It has now been one hundred days since the United States went to war with Iran, and on Saturday Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones at Bahrain and Kuwait — both of them US-aligned Gulf states — after American forces struck Iranian radar sites. Video circulating online showed Kuwait intercepting ballistic missiles, in scenes that would have been extraordinary before the conflict began but now constitute a routine escalation cycle. Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV, speaking en route to his visit to Spain, declared the war with Iran does not qualify as a “just war” under Catholic moral teaching. Back in Washington, analyses suggest Trump has failed to build domestic political support for what began as a swift demonstration of force.
The received wisdom
The mainstream antiwar argument is by now well-rehearsed, and it is not without force. The United States entered this conflict without a formal declaration of war, on the basis of executive war powers that Congress previously attempted to constrain but did not ultimately revoke. The human and economic costs are mounting: Iran faces hyperinflation, a ten per cent economic contraction, power cuts, and political dissent, but those conditions have not produced the regime change or strategic capitulation that was presumably the war’s objective. The missile strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain represent precisely the regional spillover that critics predicted — and the US-Iran ceasefire framework, whatever its precise terms, is clearly not holding. The Pope’s “just war” declaration is not trivial: it reflects the moral consensus of much of the Global South and the Catholic world, which includes significant portions of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Philippines — all countries whose cooperation matters to American foreign policy.
A different read
The antiwar case is correct on the tactics. It is less persuasive on the alternatives.
The fundamental question is what “not going to war” would have meant. By early 2026, Iran’s nuclear programme had reached a threshold that multiple administrations had designated as unacceptable. The Trump administration made a choice — one can argue about its wisdom, timing, and legal basis — but the choice was not made in a vacuum. The previous framework, the JCPOA, had collapsed under American withdrawal in 2018 and Iranian non-compliance thereafter. Sanctions alone had demonstrably not stopped the enrichment programme. Diplomacy, reinstituted under Biden, had produced periodic pauses but no permanent halt.
The “just war” framework invoked by Pope Leo XIV is worth engaging seriously rather than dismissing. Traditional just-war doctrine requires, among other conditions, that military force be a last resort and that it have a reasonable chance of success. The hundred-day record cuts both ways: against the administration, because the strategic objective remains unclear and the war has not produced Iranian capitulation; but also against a simple “this was avoidable” conclusion, because the alternative — a nuclear-armed Iran — would have restructured Gulf security in ways whose costs are harder to tabulate but no less real.
What is more troubling than the decision to act is what Al Jazeera’s analysis captures: Trump has failed to build a domestic political coalition for the war’s continuation. This is not a new American failure — it is a recurring one. The Korea War, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all followed a pattern in which initial executive action outpaced public mandate, leaving subsequent presidents to manage the inheritance. Wars begun without political legitimacy tend to be ended badly rather than well.
The strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain are, in some ways, the most analytically interesting development of day 100. Iran is not fighting a purely defensive war; it is attempting to impose regional costs on American allies in the hope of fracturing Gulf Cooperation Council support for the US campaign. This is the strategic logic of escalation dominance — if you cannot win militarily, you make the costs of victory prohibitive for your opponent’s coalition. Whether that strategy is working is an open question, but the fact that Kuwait is intercepting Iranian missiles is evidence that Iran still has operational capacity to threaten the regional order.
The domestic political failure that analysts are now identifying is the one that should concern Washington most. A war that cannot command democratic support will eventually be ended on terms dictated by exhaustion rather than strategy — and those terms rarely serve anyone’s long-term interests.
What to watch
- Whether the missile strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait trigger any formal invocation of mutual defence obligations, or remain managed as “incidents”
- Congressional dynamics: is there any mechanism by which opposition parties could force a formal authorisation vote, and would such a vote pass?
- Iran’s domestic political trajectory: hyperinflation and power cuts are historically associated with either regime collapse or hardened repression — which direction does Tehran move?
- Gulf Cooperation Council cohesion: Saudi Arabia’s posture will be decisive in determining whether Iran’s strategy of imposing regional costs achieves its objective
— J