Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have made a dangerous gamble in Iran. Why is Mark Carney cheering them on?

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Toronto Star                                                                                                                                                                         Feb. 28, 2026

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have made a dangerous gamble in Iran. Why is Mark Carney cheering them on?


Protesters gather in London, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026, after U.S. and Israeli forces 

carried out a series of strikes on Iran. Alastair Grant/AP

By Justin Ling

Justin Ling is a staff columnist for the Star and an investigative journalist based in Montreal. Reach him by email: jl...@thestar.ca

In Iran, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have opted to play regime change roulette.

They are wagering with the lives of civilians in Iran, Israel, and the Gulf countries. They risk embroiling American and Israeli forces into yet another forever war, a military operation with no clear objectives and no way to truly win. And they do so with no clear plan, purpose, or objective.

This gamble may yet pay off. These strikes could paralyze the Iranian state enough that the people may seize power from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as Trump has called them to do.

But that doesn’t make the risks of this immoral gamble any less dangerous.

Nevertheless, the warmongers have found a fan in Prime Minister Mark Carney. Saturday morning, Carney released a statement announcing that he “supports the United States” in its strikes on Iran.

It is a feckless, bewildering, totally unnecessary position. It should call into question the prime minister’s supposed belief in the “prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter,” as he told the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year.

Carney’s statement does not even make a boilerplate call for de-escalation. Instead, it cheerleads America “acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.”

That is a painfully naive and obsequious statement which blindly accepts an entirely unconvincing casus belli.

The rest of the liberal world has managed to thread this needle. A joint statement from the United Kingdom, France and Germany did not endorse Trump’s war, while other European leaders urged de-escalation. Spain’s prime minister went so far as to say he “rejects the unilateral military action of the United States and Israel.”

Iran has spent decades chasing a nuclear weapon, yes. The threat of this program is why Israel and America launched waves of strikes last year — strikes which apparently “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, at least according to the White House. (Any suggestion to the contrary was “fake news,” the administration said.) The risk of Iran rebooting that program is why America has been trying to push Tehran into accepting a new disarmament deal. Oman, which had been mediating the talks, said Thursday there had been “significant progress” on a deal.

But America isn’t even trying to pretend that there is a nuclear program left to destroy. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “given the opportunity, (Iran) will return to enrichment one day.”

They are lying to justify war. And they are risking international peace and security in doing so.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported Saturday that Trump and Netanyahu had settled on the plan for this war during their meeting in Washington on February 11 — and that these recent weeks of negotiations were a mere “deception exercise.”

Why? Well, with Trump, every past accusation has turned into a modern admission. In 2011, he tweeted that “in order to get elected, Barack Obama will start a war with Iran.” With midterms looming on the horizon, we should recognize this war as a Trumpian effort to improve his own political fortunes.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have chaos at home they are desperate to distract from. Trump has never been so unpopular: the Epstein files he tried to keep secret have implicated members of his own cabinet; his tariffs are driving prices up and put him on a legal collision course with the Supreme Court; and he is months away from midterm elections that he has, thus far, failed to rig.

Israel is also heading to elections this fall, and polls from earlier this month suggest Netanyahu could lose that vote. What’s more, settler violence has again engulfed the West Bank, as Netanyahu’s government openly muses about seizing more land from Palestine. In the past, his wars have generally improved his standing at home.

That this invasion is morally bankrupt and intolerably risky doesn’t change the fact that the Iranian regime is brutal and illegitimate.

The Iranian people are sick of the theocratic regime, and they have died trying to oust it. Tehran says it killed 3,000 protesters in recent months, but independent assessments put that figure as high as 30,000.

Despite extolling people to take to the streets it does not seem Trump’s operation has done much to weaken the tools of state coercion which have put down unrest. The Iranian state has warned its citizens to remain indoors, and state forces were quickly deployed to patrol the streets and quell any attempts to instigate revolution.

The Pentagon itself told Trump this. Both the Wall Street Journal and Axios have reported in recent days that General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that attacking Iran risked overtaxing the American military, depleting its reserve of air defence munitions, sucking America into another protracted conflict — and that it might not work. Quoting a source, Axios reported that the general, who is close to Trump, is a “reluctant warrior” on Iran.

While it is far too soon to know the full consequences of this war, initial reports suggest that America and Israel failed to attain their main operational aims. The airstrikes may have killed the 86-year-old Khamenei, but they did little to hinder Iran’s ability to launch waves of attacks against Israel, Jordan, and the metropolises on the Arabian Peninsula. The scale of Iran’s response far exceeds what they unleashed last year.

Worse yet, America has no plan for a post-Ayatollah Iran, and these strikes risk solidifying the regime’s hold on power — as they have in the past. It is good news that Khamenei, who was a butcher of his own people, is dead. But let’s not pretend that war on Iran was done to help the Iranian people any more than Trump’s operation in Venezuela, which removed Nicolás Maduro but kept his corrupt and violent government in place, was done in the name of democracy.

Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that the bombing will continue “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”

And we should not ignore the lives Americans took while pursuing this brazen, unnecessary war. This morning, airstrikes hit a school in southern Iran, killing at least 80, according to Iranian state media. Photos showed a pink backpack leaning on the rubble of the school, splattered in blood.

We should cheer when the brutal Iranian regime falls, whenever that may come to pass. But we should condemn this chaotic, risky violence and all the death that comes with it.