Ourtimelineof events leading up to Operation Epic Fury reveals a puzzling jump cut.

At around 4 p.m. EST on Feb. 27, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News online and announced that Iran had agreed to major concessions in the negotiations with the U.S. that he was mediating: “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem.”

A few hours later, at 2:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 28, President Donald Trumpappearedon screens around the world and announced that Iran’s nuclear enrichment had become intolerable. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions and we can’t take it anymore,” he said. America was going to war.

Into the breach, Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has offered an explanation. The march to war with Iran had begun much earlier, decades earlier, but at least as early as March 2025, with a speech by Scott Bessent before the Economic Club of New York.

Bessent described the aim of anexecutive orderthat Trump had signed just 16 days after assuming office. It called on the the Department of Treasury to apply “maximum pressure” to Iran. (Sachs is familiar with the consequences ofU.S. economic statecraft.)

“Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither,” Bessent said.

By January 2026, Bessent would boast that “President Trump ordered the Treasury … to put maximum pressure on Iran and it worked.”

“In December their economy collapsed,”he said. “We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the street.”

Though Team Trump had promised an end to forever wars in the fall of 2024, it had set regime change into motion within three weeks of Inauguration Day.

News coverage reflective of Bessent’s comments would move the Iran War out of the realm of nuclear negotiations gone sour and into the thornier realities of permanent Washington’s designs on the Middle East.

Source: Racket News