Hav­ing start­ed out my blog­ging life as a writer on non­vi­o­lence, I must admit it’s hard to real­ly respond to this week’s mil­i­tary actions with the grav­i­ty they deserve. Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions like AFSC and FCNL are speak­ing out, as they must (“We must act now” and “You can’t bomb your way to peace”) but I can’t get over just how much the­ater this all is. Pres­i­dent Trump gave Iran advance warn­ing of the incom­ing bunker bombs, plen­ty of time for Iran to get its stock­piles of near-weapons-grade mate­r­i­al out of har­m’s way. When Iran retal­i­at­ed with mis­siles against U.S. bases in Qatar, they too gave advance warn­ing, giv­ing the U.S. anti-missile defens­es the heads-up need­ed to defend and destroy the incom­ing barrage.

In reports, Trump is said to have decid­ed on the Iran attack in part because he felt Israel was get­ting such “good press” for its attacks against Iran (not sur­pris­ing­ly, he fix­ates on Fox News cov­er­age, which was all-in for Netanyahu’s attacks). U.S. mil­i­tary intel­li­gence says the attacks on For­do, Iran’s pri­ma­ry nuclear-enrichment site, only delayed a pos­si­ble cre­ation of a nuclear weapon by months. Why gen­er­ate such ill-will for such a tem­po­rary advantage?

Of course, would we even be in this mess if Trump had­n’t scut­tled the hard-won nego­ti­a­tions of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal frame­work. Even at the time it seemed like Trump was most­ly act­ing out of jeal­ousy that a long-term solu­tion had been the result of his pre­de­ces­sor’s work. There does­n’t seem to be any over­ar­ch­ing log­ic to any of this. It’s all for the TV cov­er­age (the rest of the world’s lead­ers seem to have fig­ured this out). Is there a real­ly an end-game to Israel assas­si­nat­ing so much of Iran­ian lead­er­ship, includ­ing some of the very peo­ple who were nego­ti­at­ing deals? And in the midst of this, a real solu­tion to the Pales­tin­ian — Israel con­flict seems fur­ther away than ever.

Peace­ful con­duct is the best way to set up peace­ful res­o­lu­tions. Iran has always been a coun­try with poten­tial. Encour­ag­ing it to give up nuclear and ter­ror­is­tic ambi­tions, promis­ing it last­ing safe­ty, and slow­ly inte­grat­ing it back into the world econ­o­my is real­ly a win-win for all sides. So why all this the­ater? What’s the end plan any­way? Or is that such a naive thing to even ask in 2025?