Since President Trump launched airstrikes on Iran, the administration has cycled through a dizzying array of justifications for war, ranging from eliminating a nuclear program he previously said was “obliterated,” to punishing Tehran for supporting terrorism and Iraqi militias, to portraying the campaign as a mission to liberate the Iranian people from long-standing repression.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s speech at the Pentagon on Monday morning offered the newest rationale: the claim that Iran’s formidable missile and drone arsenal constituted “a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions,” and added that Iran “had a conventional gun to our head.”

Yet Hegseth’s assertion that Iran was building a conventional shield for nuclear blackmail dramatically exaggerates the threat that Iran’s capabilities posed. Moreover, it gets the logic of nuclear emboldenment completely backward — providing yet another data point that the Trump administration’s logic for war remains hopelessly muddled.

Neither Iran nor its nuclear program was an imminent threat to the United States, as Trump himself seemed to acknowledge Saturday, saying “we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future.” Iran was not on the precipice of obtaining an atomic bomb. Though Iranian nuclear scientists mastered the nuclear fuel cycle years ago by enriching uranium up to 60% purity — clearing the highest technological hurdle for proliferation — Iran deliberately stopped short of producing the 90% enriched uranium necessary for building nuclear weapons.

Nor is there clear evidence that Iran was attempting to assemble an actual bomb device, even if it had succeeded in producing weapons-grade uranium. As late as March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that Iran was not actively pursuing weaponization, despite a November 2024 US intelligence assessment concluding that Tehran had “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” Subsequent US strikes on the nuclear facilities at Natanz Nuclear Facility, Fordo Fuel Enrichment Plant and Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center in June 2025 — carried out under Operation Midnight Hammer — set the Iranian program back by an estimated two years, according to the United States Department of Defense.

The concept that Iran’s missile and drone forces served as a “conventional shield” is a mistaken analogy. Iran possessed nothing resembling a protective shield. Its air-defense network — a patchwork of aging Soviet-era systems, limited Russian imports, and newer domestic platforms — proved no match for superior US and Israeli airpower, and certainly lacked anything comparable to the dense, technologically advanced missile-interceptor architecture fielded by its adversaries. Its decrepit air force was so outmatched by US and Israeli fighters that Iran kept it grounded during the 12-Day War. In theory, Iran’s missiles and drones existed to deter the US from striking by threatening retaliatory punishment against US bases in the region, but as Trump’s attack showed, they were too weak to accomplish even that.

The real argument to contend with is whether nuclear weapons would have allowed Iran to behave more aggressively with its conventional forces, secure in the knowledge that a nuclear arsenal would deter retaliation — a phenomenon known as nuclear emboldenment. But leading international relations scholars have demonstrated nuclear emboldenment to be a myth. Nuclear weapons provide deterrence against attack. But they do not inherently embolden their possessors to behave more aggressively, nor do they meaningfully enhance the effectiveness of conventional military coercion.

All the “conventional shield” theory really does is to provide an unconvincing justification for a war the administration had already decided to fight. Instead, the US public must recognize Trump’s attack for what it is: a war of choice against a weak country that could not strike the American homeland, launched without congressional authorization, and lacking any clear reasoning or exit strategy.