Donald Trump has been doing his own spinning about Operation Epic Fury with a round of media interviews. But behind the confident chatter, the US President couldn’t conceal the chasm of uncertainty affecting his plans for Iran.

Speaking on the phone to a CNN presenter, he said: “We don’t know who the leadership is. We don’t know who they’ll pick. Maybe they’ll get lucky and get someone who knows what they’re doing … We don’t know who is leading the country now. They don’t know who’s leading.”

The last time a massive attack was launched on the Middle East in 2003, there was a seasoned defence secretary at the helm, Donald Rumsfeld. When asked how long he thought the Iraq war would last he replied: “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

Rumsfeld was no neocon. He was contemptuous of nation-building, but famously observed in 2002: “There are known unknowns…but there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

This is where we are again today as rockets fly, embassies shutter and Westerners are urged to leave the Middle East. It is why a Pentagon insider told The Washington Post “the mood here is intense and paranoid” after six service members died in Kuwait.

The soldiers were killed by an Iranian strike on a makeshift operations center, at a civilian port thought to be far from harm’s way. These troops could be among the last US casualties or the first in a distressing series of them. Trump doesn’t know and his story keeps changing.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” Trump told the New York Post, not ruling out the use of more US personnel. Further extending the timeline for military action, he claimed in a Truth Social post (designed to be reassuring about alleged dwindling US munitions) that “wars can be fought ‘forever’ and very successfully”.

The Maga movement is experiencing whiplash after swallowing Trump’s campaign rhetoric about wanting to stop wars, not start them. But the Washington establishment – derided as the “swamp” – is equally alarmed.

Ending the rule of the Mullahs has been a strategic US foreign policy goal since the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis in Tehran. This is why Trump has attempted to frame the decision to launch the attacks as an end to the 47-year “forever war” started by Iran.

“The killing of Ayatollah Khamenei led to a feeling of euphoria and ‘we’ve succeeded’. To a certain extent Washington thinks, ‘we’ve won. All we have to do is tidy up,’ but we’re not there yet,” Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, told me. “Even if we succeed, there are bound to be clashes and ugliness.”

Bluntly, Iranian exile politics is a mess. Few Washingtonians have faith in the abilities of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, to usher in democracy, as King Juan Carlos I did in post-fascist Spain in 1975. Competing groups vie for influence and accuse others of being spies and stooges.

The hope that the Iranian people will liberate themselves from a reign of terror has been around for decades. I remember listening to a US billionaire in Washington explain in the early 2000s how smuggling in Baywatch videos would help Iranians to break their chains.

This was the period when the Farsi-language station Radio Farda, blending news and pop music, was established as an offshoot of Voice of America (VoA). Foolishly, it was closed in March 2025 on Trump’s orders, while VoA was gutted, but resumed shortwave broadcasts into Iran after nationwide protests erupted in January.

So we’re back where we started, to the early 2000s, only this time the amorphous “war on terror” has turned, in Trump’s words, into a “punishing blow” against “the terrorists who have waged war against, basically, civilization”.

Although the Iranians are no match for US firepower, they managed to hit the US Embassy compound with its CIA station in Saudi Arabia with two drones – a mere pinprick, but an embarrassing one. 

This time, we are not supposed to call what’s going on a war, but rather “major combat operations”, creepily similar to the Kremlin’s special military operation in Ukraine. This is despite the Department of Defence changing its name to the “Department of War” and “war” secretary Pete Hegseth declaring at a press conference this week, the “US is not a defender, but a warrior”.

As with all wars of choice, the prize is tantalizingly big, but the risks are high. Sunni Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, who are quietly supporting the US-Israeli attacks on Shia Iran, are wondering whether Trump can be trusted to stand by them.

According to Henderson, “they placed their bets on Trump many months ago and hope their bets are still good. But they must be thinking, is he going to succeed or are they going to be left to drift?”

Several important Maga media figures, such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have criticised the attacks on Iran, reserving a special venom for US co-operation with Israel.

The achievements Trump touted in his State of the Union Address last week such as low petrol prices and soaring stocks are imperilled. But Trump’s constantly shifting war aims has the advantage that he will be able to claim some semblance of victory, no matter what.

The Maga coalition is fracturing, but Trump still believes. In reaction to Carlson and Kelly, the President said: “I think that Maga is Trump — Maga’s not the other two.”

Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting

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