The situation in Iran is dangerously escalating – but whatever you do, don’t call it a war

The Guardian-Sept14th2026

I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end,” Donald Trump promised a crowd in Pennsylvania in 2024. While the disastrous conflict in Iran, which has escalated in recent days, may make it seem like the president has reneged on that promise, that’s inaccurate. It would be wrong to say that the president has dragged the US into yet another disastrous forever war in the Middle East because, as government officials keep insisting, what’s happening in Iran isn’t actually a war.

“I wouldn’t call it a war,” JD Vance told reporters early this month, for example, after being asked whether the fighting in Iran might be over by the November midterms. “Right now, there is no active shooting.”

Maybe not, but there has been quite a bit of active bombing. Earlier this month, a US missile strike hit a wedding at a private home in southern Iran, killing at least four people, including a four-year-old child and a 16-year-old. That’s fairly restrained compared to the massacre in March when a US precision-guided missile hit an elementary school in Iran, killing 150 people, including 120 children, but it’s still something I would personally file under “possible war crimes”.

But not only does the Trump administration keep insisting this isn’t a real war, they’re also adamant there aren’t any real crimes being committed: the vice-president would like to stress that you shouldn’t believe your eyes or ears when it comes to the civilian deaths being reported. Despite a weapons expert and a visual analysis by the New York Times concluding that the bomb that hit the wedding party in a residential area of the country was American, Vance has a hunch the whole thing might have been made up by some untrustworthy brown people.

“The Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far,” Vance said at that same press briefing, in relation to the wedding massacre. “So I’m extremely skeptical of this.”

The vice-president may be skeptical, but I’m confused. If this isn’t a war, what is it? A little skirmish? An interminable series of special military operations? A very bloody screw-up? Trump himself has called it a war on several occasions. Last Wednesday, for example, he said: “The war is going to end immediately after the election.” However, rather confusing matters, he also recently suggested he agreed with Vance that it wasn’t a full-fledged war. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us,” Trump said last month. Those are some very expensive potatoes: the not-a-war already has a price tag of tens of billions. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has roughly estimated that it has cost the typical US household $1,200. And then of course there’s the human cost: the thousands of lives that have been lost.

What we call this “military conflict” isn’t just semantics, it matters greatly. Not least because the constitution is very clear that a president can’t unilaterally start an official war on a whim; only Congress has the power to declare a war. Trump isn’t the first president to launch major military action without going to Congress for a declaration: Harry Truman classified the Korean conflict as a “police action” to bypass Congress and presidents since have engaged in similar semantic sleights-of-hand. But, as the historian and foreign relations expert Fredrik Logevall noted in an interview with the Harvard Kennedy School: “What’s extraordinary about President Trump in the current context is that he has not really bothered to even consult with Congress, never mind seek the approval of Congress.” In other words, he’s acting like a dictator.