Pete Hegseth on Monday showed the bombast typical of the shock and awe start of America’s wars as he promised victory over Iran.
“We will finish this on ‘America first’ conditions of President Trump’s choosing, nobody else’s, as it should be,” the defense secretary said at the Pentagon.
But his comment fatefully recalled another promise, made in 2001.
“This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing,” President George W. Bush told a nation traumatized by the 9/11 attacks. Shortly afterward, he took America into wars that lasted for most of two decades.
History’s echo will only fuel fears that this administration is failing to remember the bloody lessons of the recent past.
The size of Donald Trump’s gamble in launching a war alongside Israel that has already led to the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is encapsulated by the scale of possible outcomes.
The risk is that the conflict rooted in a questionable rationale will ricochet chaos across the Middle East and end up killing thousands of civilians while seeding new terror attacks against Americans in years to come.
Yet there’s an alternative scenario for a president who launched an attack on Iran that his predecessors never dared. He could forge a strategic victory if he neutralizes the regional threat from a sworn US enemy for nearly 50 years and catalyzes the birth of freedom in Iran.
“This war that Trump launched is unwarranted and illegal. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be unsuccessful,” historian and foreign policy scholar Max Boot said on a Council on Foreign Relations Conference call on Monday, while criticizing the president for hubris.
The US promises to escalate the war
As the war enters its fourth day, the US and Israel are vowing to escalate the assault on Iran. Tehran’s remnant leadership is determined to foment regional chaos.
Three broad outcomes seem possible:
► The rosiest scenario is that days of air attacks on instruments of Iranian state repression could precipitate a popular uprising. A new Iran could transform the Middle East.
► A messier, and perhaps more likely, possibility is that Iran’s surviving leaders build a new regime. But the US operation could still succeed by gutting the nuclear, missile and military capacity that makes Iran a regional threat. This may be an acceptable outcome for Israel but could lead to future wars to prevent Iran’s new regime rebuilding its capabilities.
► The worst-case scenario is that Iran mirrors Libya amid a power vacuum in a state destroyed by years of authoritarianism. Factional fighting or a civil war could erupt, exporting chaos, causing a refugee crisis and leaving Iran’s uranium stocks vulnerable to extremist groups.
Where it could all go wrong
If Americans are confused by what’s ahead, it’s not surprising, since the administration keeps changing its rationale for war.
Trump has posited regime change and a desire to give Iranians their freedom. He’s pledged to destroy a nuclear program he’d already claimed to have obliterated. Hegseth on Monday stressed the need to avenge Americans killed by Iranian terror attacks or by Iranian-backed militia during the US occupation of Iraq. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that the US staged preemptive war because Israel planned to attack Iran and American troops in the region would face reprisals.
If this fuzzy reasoning reflects an administration that doesn’t know why it went to war, the campaign could already be in trouble.
“There isn’t really a clear strategy. And we need to hear from the president what he wants,” Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen told CNN on Monday. “This is an opportunity for a real inflection point in the Middle East if we’re successful. But it’s not at all clear how that’s going to play out.”
Yet for Trump, imprecision is a feature, not an anomaly.
By keeping war aims vague, he builds political room to declare victory whenever he wants. He seems to have learned one lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan: Large-scale land wars risk quagmires.
But it’s hard to think of a single example of air power triggering regime change and the birth of a stable successor state. While Trump insisted Monday he won’t get “bored,” some of his critics doubt his staying power if the regime survives.
And Trump already seems to be narrowing his war aims. On Monday he said the plan was to eradicate Iran’s navy, missile programs and future nuclear aspirations. Both he and Hegseth seemed also to lay the groundwork for an excuse if the regime reconstitutes, implying that Iranians would only have themselves to blame if they failed to seize their chance. “I think the message the president has given has been clear. To the people of Iran: This is your moment,” Hegseth said.
Some analysts have drawn comparisons to Trump’s regime-toppling strategy in Venezuela, where interim leader Delcy Rodríguez emerged to work with Washington after the special forces raid that extracted President Nicolás Maduro.
But Washington has been trying — and failing — for decades to find moderate Iranian officials with whom to work. After the assassination of the ayatollah, there seem even fewer incentives for such figures to emerge.
Still, at worst, US military success that is not accompanied by a broader political shift could still make the region safer.
“I think what will clearly emerge from this war is a very, very much changed regime, even if it hangs on,” said Elliott Abrams, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and former top foreign policy official in the Bush administration. “There won’t be a supreme leader who’s truly supreme in the way that (Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini and Khamenei have been,” Abrams said.
He continued: “This will be a country largely without the ability to use force. I think by the time this is done, even if it’s only another week, they will have no nuclear program at all. They’ll probably have no missile launchers and maybe no missiles. They will have no navy.”
A neutered Iran would also have wider geopolitical implications. It would deprive Russia and China of the third member of their anti-Western axis. It might also slow the flow of drones and missiles into the Russian military effort in Ukraine.
Where it could all go wrong
Still, even the act of drawing up positive scenarios for Iran ignores the curse of post-World War II US foreign policy. What seems logical and even probable inside the West Wing can wither on contact with Middle Eastern reality.
Washington came up with umpteen new strategies to finally win the war in Afghanistan and troops surges to quell the insurgency in Iraq. But America still left those wars defeated.
Ironically, Trump touched on this failure himself during the first foreign tour of his second term, in Saudi Arabia. “The so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said.
But Trump may be guilty of a different failure of understanding.
Although he had appeared to be making progress in forging a nuclear deal with Tehran, he never offered Khamenei a face-saving off-ramp. Instead he demanded total capitulation. And Trump invested so much of his own prestige in the negotiations that he left himself little option but to impose his red lines or shed global credibility.
Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday that the US now intended help protesters to rise, up. But he added: “Right now we want everyone staying inside. It’s not safe out there.”
But the chances of regime collapse in a repressive state that penetrates every level of Iranian society seem far-fetched. And even if the bombing seriously degrades the Islamic Republic’s security forces, they’d outgun regime opponents, who lack organized leaders. Khamenei’s martyrdom may make his street-level loyalists even more ruthless than those who killed thousands of protests in the last uprising against the theocracy in December and January.
It’s always hard to predict when totalitarian regimes may fall. But the longer the regime clings on, the worse the chances of a political transformation.
“From the Iranian perspective, their strategy has shifted,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Their calculation, their metric of success, is not that they can necessarily win the war. They just need to get as close as possible to destroying Trump’s presidency before they lose the war.”
A prolonged US engagement in Iran, even as US officials predict weeks and not months of action, would heap intense political pressure on the president — who needs a quick victory in a midterm election year.
A new CNN poll Monday showed that nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s decision to take military action in Iran. While a majority of Republicans support him, that could change in a knock-on crisis — for instance, if oil shocks spike domestic inflation. The president’s decision not to seek congressional authorization for the conflict, and his refusal to explain it in any more than a cursory way, may come back to haunt him.
America’s modern history shows that wars do not simply founder on foreign battlefields. They are just as often lost to public opinion at home.
And contrary to Hegseth’s assurance, no one can yet know how this one will end.
