Nobody Wants to Go to War

On a corridor interview of 21 July 2026, and the verb that carries a war

A journalist puts one question to three United States senators: the President has formally told Congress that the war with Iran has resumed. What do you make of it? The exchange, filmed by Marzia Hussaini and posted to X on 21 July 2026, runs to about two minutes. Three answers; three different objects of attention.

Cory Booker answers with cost and strategy – a failed war doubled down on, an upended economy, billions spent without objectives. Ruben Gallego answers with law. The war never stopped, he says, and deciding what counts as a war belongs to Congress, not to a president setting his own definition of it. Rick Scott answers with permission.

‘We can’t allow them to have a nuclear weapon.’

Read the verb slowly. To allow is to hold a power of refusal over something already in motion. The sentence installs two claims without arguing either: that a weapon is being acquired, and that Washington is the body whose consent is at issue.

Take the first. The 2025 American public intelligence assessment stated that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, and that the then supreme leader had not reauthorised the programme suspended in 2003. On 4 March 2026 the IAEA’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, said the agency had never held information indicating a structured, systematic programme to construct one. The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment does not address the matter. What has changed is that the inspectors are gone. They withdrew after the American and Israeli strikes of June 2025, and the agency’s report of 4 June 2026 describes a near-total loss of monitoring, with a stockpile once counted to the kilogram now unaccounted for. The bombing produced the darkness. The darkness is now the argument for more bombing.

The shape is Iraqi, and worth being exact about. The failure of 2003 went deeper than a false claim. A phrase – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – fused aspiration, capability and possession into one object, so evidence for the weakest member established the strongest. ‘Have a nuclear weapon’ performs the same fusion. Enrichment, threshold capability, a suspended weapons programme and a deliverable bomb become one noun, and the fusion does the work an argument should do.

Then comes the destination. Scott disclaims the thing he is about to endorse – ‘nobody wants to go to war’ – and arrives four sentences later at regime change. The interviewer had asked about the war’s new objective. He received one that Congress has not authorised and the President does not state. This was no slip. On 13 May he published an opinion piece calling for a final blow to the Iranian government. On 18 May he proposed bombing the living daylights out of Iran to produce a compliant regime. On 15 July, the blockade reinstated, he counselled sticking it out. The position is consistent; it deserves to be tested as one.

Between the disclaimer and the destination lies one clause about the ninety million people who live there. ‘It’s too bad for the people of Iran.’ Too bad. No agent, no cost, no duration. It is the only moment when Iranians appear at all.

The partisan grammar is not hidden. Opposing a reconstruction fund in June, Scott explained that Republicans are not the party of Barack Obama, which throws money at them. On Fox News Sunday in April he routed the nuclear question through money Obama gave them. A question about war, answered in the currency of party. The bomb is not the subject of these sentences. It is the warrant.

I hold up neither Democrat as a model. Booker measures a war at the petrol pump and the grocery till, its own provincialism. Gallego, who fought in Iraq, identified the mechanism. A president who can declare a war terminated on 1 May and resumed on 10 July, restarting a sixty-day clock each time, has taken from Congress the power to say what is happening – which is why a blockade, an act of war on any reading of the law of naval warfare, arrives without a vote.

These wars persist for many reasons, and Iran’s rulers have supplied a long list of them. They also persist because sentences like these travel unopposed. A verb of permission asserts an authority nobody conferred. A fused noun converts an unverifiable capability into an imminent weapon. A regretful clause disposes of a nation. Two minutes in a corridor, and a war acquires an aim no legislature has voted for and no evidence has established.

Nobody wants to go to war. Almost everybody says so, and the sentence has never once stopped one.