{"id":58994,"date":"2026-04-29T05:09:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T13:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=58994"},"modified":"2026-04-29T05:09:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T13:09:42","slug":"daniel-larison-on-two-months-of-senseless-unnecessary-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/29\/daniel-larison-on-two-months-of-senseless-unnecessary-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Larison on Two Months of Senseless, Unnecessary War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. and Israel started a senseless, criminal war of aggression against Iran two months ago, and that war set much of the rest of the region on fire. The aggressors failed to achieve anything beyond inflicting death and destruction while causing massive damage to the region and the global economy. The smart thing to do now would be for the U.S. and Israel to cut their losses and accept Iran\u2019s latest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/asia-pacific\/trump-not-happy-with-latest-iran-proposal-end-war-us-official-says-2026-04-28\/\">proposal<\/a>, but that seems unlikely to happen.<\/p>\n<p>Thousands of people have been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles in Iran and Lebanon, and millions have been displaced from their homes. Only <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/graphics\/2026-iran-tehran-strike-damage-satellite-images\/\">one-third of the targets<\/a> that the U.S. and Israel have struck have been military sites. The rest have been civilian, commercial, and government buildings with the first two accounting for 40% of all targets. This is a war on Iran and the Iranian people. The current U.S. blockade aimed at strangling Iran\u2019s economy is more proof of that.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to this completely unnecessary war, the U.S. will be weaker, poorer, and more despised than it was. Relations with its European allies have been seriously damaged, and the administration seems determined to strain them further with threats of punishment. The U.S. has expended a large percentage of its stockpiles of interceptors and advanced munitions in a conflict it needn\u2019t have fought and won\u2019t win.<\/p>\n<p>The economic shock from the war is already being felt around the world, and the shock is going to become much more severe over the next few months. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/opinion\/articles\/2026-04-24\/the-oil-futures-market-is-lying-to-us?srnd=phx-opinion\">shortages<\/a> caused by the halt in shipping traffic are huge and growing ever larger. Eventually the reality of this catastrophe is going to set in and it won\u2019t be possible for the president to jawbone the markets into being irrationally optimistic.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/daniellarison.substack.com\/p\/two-months-of-senseless-unnecessary\"><b>Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. and Israel started a senseless, criminal war of aggression against Iran two months ago, and that war set much of the rest of the region on fire. The aggressors failed to achieve anything beyond inflicting death and destruction while causing massive damage to the region and the global economy. The smart thing to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[747],"class_list":["post-58994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"45 million people will be at risk of acute hunger if this keeps going into June."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58994"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59001,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58994\/revisions\/59001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58994"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=58994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}