They Told Us It Was Worth It. Three-Quarters of America Disagrees.
An Average American commentary on the war nobody asked for.
Let’s start with a number: 24.
That’s the percentage of Americans who believe the war with Iran was worth its costs, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week. One in four. That means three out of every four of your neighbors, your coworkers, the guy pumping gas next to you at the station — they look at what happened over the last few months and they say: no. This wasn’t worth it.
And honestly? They’re right. And I’ll tell you exactly why — not from a partisan talking point, not because I want the left or the right to win, but because this is the kind of decision that affects every single one of us regardless of how we vote. This is about money out of your pocket. This is about the lives of your kids and your neighbors’ kids. This is about whether the people in power told us the truth.
They didn’t.
The Numbers Don’t Lie. Washington Does.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll didn’t just find that Americans think the war wasn’t worth it. It found that the damage cuts across party lines — and that’s the part the media buries in paragraph seven.
Only 23% of Americans — including just half of Republicans — think the U.S. is now in a stronger position with Iran than it was before the war started. Let that sink in. Half of the president’s own party doesn’t believe this made us safer. Thirty-five percent of respondents said the U.S. is now in a weaker position. The rest weren’t sure. That’s not a divided country — that’s a country that got sold something and realized, upon opening the box, it wasn’t what was advertised.
And on the deal? A full 63% of Americans say it’s unlikely to bring lasting peace. That includes roughly half of Republicans and eight out of ten Democrats. Only 18% of the country believes this ends with lasting peace. Not 50%. Not even a third. Eighteen percent.
This is the public verdict. And Washington is trying very hard to get you to look elsewhere.
It Wasn’t Fiscally Conservative. It Never Is.
Here’s what I want every self-described fiscal conservative to sit with for a moment.
The Trump administration — the one that ran on slashing government spending, DOGE, cutting the fat, getting our fiscal house in order — launched a war that a Harvard Kennedy School professor now says will cost at least one trillion dollars. Professor Linda Bilmes, one of the foremost experts on war budgeting in the country, put it plainly: “I am certain we will reach $1 trillion for the Iran war.”
Let’s put that in perspective. The first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost $11.3 billion, according to the Pentagon’s own classified briefing to Congress. Eleven billion dollars. In six days. That’s nearly $1.9 billion per day. And that’s the Pentagon’s number — which Bilmes and other independent analysts say is almost certainly an undercount.
Democrats and multiple economists have argued the true cost to the U.S. economy — factoring in oil price spikes, munitions depletion, base repairs, long-term veteran disability payments, and the interest on borrowing — could run between $630 billion and $1 trillion. We fired more Patriot missiles in the first four days of this conflict than we gave Ukraine over the past four years. Each Patriot missile costs about $4 million. We were shooting them at Iranian Shahed drones worth $50,000 apiece. Do the math.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to talk about: we’re not paying for this with money we have. The federal government was already projected to run a $1.853 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2026 before the war started. Every dollar of war spending is being borrowed. With a national debt that already exceeds $39 trillion and interest consuming nearly 15% of the federal budget, we are lighting borrowed money on fire and calling it strength.
The Trump administration responded by requesting a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027 — a 42% increase, and the largest expansion in military spending since World War II. That doesn’t include the $200 billion the Pentagon separately asked to be set aside for the war itself.
This isn’t fiscal conservatism. This is the opposite of fiscal conservatism. And every American who voted for smaller government, lower spending, and a return to sanity on the national debt should be furious.
The Man Whose Job It Was to Know Said There Was No Threat
Now let’s talk about the part that really matters: why we went to war in the first place.
Joe Kent was Trump’s own appointed director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He was a former Green Beret who served eleven combat deployments in the Middle East. He was confirmed by a mostly party-line Senate vote. He wasn’t a Democrat. He wasn’t part of the “deep state” — he was one of Trump’s own people, put in place to advise the president on exactly this kind of threat.
In March 2026, he resigned. And in his resignation letter, he didn’t mince words.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
This matters legally, not just politically. Under U.S. law, “imminent threat” is the prerequisite for a president to launch military attacks without Congressional approval. Under international law, it’s the standard for legal action against a sovereign nation. And the man whose entire job was to assess that threat — Trump’s own guy — said it wasn’t there.
Kent went further. He explained that since Trump returned to the White House, Iran had actually been de-escalating. Their proxies stopped attacking U.S. forces, which had been happening under Biden. They came to the negotiating table. During the 12-Day War, when Israel struck Iranian targets, Iran’s retaliation was measured — they fired missiles at a nearly empty section of a U.S. base in Qatar and immediately returned to talks. Kent’s reading: Iran didn’t want this war. We dragged them into it.
“The only imminent threat,” Kent said, “was from the Israelis. The Israelis attacked Iran. This whole series of events wouldn’t have taken place if the Israelis would not have attacked.”
He also warned that a regime-change approach — which mirrors what we attempted in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria — was “a recipe for disaster.” History has endorsed that warning every single time.
Now, Kent has his own credibility problems. He’s been linked to conspiracy theories and has made statements that drew accusations of antisemitism. That matters. His track record on other issues is legitimately controversial, and those critiques should be on the table. But here’s what Senator Mark Warner — the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, someone who strongly disagreed with Kent on almost everything — said after the resignation:
“On this point, he is right: There was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East.”
When a Trump-appointed counterterrorism chief and the top Senate Democrat on intelligence agree on something, maybe the American people deserve to hear it.
What They Promised and What They Delivered
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election on a very specific set of promises. Lower inflation. Border security. And — critically — no new wars. “Put America First.” “Don’t let us bleed out in the Middle East.” These weren’t small policy positions. They were the emotional core of the campaign.
Joe Kent himself said it on Tucker Carlson’s show: “This is why 77 million people voted for him. The no new wars, put America first, don’t let us bleed out in the Middle East — that’s what people voted for.”
So what happened? Trump’s cost-of-living approval rating is now at 22% — near the lowest point of his presidency, and below Joe Biden’s approval on the same metric at the end of his term. His overall approval has dropped to 34%, tied for the lowest of his second term. The war started February 28. The deal was signed June 17. Gas prices are still considerably higher than they were before the conflict began, even after the deal led to a drop in global crude oil prices.
The deal itself, by the way, reopened oil shipping lanes and eased sanctions on Iran. That’s it. No lasting disarmament. No transformed Middle East. No regime change. Sixty-three percent of Americans think the deal won’t even hold. More than 8 in 10 Democrats say lasting peace is unlikely. About half of Republicans say the same.
We spent over $100 billion in direct military costs — with estimates running toward a trillion when all the downstream costs are counted. We lost 15 American service members. We added to a national debt already drowning in interest payments. We destabilized oil markets that working-class Americans feel in their gas tanks and grocery bills every single day.
And we ended up... roughly where we started, except poorer.
The Deeper Problem: We Keep Falling for This
Here’s the thing I need you to understand, because this is what Average American is really about.
This isn’t a left-wing critique of a right-wing president. This is a critique of a system that has been selling Americans the same war in a different wrapper for decades. Iraq was going to be quick. Afghanistan was going to be contained. Libya was going to be a limited intervention. Each time, the people making the decisions told us there was a clear and present threat. Each time, the cost exploded beyond projections. Each time, the situation on the ground became more complicated than the talking heads promised. And each time, the American people were left holding the bill.
The Harvard economists who warned about the true cost of the Iraq War in 2006 were dismissed. That war ended up costing between $4 and $6 trillion when all the long-term costs — veteran care, disability benefits, interest on borrowed war spending — were calculated. The same pattern is repeating right now. The same dismissal of inconvenient experts. The same gap between what the Pentagon says and what independent analysts find.
We are borrowing to finance this war at higher interest rates, on a debt base that is exponentially larger than it was during Iraq. The interest costs alone on the borrowed war spending will compound for decades.
And the people who made these decisions will move on. They’ll land at think tanks, defense contractors, speaking circuits. The bill stays with us. The missing servicemembers stay in the memory of their families. The inflation stays in your grocery cart.
What the Polls Are Actually Telling Us
The Reuters/Ipsos numbers released this week aren’t a partisan indictment. They’re a verdict from a country that watches the results and makes its own judgment.
Three out of four Americans say this war wasn’t worth the cost. More than half say it wasn’t worth it outright — not “unsure,” not “maybe” — flat out, no. Nearly two-thirds of the country doubts the deal will hold. Only one in four believes the United States is now in a stronger position.
These are not the numbers of a nation that feels like it won something.
And here’s what makes this moment different: the critique isn’t coming from the anti-war left. It’s coming from Joe Kent, from Tucker Carlson, from Joe Rogan and Theo Von and Megyn Kelly — from voices inside and adjacent to the MAGA coalition who feel genuinely betrayed. They were promised one thing and got another. That’s not spin. That’s accountability.
When your own base looks at the results of a decision and says this isn’t what we voted for, something has gone wrong at the core.
The Average American Take
I’ll be straight with you. I’m not against defending America. I’m not against confronting real threats. I believe in a strong military and I believe there are times force is necessary.
But I also believe you don’t get to call yourself fiscally conservative while spending over $100 billion — possibly a trillion — on a war that your own counterterrorism director said wasn’t necessary, against a threat that independent experts couldn’t verify, without a declaration of war from Congress, financed entirely on borrowed money we’re paying 15 cents on the dollar to service.
I believe that if you ran on “no new wars” and then started a new war, you owe the people who voted for you an honest accounting of why.
I believe that 24% approval on whether the war was worth it is not a partisan number. It is a statement from the American people, cutting across party lines, that they see the gap between what was promised and what was delivered.
The establishment — on both sides — will tell you to move on. The deal is signed. Oil prices are stabilizing. Crisis averted.
But the average American is still paying more at the pump than before February 28. The average American is watching a national debt grow that will constrain what the government can spend on roads, schools, and Social Security for the next generation. The average American who served, or whose kid serves, knows the 15 who didn’t come home.
They deserve more than a 24% approval rating for the decision that sent them there.