Trump’s War in Iran Is Different from Putin’s War in Ukraine

But a few similarities cannot be ignored.

Credit: White House

Early in President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, one of my tweets got a lot of engagement on X—but perhaps for the wrong reasons. This is what I wrote:

Once our presidents make a decision to go war, even when I disagree with the decision and process as is the case with our current war with Iran, I still want our armed forces to win. To date, however, I have no idea what the definition of winning in this war is.

Reaction from Russian speakers was particularly voluminous and mostly critical. Many accused me of double standards. They said I sounded just like a Russian supporting Putin’s war, with some users substituting the word “Ukraine” for “Iran.” The line about wanting our armed forces to win, even if I disagreed with the president’s decision to go to war, seemed especially offensive to many. I regret that phrasing. I was trying—albeit clumsily—to distinguish between supporting soldiers in their tactical operations and not supporting a president’s strategic decision to go to war in the first place. I realize that, for some, this may be a distinction without a difference, but it still matters to me. I do not want American soldiers to die, nor do I want them to kill any more civilians. I hope that their commander-in-chief, President Trump, ends this war soon.

What I also failed to make clear in my tweet was the limits of this principle. I would not support U.S. troops in a war of annexation against a democracy, such as the one Trump has previously threatened against Denmark, or the one Putin is executing right now in Ukraine. Nor is my position one of unqualified support for our warriors. If American soldiers were to commit war crimes in Iran, as Russian soldiers have in Ukraine—and as U.S. soldiers have sometimes done in previous wars—I would not defend such actions, but demand accountability. I am still waiting for the Trump administration to take greater accountability for the killing of Iranian schoolchildren in Minab.

At the same time, where I disagree with critics of my tweet is that the word “Iran” can simply be substituted for the word “Ukraine.” That is a false comparison. Some of the goals of Trump’s war (however ambiguous, as I write about here) advance legitimate American security interests, even though I still believe that non-military instruments of American power could have achieved them more successfully and without the loss of life, and I am not sure that Trump’s war is achieving them. And that is how Trump’s war against is fundamentally different from Putin’s war in Ukraine.

First, Ukraine has never posed a security threat to Russia. Never. By contrast, Iran’s regime has threatened the United States and our allies and partners in the region for decades. The theocrats who seized power in Iran in 1979 kidnapped American diplomats and other embassy officials. Ukrainian leaders never did anything remotely similar to Russians. Iran’s autocrats have supported terrorist groups and militias that have killed American soldiers (for instance, in Beirut in 1983 and throughout the Iraq war) and Israeli civilians. The Hamas terrorists who killed innocent Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, were Iranian proxies. To the best of my knowledge, Ukrainian leaders have never funded jihadist terrorists to attack Russian soldiers or civilians. Alongside its expanding missile arsenal, Iran was developing a nuclear weapons program. (The expansion of Iran’s nuclear program occurred after Trump pulled out of the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018.) Though most likely intended for deterrence and not for use against American targets, Israeli officials still assessed the risk of an Iranian nuclear strike against their country as real. The government in Kyiv was never developing a nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, Ukrainian leaders agreed to give up their nuclear weapons in the 1990s in return for a security guarantee from us that we failed to honor.

Second, Trump’s war aims, while still fluid, do not include annexing Iranian territory. Putin’s war in Ukraine does. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, then on paper in 2022 the Donbas region, along with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia (even though Russia does not occupy all these territories) and now seeks to subjugate the rest of the country to be under Russia’s control.

Third, the way American armed forces are fighting against Iran is different from the way Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. Trump and his military commanders are not targeting civilians. Trump also has not kidnapped Iranian children. American soldiers have not raped Iranian women and children. And so far, the number of casualties from Trump’s war is significantly lower than those killed and wounded in Putin’s war. Every lost soldier is a tragedy. As General Stanley McChrystal rightly observed, “we’ve fortunately suffered few casualties today, but every casualty has a family and carries a loss, and we need to remember that.” But to date, the scale of killing in Trump’s war is not comparable to Putin’s war.

Fourth, for all its faults, the United States is still a democracy, and Iran is a dictatorship. The theocracy ruling Iran is very repressive, and just this year, it has killed thousands of peaceful protestors. In the war in Ukraine, Russia is the dictatorship, and Ukraine is the democracy. Like those ruling in Iran, Putin’s regime is a repressive dictatorship that kills and arrests its political opponents. Regime type matters, at least to me. If Trump launched an unprovoked war of annexation against democratic Denmark and tried to annex Greenland or tried to use military force to make Canada the 51st state, as he tragically has sometimes joked about, then the parallels to Putin’s war in Ukraine would be tighter. But an American war to weaken an autocratic adversary is different.

Acknowledging the Similarities—and Their Risks for America

While the differences between Trump’s war in Iran and Putin’s war in Ukraine are major, I want to acknowledge—in response to comments about my original tweet—that there are some similarities between these wars. And these parallels, in my view, are detrimental to American national interests.

First, both Putin and Trump went to war without any authorization from the UN Security Council or any other international organization. When NATO and Middle East partners bombed Libya in 2011, they did so after obtaining UN Security Council approval (UNSC resolutions 1970 and 1973). When President George H.W. Bush led the invasion of Iraq to liberate Kuwait, he also had the blessing of the United Nations Security Council. So too did his son, George W. Bush, when he launched his war against Afghanistan in 2001. Even before invading Iraq in 2003, President Bush and his administration tried to gain approval from the UN Security Council. While they failed there, they succeeded in the U.S. Senate, where a vast majority of the senators (77) voted in favor of war. At the beginning, most Americans also supported the war. Trump and Putin had no support from the United Nations for their wars of choice. Trump did not even bother to try to convince Congress or the American people of the wisdom of his war. Even Putin went through the charade of getting parliamentary approval for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (It was a charade because the Russian parliament is completely subservient to Putin.)

Second, Putin’s war and Trump’s war have both killed innocent civilians. Putin is doing so on purpose. He seeks to terrorize the Ukrainian population as a strategy for pressuring them to capitulate. Trump thankfully had not adopted such a strategy in Iran. But, through an egregious intelligence failure, Trump seems to have destroyed an Iranian school, killing 168 Iranian children and their teachers. Shamefully, he has still expressed no remorse for this tragedy. American and Israeli attacks have also killed other civilians inside Iran. So, too, have Iranian attacks on Middle Eastern countries. But the indifference that Trump and his administration have shown regarding these civilian casualties draws comparisons to Putin’s cruelty.

Third, both Putin and Trump have tried to pretend that these military conflicts are not actual wars, but lesser operations. Putin calls his war in Ukraine a “special military operation.” If you accurately call it a war inside Russia, you can go to jail. Similarly, Trump frequently refers to his war as an “excursion.” (I think he means incursion, but none of his advisors dares to tell him about his mistake.) Both leaders and their teams also use Orwellian disinformation to frame their wars. Putin’s propagandists called their special military operation a crusade against Nazis and NATO. Trump and his spin doctors describe their war as an example of “peace through strength.”

Fourth, both Trump and Putin have claimed at times that they should have the authority to choose the leaders of Iran and Ukraine, respectively. Putin calls his project to determine Ukrainian leaders “denazification.” Comparing Iran to Venezuela, Trump stated very explicitly that “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela.” Tragically, Trump did not say that the Iranian people should be given the ability to select their new leader. That’s a very Putin-esque approach, since the Russian autocrat also does not want the Ukrainian people to elect their leaders.

These parallels deeply damage America’s image in the world. We look like a great power doing what we want because we can, ignoring international rules, laws, and procedures for why we started this war and how we are fighting it. In the eyes of many worldwide, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that makes us look just like Russia today or any great (imperial) power of previous centuries. On this point, I agree with my critics on X. Conversely, China today appears to look like the more law-abiding stakeholder in the international system. Unlike Russia and the United States, China has not invaded any country for several decades. And as both the United States and Russia ignore or withdraw from international institutions, China is expanding its presence in them. As I wrote about in Autocrats vs Democrats even before this war against Iran, that’s not good for American long-term national interests.

I did not support Trump’s decision to go to war. A month later, I still don’t. I speak critically about the war in the media daily. At the same time, I still assess that the differences between the wars in Iran and Ukraine outweigh their similarities.

All wars are hell. Rarely are they justified, and they should always be avoided if possible. But not all wars are equally bad—they fall on a scale. Trump’s war against Iran is bad, but not nearly as bad as Putin’s war against Ukraine.