MADRID – One way to analyze the current U.S. aggression against Iran is through the political language that precedes and organizes it. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq was justified by a discursive apparatus centered on weapons of mass destruction that never appeared. The sequence is known: first, a set of propositions is presented as self-evident; then, reality is read through them. The decision for war does not emerge from the evidence. The evidence is adapted to the decision.

In the case of Iran, this dynamic is reproduced under new conditions. Claims are articulated, circulated in Western media and think tanks, and gradually sedimented into the collective imagination, where they become “facts” that do not require demonstration. By the time these propositions are challenged, the machinery of escalation is already in motion. What has changed in relation to 2003 is not the structure of the discourse, but its speed and lack of restraint.

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, there has been no serious attempt to construct a multilateral framework or achieve a stable political consensus around the attack on Iran. The operation advances with a narrow procedural base, relying on Washington’s unilateral power and the complicity of a few regional actors. In this context, what appears is not a single coherent justification but a constellation of overlapping narratives. Each one compensates for the limits of the others; none is sufficient on its own.

Surveys in the United States and Europe reveal little enthusiasm for an open conflict with Iran. This lack of popular support has not altered the strategic orientation; it has simply forced elites to diversify the rhetoric used to justify it. Different audiences receive different explanations. The result is not a unified argument, but a flexible discursive field that can be rearranged as needed. Evidentiary coherence is not a requirement for this system to function. Its objective is to keep the war structure operative while containing oversight.

The nuclear premise

The central axis remains the assertion that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. This claim persists despite the most consistent and long-standing assessments of the U.S. intelligence community, which for over two decades has maintained that Iran has not taken the political decision to build a nuclear bomb. This distinction between nuclear capability and weaponization is crucial yet is systematically erased in mainstream discourse.

Policy does not confront this distinction; it displaces it. Enrichment—an activity explicitly allowed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty—is recoded as the sign of an invisible intention. Technical capacity is interpreted as proof of an underlying will to arm. The burden of proof is inverted: it is no longer necessary to demonstrate that Iran is constructing a weapon; it is sufficient to affirm that Iran could do so. Possibility is elevated to the rank of guilt.

At this point, the question is not what has been empirically verified, but how observation is organized through specific categories. “Threat” is not a neutral description emerging from reality; it is a political lens that shapes what can be seen and what must remain invisible. The absence of proof is not read as a limit, but as a space to be filled by suspicion. Uncertainty becomes a resource to legitimize further coercion.

This logic is not applied uniformly. Nuclear-armed states outside the NPT, or those enjoying Western protection, are never subjected to the same constant suspicion and punitive measures. The asymmetry is not argued; it is presupposed. It belongs to a broader colonial hierarchy that decides which sovereignties are acceptable and which must be permanently problematized.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) introduced strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program and the most intrusive monitoring regime ever applied to a member of the NPT. The International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly confirmed Iran’s compliance. The agreement demonstrated that the problem was not verification; verification was possible and effective. Washington’s decision in 2018 to abandon the JCPOA did not resolve a proliferation crisis. It dismantled an arrangement that was working.

Even after that unilateral withdrawal, intelligence assessments continued to indicate that Iran had not resumed a nuclear weapons program. Nonetheless, the public rhetoric kept returning to the same nuclear specter. When officials now claim that military strikes have “neutralized” Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, they generate a new contradiction: if there was a weapons program to be destroyed, the previous assessments were false; if there was none, the language of neutralization is purely theatrical. Both statements cannot be sustained simultaneously without eroding the credibility of the entire discourse.

At the same time, diplomatic channels were not exhausted. Mediated talks, including Omani facilitation, had advanced to a point where a new framework combining inspections with clear limits on enrichment was realistic. Iran had shown, once again, its willingness to operate within defined parameters. The interruption of this process did not arise because diplomacy failed; it occurred precisely when diplomacy began to work. An effective agreement narrows the space for the nuclear threat narrative. What is threatened by such an agreement is not Western security, but Western capacity to maintain discretionary pressure over Iran’s strategic autonomy.

The construction of threat

The second element of the justification revolves around the category of “imminent threat.” Conceptually, imminence designates an event that has not yet occurred and cannot, by definition, be fully verified beforehand. It must be asserted as fact before it can be empirically tested.

In Washington’s discourse, imminence does not derive from clear evidence of Iranian preparations for attack. Instead, it is constructed from a hypothetical sequence: if Iran is subjected to certain pressures, it might respond; therefore, action is needed before that response takes place. Cause and effect are thus folded into a circular relation. What appears as an original threat is, in reality, the projection of a possible reaction to previous acts of coercion.

Threat, in this sense, is not discovered; it is produced. Intelligence becomes a reservoir of elements that can be selectively assembled to support a pre-established conclusion. The conclusion comes first, and the interpretation of data is adjusted to it. The same information could sustain a call for de-escalation or for war, depending on how it is inserted into the discursive framework.

Within this anticipatory logic, what Iran actually does at any given moment is less central than how its capabilities can be narrated. The threshold for the use of force is detached from verifiable conduct and relocated in the capacity to represent a set of possibilities as existential risk. The separation between evidence and inference collapses, producing a field in which the notion of “security” is permanently expandable.

The role played by allied actors is largely erased in this narrative. The United States operates in close coordination with regional partners whose actions—from sanctions to targeted killings—shape the environment in which Iranian decisions unfold. To depict Tehran as the sole source of instability is to conceal how Western and allied practices contribute to the very conditions later described as threatening.

In the absence of public proof of an imminent large-scale Iranian attack, the discourse of imminence persists as a structural necessity, not as a conclusion derived from facts. Internal assessments that continue to differentiate between nuclear capability and actual weaponization accentuate the distance between analytical knowledge and political justification. Imminence thus becomes a doctrine that releases decision-makers from the obligation to demonstrate the reality of the threat they invoke.

What this war reveals

Taken together, these narratives do not produce a coherent chain of reasoning. Their articulation gives the impression of completeness, but they do not converge into a unified logic. 

Their role is not to explain reality, but to organize perception in such a way that the continuation of aggression appears both necessary and inevitable. The target is not a concrete act committed by Iran at a specific moment; it is the very fact that Iran insists on preserving an independent foreign policy and a degree of strategic autonomy that does not fit within the Western security architecture.

The framework used to evaluate Iran does not merely register threats; it manufactures them. Identical or greater capabilities—whether nuclear, military, or regional—are tolerated in some actors and criminalized in others. These distinctions are not neutral. They reflect a colonial order that hierarchizes sovereignties and decides who may exercise power freely and who must do so under permanent suspicion.

What remains, once the rhetoric is stripped away, is not only the content of the accusations, but the method by which they are constructed, insulated from contradiction, and detached from the very evidence they invoke. It is within this gap between discourse and reality that war becomes possible—and repeatable.