Once again, American forces are bombing Iran. So once again, I have to ask what exactly do American voters have to do to avoid war in the Middle East? Welcome to the Risen Roundtable. This is your weekly libertarian review of news and culture from the editors of Reason magazine. I'm your host, Peter Souterman, and today I am

joined by my colleagues, Catherine Mangy Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. Happy Monday,

everybody, or maybe not so happy, if you're not stoked about a new war of choice in the Middle East.

So, Matt, last time we talked about this was in June of last year

when Trump bombed Iran. We criticized that. We said that, okay, maybe it's one and done. Maybe this is a one-off,

but it could lead to more, right, it's sort of greater consequences. And people were like,

oh, look, no, this is a Jacksonian thump. That's all it is.

This isn't war. This is actually going to prevent war. He obliterated the nuclear facilities.

That's what it says on the White House website, right? There's this great bit. Iran's nuclear

facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake news, June 2025 White House headline.

What happened? Why are we at war now?

I think that the best explanation of the 75 explanations that President Trump has come up with came in his pre-dawn white hat speech where he said after reciting a litany of abuses,

very real abuses that the Iranian regime has engaged in over the years, including towards

Americans, he just said, and we're just not going to take it anymore. That's what it is.

He used the phrase imminent threats. No one really believes that there was an imminent threat. He just sort of has to say that because of the war powers resolution, kind of sort of, but he doesn't really care about that too much. They've been trotting out a bunch of other things. But it's because he has decided, and the president in the United States has a ton of power and discretion to use the military, he's decided that we're not going to take the things that Iran has done for years, which is export its revolution, it's harass, people kill Americans, etc.

And he's doing this precisely because of the aforementioned bombing raids of last June,

which basically decimated the anti-air, if there was any really anti-air capabilities of Iran.

And so Iran was weak. And he, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, decided to strike while the enemy was weak

and get rid of as much as they think that they can, their nuclear capabilities, their Navy,

and their ballistic missile systems. So it's a war, a preventive war, preemptory war, of choice,

of opportunity against someone that has no imminent threat towards

us at all. We just felt like we wanted to take care of this problem because the president

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