Epic Fury: Our Own-But-Not-The-First “Pearl Harbor”: Will We Never Learn?

Epic Fury: Our Latest But-Not-Only “Pearl Harbor” Moment: Will We Never Learn?

At 3:38 p.m. Eastern Time on February 27, 2026, Donald Trump gave the ‘final go order to launch Operation Epic Fury, a combined US-Israeli air campaign against Iran. The operation began at 9:45 a.m., February 28, Tehran time, as many people were having late breakfasts, and children were settling in at school. The ‘trigger event’ was conducted by the Israeli military, with the US’s initial actions consisting of cyberattacks to jam Iran’s ability to communicate and coordinate.

With the massive naval armada that the US had positioned near Iran, the attack itself should’ve come as no surprise to anyone. The timing of the attack, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely.

Between April and June 2025, there were five rounds of talks between Iran and the US. This was the third round of talks that had begun in Muscat, Oman, on February 6. The last round ended without any agreement, but there was a commitment that they would ‘resume soon.’ Just before the talks ended, Iran indicated that it was not prepared to meet Trump’s demands that it stop enriching uranium, that it ship all enriched uranium abroad, and while it wanted to avert war, it did not want to discuss other issues, such as its long-range missile program or support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to degrade its current stockpiles of nuclear material to ‘the lowest level possible,’ but this apparently did not sway Trump or Israel.

While the lack of progress in the talks surprised no one, the timing of the attacks seems to have caught everyone—especially the Iranians—off guard, and the Administration’s justifications for the attack shifted several times, from fear, to an impending attack, to a desire to change the regime, and from a brief conflict, to ‘as long as it takes.’ The timing, in fact, makes one believe that the decision to launch had been made well before the order was given, bringing to mind the Imperial Japanese Navy’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

There are significant parallels between the US-Israeli attack and the Japanese attack, which US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy.”

The Japanese, determined to attack the United States in retaliation against aggressive US policies and sanctions, planned a surprise attack aimed at destroying the US Pacific Fleet in order to cripple US naval power in the Pacific. The rounds of negotiations had stopped. The Japanese attempted to deliver the declaration stating that further negotiations were impossible because of US policies, thirty minutes before the attack commenced. (As we know, the Japanese embassy in Washington took too long to decode the 5,000-word document, and the declaration was delivered two hours after the attack.)

In the case of the current conflict in Iran, negotiations had paused but with an expressed intention to resume; the US and Israel attacked despite ongoing diplomatic negotiations–and without any declaration at all. Nearly 1,000 Iranians were killed, including over 100 school children when their school was struck, and who knows how many other noncombatants. In addition, the initial, surprise attack included significant other damage, including the sinking or destruction of most of Iran’s navy, including one warship that was in the Indian Ocean, in an attack in which the attacking US force failed to try and rescue any survivors; and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader in a targeted attack.

Epic Fury is not the only “Pearl Harbor” action in US history; one need only look at the 17th-19th century US history of war. With the federal government preoccupied with the Confederate armies in the east, the western tribes took advantage of the situation to try to recover some of the tribal lands that they’d lost to whites before the Civil War. War broke out between the US Government and many of the Western Native American nations, but Black Kettle, White Antelope, and 30 other Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders brought their people to a site along Sand Creek near Fort Lyon in Colorado to make peace in accordance with instructions from Colorado’s territorial government. The camp, containing approximately 750 people, including women, children, and the elderly, was under a flag of truce, and despite being recognized as ‘friendly Indians’ by territorial authorities, it was attacked on November 29, 1864, by 675 Colorado Territory militia troops under the command of Colonel John Chivington. The militia killed over 230 people in the camp, including approximately 150 women, children, and the elderly. Chivington was initially lauded for his ‘victory’, but subsequently discredited when it became clear that the ‘battle’ had, in fact, been a massacre. The Sand Creek Massacre was a chief cause of the Arapaho-Cheyenne war that followed, and motivated the Plains Wars of the 1870s.

The Sand Creek Massacre was not the first, nor was it the last such incident in America’s history, with both whites and Native Americans guilty of atrocities. The first such wars took place in the 1600s, beginning with the Jamestown Massacre on March 22, 1622, when Powhattan Chief Opechancanough attacked the colony of Jamestown, killing some 350 of the 1,200 colonists. In retaliation, the English attacked Powhatan villages, destroying crops and driving them from their land. During the 1636-37 Pequot War, in the Connecticut colony, English militia with aid from the Narragansett and Mohegans attacked the Pequot at Mystic, killing hundreds, many of them women and children. Incidents like this were a constant in America’s history up to December 29, 1890, and the most famous of all, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, when troops of the Seventh US Cavalry surrounded a band of Sioux Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota near Wounded Knee Creek. In the incident, hundreds of unarmed Sioux men, women, and children were slaughtered in what was one of the last military actions against the people of the northern Plains. The US government awarded 20 Medals of Honor to soldiers who took part in the massacre.

While the actions thus far in Epic Fury pale in comparison to wars with Native Americans throughout this period, the underlying principle is no different: Like Japan in 1941, in 2026, the norms of what we could call “civilized behavior in war” have again been ignored by the United States.

One would hope we would have learned the lesson that when we normalize the flouting of norms, we undermine trust and sabotage opportunities to negotiate lasting peace. In the nineteenth century, a massacre of 150 innocents was a root cause of another ten years of war, and even though peace was finally restored on the Western frontier, it can be legitimately argued that trust between Native Americans and the US Government has not been restored over a century later. We should be asking ourselves at this critical moment in time if we’re not risking history repeating itself, but with the potential for much more serious consequences. As Mark Twain wrote in his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, “history never repeats itself but often seems constructed from fragments of past events.”

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Charles A. Ray served 20 years in the U.S. Army, including two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a senior US diplomat, serving 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, with assignments as ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Republic of Zimbabwe, and was the first American consul general in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He also served in senior positions with the Department of Defense and is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 390 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.