu, Trump instructed the CIA to verify Israel’s intelligence. It checked out. Three days later, his envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff called from Geneva. Negotiations with Iran were going nowhere, they claimed. Now it all came together for Trump: the plan, the operational opportunity, the diplomatic deadlock. The result was Operation Epic Fury, a joint American and Israeli surprise strike that killed Khamenei and triggered the war.
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