By Stephen Leeb, PhD and Megan Davis
Robert Jackson, the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, described those trials as delineating “mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.” Indeed, the International Military Tribunal asserted that a war of aggression is the most heinous kind of international war crime. The accumulated war crimes of the entire war can all be attributed to the act of the aggressor.
So why would the U.S. and Israel choose to commit such a heinous crime? It does seem, at least as of this writing, that the war has slowed – hopefully for good. There have been false dawns before, but if indeed the war is nearing the end, we will address the economic consequences in the next blog.
That still leaves open the troubling question of why the two countries launched the war in the first place, resulting in the loss of innocent lives. Many assume the motive relates to U.S. need for oil. The independence of the U.S. when it comes to this commodity is complicated, with more facts leaning toward dependency. Much of our own oil is difficult to refine (and in fact drilling and refining it results in close to a negative return: It requires a lot of money and financing to produce profits).
Much ado is being made about oil, and for good reason given that at the time of this writing, oil is selling at over $100. Because of oil’s obvious impact on the economy, it is easy to overlook other major resources at play also affected by Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. Fertilizer prices are likely to soar—an obvious problem given the importance of fertilizer in growing food—and the production of helium has also been disrupted. Qatar produces around a third of the world’s helium, extracting it alongside its natural gas. Helium is absolutely essential in the production of semiconductors and advanced chips crucial to AI processing. The problem is twofold, as not only has the war disrupted helium production, but the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz has also cut off the supply.
Moreover, the U.S.-Israeli attacks, while inflicting severe physical damage, have not had a major impact on Iran’s use of resources, as Iran is only 10% dependent on imports, so shutting off imports to Iran is really not that big of a deal. Neither is attacking Iran’s desalination plants. In fact, it was dumb considering that the countries the U.S. is supposed to be protecting are very dependent on desalination for their water—90% dependency for Kuwait and Oman, 85% for Bahrain, and 70% for Saudi Arabia. Iran could destroy the water supply of U.S. allies, and in return, there is not much of a response to be had given that Iran is only 2% dependent on desalination.
It seems that the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran were aimed primarily at neutralizing what they considered an existential threat to Israel and ending Iranian support for proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. But even if you think this justifies Israel’s actions, it didn’t make sense for the U.S. to join in—especially given that negotiations seemed to be progressing well right before the U.S. attacked, both in June 2025 and four weeks ago.
“Could something else be going on – something that should in no way influence policy and war?”
Jonathon Swift once wrote: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” While faith is often cited as a primary cause of conflict, wars fought solely over faith are relatively few. According to a study cited by omnesmag.com, only about 7% of the 1,763 major wars in history were primarily religious, while most conflicts are driven by intertwined political, economic, and territorial motives. Faith can be used to motivate, and at times manipulate, troops, but the true drivers of war are usually greed, power, or land. We can’t definitively rule those factors out in today’s war, but it does seem there is something very religious going on here.
HuffPost carried an article that perhaps should have been more alarming to U.S. Citizens, particularly in view of the fact that the U.S. Constitution dictates separation of church and state—the First Amendment Establishment Clause that prohibits government from establishing an official religion, favoring faiths, or coercing belief. It protects both government and religion from overreach.
The article begins with the subtitle: “One commander had a ‘big grin’ on his face while saying Donald Trump, ‘has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran,’ a service member said.”
What?
It turns out that more than 100 service members have filed complaints about religious ideology finding its way into military orders since the U.S. and Israel first began bombing Iran. Journalist Jonathan Larsen was the first to report on a non-commissioned officer in a Ready-Support status unit outside the Iran combat zone who wrote to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation that the commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”
The complainant went on to say, “It’s not just the separation of church and state … It’s the fact that our commander feels as though he is fully supported and justified by the entire (combat unit’s name withheld) chain of command to inflict his Armageddon views of our attack on Iran on those of us beneath him in the chain of command.”
The avenues to seek help or guidance for these troops are very few. Even the avenues that are open leave them as what officers jokingly call “a tarantula on a wedding cake.” They can file an inspector general complaint or an ethics complaint within the military, or they can talk with military judge advocates, lawyers or chaplains. The huge issue with speaking to a chaplain, though, is that most of them are Christian, and usually evangelical.
The fact that the military is seeing so much influence from the evangelical segment of the Christian faith shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Trump administration has notoriously leaned evangelical, and the religious extremism of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is well-documented, with the Interfaith Alliance calling Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist Crusade a “threat to religious freedom.”
Since his appointment as defense secretary, Hegseth has brought his religious views and practices into the Pentagon—hosting monthly Christian worship services and promoting military videos with Bible verses. In his speeches, he often includes his views that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and his hopes that American troops will embrace God—or, at least, Hegseth’s version.
Hegseth, a self-proclaimed “American Crusader”, was banned from working as security at President Joe Biden’s inauguration after being flagged by fellow National Guard members as an extremist because of his tattoos. The words “Deus Vult” –Latin translating, “God wills it”, a battle cry associated with the First Crusade—appear on his arm, and he also has a large Jerusalem cross, known as a Crusader cross, tattooed on the center of his chest. Perhaps the most currently controversial tattoo, the word “Kafir”, an Arabic word meaning “infidel” or “unbeliever”, is tattooed on his arm; many see the term as antagonistic and directly offensive to those who practice the Muslim faith. These tattoos, along with others ranging from American Revolution symbols to Bible references, cover his body, and are ones commonly used as symbols among Christian Nationalism—a form of Christianity that promotes the Christian views of its followers in order to achieve prominence or dominance in political, cultural and social life—and, to be fair, a modern political ideology that many Christian leaders argue conflicts with biblical teachings and distorts faith by fusing national and religious identities. The same symbols are also commonly used by far-right extremists and white supremacists who believe that they are fighting a perceived civilizational battle against Islam.
Georgetown scholar Matthew D. Taylor, who studies religious extremism, said, “The U.S. voluntarily going to war against a Muslim country with the military under the leadership of Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election and throughout his appointment process.” This is because some Christian Nationalists and evangelical extremists, particularly those aligned with Christian Zionism, view the rebuilding of a Third Temple in Jerusalem to be a necessary literal event that needs to occur before the end times and the second coming of Jesus. It is important to note that many Christians and Jews view these events as more symbolic, but for those who do not, this viewpoint combines literal interpretation of biblical prophecy with active political support for the state of Israel.
The problem is that this Third Temple must be built upon a site where the previous Temple stood—the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—and which is currently home to the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, two of the holiest sites in Islam.
Any move toward rebuilding a temple would require the destruction of both the Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, i.e., an attack on the third-holiest site in Islam and a major flashpoint in global politics. It would likely trigger intense and widespread calls across the Muslim world for jihad (holy war).
Philosopher Ivan Ilyin has said that totalitarianism is “godless” –replacing devotion to faith with devotion to the state. According to a 2012 article in the “The American Conservative,” Ilyin believed, among other things, in freedom of conscience, speech and assembly, and that “the state should be supreme in those areas in which it had competence but should stay entirely out of those areas in which it did not, such as private life and religion.”
But what happens when the state and the church become one? Though that supposedly can’t happen in the U.S., it seems we’re entering territory where we need to answer that question. Retired Navy Chaplain Steve Dundas said, “…my work was to support people regardless of their beliefs, not mine, because when it comes to military service, it is the Constitution that is the guide, not the Bible or the tenets of any church or religion.”
It is not bad for a country to have a spiritual foundation, in fact, we’ve argued again and again that it’s a positive—but spirituality is different from the practice of one particular form of religion that Hegseth or anyone else might be promoting. Jefferson himself viewed the New Testament as containing the most sublime moral code ever taught and was joined by Tolstoy and Wittgenstein in recognizing the value of the morality of the New Testament—a morality appearing almost universally across all religions—even if one doesn’t believe in the miracles or divinity of Christ. Jefferson identified as a deist, and there is a commonality to the idea of all being one and the beginning of the Constitution starting “We the people…” But at the same time, separation of church and state was so important to the Founding Fathers that they included it in the First Amendment.
Of course, there are many factors other than religious fanaticism that are at play in the current conflict, and we will continue to assess them. But also important is the fact that the U.S. has long been marked by its profound diversity of culture and belief—a multicultural tapestry that embodies a long tradition of cultural fusion and religious pluralism. No matter what your belief, however, it seems difficult to view this illegal war as being in any way in line with the morality of any religious or spiritual foundation.We write these articles as two very different people, debating together all of the points throughout our research. Neither one of us necessarily identifies as a Christian, but we’ve both done a lot of research, and even looking at this from a Christian perspective it seems hard to see how the actions of the current administration line up in any way with the morality of what Jesus taught. In Matthew 7:16 it is written: “You will know them by their fruits”, and judging by that metric, the fruit might be more in line with Dostoevsky’s perspective from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’: “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him; he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
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