Donald Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while on board Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus Christi, Texas.
Trump was on his way to the port city to give a speech titled American Energy Dominance and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texas Republican politicians including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, about his options in Iran.
Also present on the plane in the countdown to Operation Epic Fury was a veteran film star, Dennis Quaid. At some point in the flight, Cruz filmed Quaid sitting next to Trump and persuaded the actor to reprise his role as Ronald Reagan in a 2024 reverential biopic, so that Cruz could frame the encounter as “two great American presidents”.
Speaking as Reagan, Quaid declared Trump was “like me on steroids”. It was a highly stylised passing of the flame from the patron saint of Republican hawks to their current hero.
Not mentioned was the fact that Quaid had also played a slapstick version of George W Bush in a 2006 film, American Dreamz, as a clueless good-ol’-boy president manipulated by war-hungry and oil-thirsty aides into invading Iraq, unaware there were more than “two kinds of Iraqistanis”.
The shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House.
Trump had, after all, campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars” begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of 2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
In the space of a few months, however, the “peace president” became the first US leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary.
The factors behind this apparent transformation in the run-up to Operation Epic Fury are many and various, and include Trump’s long-proven susceptibility to persuasion by foreign strongmen, his showman’s knack for stirring up sensation to distract from problems, a stubborn adversary and the sheer momentum of a vast military machine once it is set in motion.
In reality, the road Trump had to travel was shorter than it appeared. His opposition to war had only been partial. He was against large-scale infantry wars, but has shown himself ready to use the US military’s overwhelming superiority in air power to punish enemies. He risked all-out war with Iran in his first term by assassinating its most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani, in January 2020, and bombed Iran’s nuclear sites last June in Operation Midnight Hammer.
In his second term, Trump has seemingly become intoxicated with the overwhelming military capabilities at his disposal.
A key date in the path to war with Iran was 3 January this year, when US special forces pulled off an extraordinary operation in Venezuela, abducting its recalcitrant and heavily guarded leader, Nicolás Maduro, in the middle of the night without a single US fatality.
It was a close-run thing. One of the helicopter pilots flying special forces into Maduro’s stronghold was shot repeatedly in the lower body but managed to keep control of the aircraft. If it had crashed, killing everyone on board, the operation could have been aborted, and Trump would have very likely lost his appetite for military action.
As it happened, the Maduro kidnapping was, for Trump, a made-for-television success, a tale of heroics that diverted attention from gathering threats at home, most importantly the pressure on his administration to release all its files on Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier who ran a child sex-trafficking ring. The president is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the files, and possibly far more. He has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the matter.
However desirable the distraction of foreign military operations must have appeared, the decision to opt for an all-out assault on Iran intended to fatally weaken the regime, rather than targeted strikes on nuclear and military targets, still represented an enormous gamble for Trump.
The president alone would be able to determine the time and circumstances of the start of the war, but others would have a say over when it ended, most importantly the Iranian regime itself.
Benjamin Netanyahu played a leading role in bringing Trump around to the cause of regime change. The Israeli prime minister visited Trump in the “winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago in late December, reportedly asking for US approval for more Israeli strikes on Iranian missile sites.
Trump gave his support, but over the next few weeks that pledge ballooned into a commitment to a joint onslaught to bring down Iran’s Islamic Republic.
The successful Maduro operation clearly played a role in raising Trump’s military aspirations, but so did events inside Iran. When protests over dire economic conditions spread across the country, Trump used his social media platform to promise the demonstrators that the regime “will pay a big price” and that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” At the time, however, it was a pledge he was not in a position to back up.
The US had no aircraft carriers in the region, limited numbers of warplanes, and its 40,000 troops spread around bases in the Middle East did not have adequate protection against the inevitable Iranian missile retaliations.
The scale and ferocity of the protests changed the CIA and the Mossad’s assessments of the weakness of the regime. According to reports in the US and Israeli media, the two intelligence agencies became more confident that it could be brought down. Even if it meant that power flowed to the generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at the expense of the ayatollahs, the agencies thought a more secular leadership could ultimately be more pragmatic, and willing to do a deal.
Meanwhile, another important switch in the Middle East had turned towards war. According to the Washington Post, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the course of February, privately urging him to attack Iran, while publicly insisting on a peaceful solution.
By the time Netanyahu returned to the US a few weeks later for a White House meeting with Trump on 11 February, regime change in Iran had become the preferred option.
Joint planning by the US and Israeli militaries had already been under way for weeks, and it would take another fortnight for the preparations to be complete, in particular for a second US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, to arrive in the region from the Caribbean, where it had been involved in ousting Maduro.
Publicly at least, Trump insisted he would prefer a diplomatic solution to the threats supposedly posed by Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes – threats Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June but was now arguing had been reconstituted.
Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, met Iranian diplomats three times in February. Opinions differ on whether the process was a sham from the outset, intended to give the US and Israel time to complete their military buildup, but the gaps between the two sides’ starting positions were anyway too wide to be bridged.
At the final meeting in Geneva on 26 February, Iran and the Omani officials acting as broker pointed at unprecedented concessions Tehran had floated, such as giving up its entire stock of highly enriched uranium, a strategic asset. But Trump wanted far more, including a permanent cessation of Iran’s uranium enrichment and steep curbs on missiles. Witkoff told Fox News the president could not understand “why they haven’t capitulated”.
By the time the delegations met in Geneva on Thursday last week, the US had amassed the biggest military force in the Middle East since Bush led the invasion of Iraq 23 years earlier. To have accepted a diplomatic solution short of surrender would have looked like weakness.
The sheer scale of joint military planning with Israel, to the extent that much of the orders were put out in English and Hebrew, and the sheer detail of the targeting plans, assisted by AI tools that Israel had used extensively in Gaza, created a forward momentum of its own.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told reporters on Monday that Washington was aware Israel was going to launch an attack and that Iran would immediately strike back against US bases in the region, forcing US forces to strike pre-emptively.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
That version, part of a wider incoherence over war aims, was hastily denied by Trump. The scale of the US commitment and close joint planning make it unlikely that Washington was taken by surprise.
The strikes were originally scheduled for 25 February, according to some reports, then delayed to allow for the Geneva meeting the next day, and then put off again, after intelligence reports that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be at his compound in central Tehran on Saturday morning, along with key defence and security leaders.
Trump gave the order on Air Force One at 3.38pm for the attack to commence.
“Operation Epic Fury is approved,” the order said. “No aborts. Good luck.”
When he landed at Corpus Christi less than 20 minutes later, he fended off questions on whether he had made a decision.
“I’d rather not tell you,” Trump said. “You would have had the greatest scoop in history.”
After his speech about US energy dominance, the presidential entourage flew on to Mar-a-Lago.
The defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, had already landed unannounced at Palm Beach and were in Mar-a-Lago’s improvised parallel situation room – where Trump had watched the Maduro operation in awe the previous month.
In his first term, Trump had launched missiles at Syria while China’s Xi Jinping was visiting the Florida resort, and the two leaders then ate what Trump described as the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”. Among some, the place had become known as War-a-Lago.
As the sun set over Florida last Friday, partygoers in ballgowns and tuxedos were dancing at a black-tie fundraiser, and Trump made an appearance in a dark suit and white trucker hat emblazoned with “USA”.
He told his guests that a planned charity auction might have to be cancelled as he was busy with Iran. “Have a good time,” he said. “I gotta go to work.”
He then passed through layers of security into the situation room draped in black curtains, where an operational map showing US deployments across the Middle East had been set up on an easel.
A video link had been established with the situation room in the White House, where the vice-president, JD Vance, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, were. They were longstanding opponents of foreign wars and regime change who had recently been brought round to the cause. On this occasion, they were presented only as observers.
The operation began at 1.15am Florida time, 9.45am Iran time. Khamenei had already made preparations for his death and chose not to flee Tehran. He clearly preferred martyrdom to surrender, but may not have been expecting a strike that morning. The regime assumed that the attack would come at night.
It was as if the regime was laying its head on the block for decapitation. As many as 30 air-launched Israeli missiles converged on the supreme leader’s compound, killing him and dozens of senior officials in seconds.
More than 100 US aircraft also took part in the initial onslaught, as well as sea-launched Tomahawk missiles.
“This was a massive, overwhelming attack across all domains of warfare, striking more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours,” Caine said.
Trump presented the massive assault as an opportunity for the Iranian people to throw off the 47-year-old regime and take over the government. “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” the president said.
The administration has since scaled down the regime change talk, but Trump has continued to insist on his steadfastness in pursuing war, pointing to his “virtually unlimited supply” of weapons.
“Wars can be fought ‘forever’ and very successfully,” he said, marking the complete turning of the wheel, from forever wars to the “peace president” and back again.
