What Is the Endgame in Iran? |
The fog of war is thick in Iran, but two things are already crystal clear. No one can question the unrivaled military prowess displayed by the United States and Israel. Since February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, struck thousands of military targets across Iran, and significantly degraded the country’s missile launchers, drone stockpiles, and naval assets. Nor should anyone doubt the cruelty of the Iranian regime they are targeting, which has spent decades killing Americans, brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors with missiles and terrorist proxies, and racing to build up its nuclear program.
But so much else about this war of choice remains unclear, and the biggest questions have gone unanswered by the Trump administration. In particular, how will this war end? And what will be the ultimate strategic implications of the Iran gamble? The history of American military intervention offers a consistent lesson: wars begun without clear political objectives rarely end well. When political goals are undefined or contested, the war lacks a logical stopping point. Tactical successes raise questions of what comes next, while tactical setbacks become justification for doing more. The mission expands, the timeline stretches, and the original rationale fades into the background as the war gains its own momentum. The nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that war is politics by other means. But the corollary is equally important: without a clear political purpose, war becomes an end in itself.
Washington’s objectives for launching the war in Iran are far from clear. The Trump administration started the war with the stated goal of regime change. “Take over your government,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on February 28. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.” Yet in the days since, administration officials have been all over the place. Is the goal to select a more “acceptable” government, as the United States did in Venezuela? Is it “unconditional surrender”? Is it to destroy the nuclear program? Or is it simply to leave whoever survives incapable of projecting military power and declare victory? Clearly defining objectives matters because achieving regime change, behavior change, ending Iran’s nuclear program, and degrading Iran’s ability to project power are not variations on the same goal. They require fundamentally different wars, with different resources, timelines, definitions of victory, and postconflict planning.
This uncertainty has been reinforced in recent days with Trump sending conflicting signals about the war’s duration. On Monday, he sought to calm markets and slow surging oil prices by hinting that the U.S. military was “very far ahead of schedule” and the war could end soon. But hours later, he backtracked. “We have won in many ways, but not enough,” he told a gathering of Republican lawmakers, adding, “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”
Strategic ambiguity leaves both the Iranian people and the U.S. military in a quandary. Many Iranians celebrated Khamenei’s death and want to see the regime gone. U.S. intelligence officials reportedly see regime change as unlikely. But what happens if courageous Iranians seize the historic opportunity Trump claims to have provided, and the regime responds with extreme violence, as it did in January when it killed thousands of civilian protesters?
Wars begun without clear political objectives rarely end well.
History offers grim warnings. After the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. President George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to rise up—and then watched from the sidelines as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein slaughtered them. In Libya in 2011, the Obama administration did the opposite—intervening to protect civilians challenging the dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, only to see regime change descend into state failure and civil war. Today, if Iranians rise up and the regime cracks down, Trump would face a similar dilemma: stay out at tremendous cost to American credibility or go all in and risk mission creep, entanglement, and chaos.
Instead of grappling with this dilemma, the Trump administration appears to be making it more acute. As the prospect of near-term regime change fades, both the United States and Israel seem to be flirting with fomenting internal fragmentation as a fallback. Reports indicate that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish militia forces in northern Iraq, while Israel bombs frontier posts, police stations, and military positions along the northern Iran-Iraq border to clear a path. In recent days, Trump has suggested he is backing away from this scheme, but Israel has not. Indeed, Israeli leaders seem to view the destabilization of Iran as a preferable backup if regime change proves impossible, potentially pushing Iran into the kind of state fragmentation seen in Libya, Syria, and post-2003 Iraq. In a country of 90 million people at the crossroads of Eurasia, that outcome would be profoundly destabilizing, not just for Iranians but for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.
Even if the war ends tomorrow, several big strategic questions and implications will linger. One is the nuclear question—and here the uncertainty about how to achieve Trump’s objectives of ending Iran’s nuclear program is genuinely alarming. Last June, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that Iran held more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity—enough fissile material, with further processing, for roughly ten nuclear weapons. Following Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran later that month, the IAEA could no longer confirm the size and location of this stockpile. Put simply, no one knows exactly where hundreds of kilograms of near weapons-grade fissile material is right now or how to take custody of it.
A wounded Iran may emerge from the current conflict even more determined to weaponize its residual nuclear capability to deter future attacks. This problem cannot be bombed away. In the absence of putting significant numbers of American or Israeli troops on the ground to secure this material, an extraordinarily risky option Trump has reportedly contemplated, it will require the administration to advance a concrete plan for postconflict monitoring—one focused specifically on verifying the location of Iran’s existing stockpile and securing custody of that material before it can be weaponized. But this is precisely the type of diplomatic strategy that becomes impossible to develop when the war’s ultimate goals remain undefined.
The United States could emerge from this war militarily overstretched and depleted.
Beyond questions about the war’s immediate objectives lie even bigger ones about the implications for defending U.S. interests around the world. Before the war, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly voiced significant concerns that a prolonged, high-intensity conflict in the Middle East could deplete critical U.S. munitions, sapping the United States’ readiness to respond to threats elsewhere. The early days of the current war have validated those concerns. The United States has already burned through significant stockpiles of long-range strike munitions and limited, high-end air defense interceptors defending U.S. bases, Gulf states, and Israel from Iranian missile and drone barrages. With U.S. munitions stockpiles already strained and the defense industrial base struggling to ramp up production fast enough to meet requirements for potential future contingencies with China or Russia, the Pentagon risks a Pyrrhic victory in which success in Iran leaves the United States less able to deter or defeat major aggression anywhere else.
That challenge is compounded by the prospect that tens of thousands of U.S. forces will need to remain in the Middle East for months or years after major combat operations end, tied down by postwar containment missions, reassurance operations for anxious Gulf partners, and requirements to engage in periodic restrikes when Iran inevitably attempts to rebuild its military. That is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, which established a permanent U.S. basing presence in the Middle East to contain Saddam Hussein that persists to this day. Today, this is the quicksand that proponents of the war claim to be escaping by ending the Iranian threat once and for all. And yet Washington may once again be wading straight into it.
There is a painful paradox here. The display of American military power has been stunning, and adversaries will take note. But the United States could emerge from this war militarily overstretched, depleted, out of position, and therefore weaker vis-à-vis China and Russia for years to come.
The biggest question may be what the war means for the future international order. So far this year, the United States has conducted two major military operations—against Venezuela and Iran—without broad international coalitions, UN authorization, or firm legal footing. The Trump administration launched this war without a congressional vote and without making the intelligence case to the American people in the way that even the flawed case for the Iraq war was made in the months leading up to the invasion.
Leaders in Moscow and Beijing are carefully watching the conflict unfold, not because they disapprove of eliminating adversaries—they don’t—but because American willingness to act unilaterally, outside traditional legal constraints, makes it dramatically harder for Washington to seize the normative high ground if and when Russia engages in further aggression against its neighbors or China moves to invade Taiwan. Every norm the United States erodes now is one it cannot compel others to respect in the future.
Wars are not judged by how well they start. They are judged by how they end—and by whether the country that started the fight is stronger or weaker when the guns finally go quiet. The U.S. troops executing these operations are serving with extraordinary professionalism, but that cannot substitute for clarity of purpose. The questions being asked too quietly right now are the ones that will ultimately determine whether this war is worth fighting.
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