The Dangerous Incoherence of Trump’s War With Iran |
The Dangerous Incoherence of Trump’s War With Iran
The president doesn’t have a clear goal in Iran but thinks he can end the war before that becomes a problem. But the problem is: He can’t.
Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who has led Iran as its supreme leader since 1989, is dead, killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday. Israeli and American bombs are still raining down across Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury—a name that doesn’t lend confidence to the notion this administration has good things in mind for the Iranian people. Some are, like the bombs that killed Khamenei, intended to assassinate top Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian. Others are aimed at decimating the country’s military. Still others are falling indiscriminately—like the one that fell on a girls’ school in Minab, killing dozens of children.
In an eight-minute video posted on his bespoke social media network Truth Social, President Trump insisted that the war had two related goals: To keep the American people safe and to ensure that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. “Our objective,” Trump said, “is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This is all quite preposterous. Iran poses no imminent threat to the American people. And just five days ago, Trump boasted in the State of the Union that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last June when American and Israeli fighter jets bombed several compounds.
Make no mistake, this is an illegal regime change war. The implications of Trump’s desperate decision-making may be felt for decades. It is the invasion of Iraq redux, but without even an attempt to cloak itself in legitimacy. There was no congressional address, no attempt to persuade the public, certainly no visit to the United Nations—just three minutes in the State of the Union devoted to a war that may portend that next great American foreign policy catastrophe in the wider Middle East, and America too. The ayatollah is dead and bombs are still falling. Now what?
No one in the Trump administration really seems to know. Certainly not Trump—but not Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio either. Vice President JD Vance, who rose to prominence in part by casting himself as an anti-interventionist and arch isolationist, has cheerled the war and insisted it has “no chance” of becoming the kind of forever war he used to rail against. The administration wants regime change in Iran, that much is certain. But how will it get there? It’s still not clear.
This is a problem not limited to Iran—though the potential for disaster and chaos is perhaps greater here than it is anywhere else. This administration loves to take cataclysmic action, to make dramatic moves that cannot be undone. But it’s hardly ever clear what it wants to achieve. In Iran, the destruction and general illegality is the point: This administration wants to drop a shitload of bombs, to kill a foreign leader, to destabilize a foreign nation, if not an entire region simply because it can—and because no one can stop them. There’s no evidence that anyone has thought through........