Why can’t the Trump administration give the American people straight answers about the Iran war? We’re now more than a week into Operation Epic Fury, and every day that passes seems to bring new questions that Trump and his top officials can’t answer consistently and coherently.
Questions like, what is our goal in Iran? Why did we launch this war now? What is our theory of victory, and how will we know when we have achieved it? These four questions in particular deserve answers. So far, we haven’t got them.
At a press conference on Monday, Trump declared the war would be over “very soon,” after saying last week that the war would likely continue for four to five more weeks. Earlier, he told CBS News that the Iran war is “very complete, pretty much.” But almost in the same breath as “very soon,” Trump said the U.S. could “go further.” “We could call it a tremendous success right now, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further,” he said.
The administration’s inability to be clear and consistent on these major questions is a huge problem — whether you support the war or not. In fact, if you support the war you should be particularly unsettled by Trump’s shifting goals and justifications, because it undermines support for a conflict that’s already unpopular with a majority of Americans.
This isn’t nitpicking. In a democratic republic like ours, it matters how our leaders communicate about something as serious and deadly as war, especially when we’re the ones who launched it. The American people should reasonably expect their government to make a good faith effort to persuade them of the need for military action abroad, or at least make a case for it.
To the extent the Trump administration has tried to make its case, it has gone about it haphazardly. Last week, for example, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” a goal that suggests a much longer and more costly campaign than what the administration had previously indicated, possibly involving a ground invasion.
Historical examples of unconditional surrender achieved solely through aerial bombardment are after all exceedingly rare, raising the possibility that Trump didn’t mean unconditional surrender in the traditional sense (which would not be unusual for Trump). Perhaps he simply meant that he will dictate the terms of how this ends. Fair enough, although if that’s the case, it would be nice if he would go ahead and state those terms clearly.
Nevertheless, it was still entirely reasonable to wonder whether Trump was now envisioning ground troops and an occupation, especially after reporting from Semafor over the weekend that one of the options developed by both U.S. Central Command and Israel includes sending Special Operations units into Iran to destroy key nuclear sites. That story, together with reporting from NBC News on Friday that the president “has privately expressed serious interest in deploying U.S. troops on the ground inside of Iran,” raised serious questions about what the White House has in mind for the next phase of the Iran war.
But within hours of Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked it back, saying that Iran’s unconditional surrender would “essentially” be achieved when Trump had accomplished his war aims and determined that Iran was no longer a threat. That isn’t what the term means of course, so it sounded like the administration was saying the United States isn’t really after unconditional surrender at all but something less, which would be defined by Trump at some future point.
Then on Monday morning, the Department of War reiterated Trump’s call for unconditional surrender without qualification, saying “we will not stop until Iran surrenders unconditionally.” So is the administration demanding Iran’s unconditional surrender, or not? And if so, what does the administration think that means, exactly? Moreover, if unconditional surrender is really the goal, does that mean ground troops are now being seriously considered?
This is just one example of the communications fog that has descended over the Iran war this past week. Republicans in Congress can’t even bring themselves to call it a war, and have beclowned themselves by dancing around the term, flippantly insisting that this is just a “limited operation” or a series of “strategic strikes” even as the president repeatedly (almost daily) accurately refers to it as a war. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday, “We’re not at war right now,” describing it instead as a “very specific, clear mission, an operation.” The next day he said, without a hint of irony, “the Department of War has made it very clear, this is a limited operation.” Other Republicans have followed his lead.
But we all know it’s a war. And as a war, the way to evaluate it in strategic terms is by looking at the relationship between military action and political objectives. But since the outset of Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration has been cagey about its political objectives, shifting between different justifications for the use of military force and the desired end-state in Iran. Early on, Trump talked about liberating the Iranian people from the regime in Tehran, even as the administration stressed this was not a regime-change war. But then one of the first things to happen in the conflict was a series of decapitation strikes on the regime by Israel and the U.S. that left the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei dead — along with dozens of top regime officials.
That is, regime change was essentially the first thing that happened in this war. Trump has since said, more than once, that he wants a hand in choosing Iran’s next leader. On Sunday, he told ABC News that Iran’s next leader is “going to have to get approval from us,” which suggests regime change is very much a part of the administration’s aims for this war. (In the same interview, Trump threw in what appeared to be a new justification for Operation Epic Fury, saying Iran was planning “to attack the entire Middle East, to take over the entire Middle East.”)
But then on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the war aims of the United States are to destroy Iran’s ability to launch missiles, destroy the factories that make the missiles, and destroy the Iranian navy. He made no mention of removing or destroying the regime (or approving its next leader, as Trump indicated), no mention of destroying the Iranian nuclear program (which Trump has said was a reason we had to attack Iran when we did), and no mention of rendering Iran incapable of projecting power through terrorist proxies (which has also been invoked as a reason for war).
All of this to say that we’re a week into this war, yet the administration has failed to communicate a consistent theory of victory or stay on message about what exactly it is we hope to achieve. As of this writing, Iran’s navy has been sunk, its ballistic missile infrastructure has been largely destroyed, and its entire political leadership has been taken out. The number of Iranian missiles and drones now being launched against other Middle East states and U.S. military bases in the region has sharply dropped off, an indication that Tehran is losing the ability to respond militarily to the U.S.-Israeli onslaught.
According to the criteria the Trump administration has laid out on some occasions, we have already achieved our goals, and we can simply declare victory and bring our troops home. But the president apparently has something more in mind. What that might be is hard to say. He cannot seem to articulate it, and therefore neither can his officials.
What we’re left with is a war with no clear objectives, no clear endgame, and no reliable messaging to the American people about what exactly it is we’ve gotten ourselves into in the Middle East, and how exactly it will end. Because of our horrible experiences with misguided foreign wars in this region over the past two decades, that’s simply not going to cut it. It’s true that some concerns, such as massively spiking oil prices, have not yet come to pass. Oil prices hit $120 a barrel on Monday but quickly dropped down to $90, which is still substantially higher than it was before the war but far short of a crisis. And Trump has indicated that the U.S. government would step in to cover insurance for oil tankers trapped in the Straight of Hormuz, which could ease the growing bottleneck there and avert a broader global energy shortage.
But regardless, Trump needs to get serious about communicating with the American people about this war in a way that makes sense, and he needs to do so immediately. He’s not a dictator, and this isn’t an autocracy. The president needs to justify his actions to the electorate, and if possible win over public opinion.
This last point is important for anyone who wants to see a real American victory in Iran — whatever that might mean in the end.
