🇮🇷 IRAN’S PRESIDENT DECLARES “TOTAL WAR” WITH THE WEST — A CRISIS TRUMP CREATED

“We are at total war with the United States, Israel, and Europe. They want to bring our country to its knees.”

— Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking to state media

Iran’s president has now declared that his country is in a state of “total war” with the United States, Israel, and Europe, accusing the West of trying to economically and militarily crush Iran.

The statement follows months of escalating violence, including U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year, assassinations of senior Iranian military figures, and an accelerating regional spiral that increasingly resembles open confrontation rather than containment.

To understand how we got here, you have to rewind a decade.

In 2015, the U.S. and its allies negotiated the Iran nuclear deal—a painstaking, inspection-heavy agreement that verifiably limited Iran’s nuclear program. Iran complied. International inspectors confirmed it. American intelligence confirmed it. The deal was working.

Then Donald Trump ripped it up.

Not because Iran violated it. Not because the deal endangered Americans. But because Trump didn’t understand it—at all. He never grasped how inspections worked, never absorbed the concept of verification versus trust, and had no patience for agreements that required literacy, discipline, or delayed gratification.

What he did understand was that Barack Obama’s name was attached to it, and Trump’s governing instinct has always been to smash whatever reminds him that someone else once did the job better.

Equally damning was the behavior of Trump’s cabinet and national security team. Many knew the deal was working. Many warned privately that withdrawal would accelerate Iran’s nuclear program and raise the risk of war. And yet they caved—out of fear, out of ambition, out of a craven desire to survive another day in Trump’s orbit.

No one stopped him. No one forced a reckoning. They watched a reckless, ignorant president dismantle a functioning system because contradicting him required courage they did not have.

By withdrawing unilaterally, Trump shattered U.S. credibility, humiliated Iranian moderates, empowered hardliners, and replaced containment with provocation.

This is the result. We are closer to World War III—the slow, stupid march toward a cataclysmic war driven by ignorance, envy, and a president pathologically incapable of restraint.

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