It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.
This isn’t going that way. From one vantage point, what we’re seeing in Iran’s response shouldn’t surprise us. And that response is not going especially well for Iran. What’s telling is that the White House doesn’t seem to have been prepared for the rapid clip of escalation or the market chaos, which are fairly predictable responses to the war it started.
Let’s run through some particulars.
Iran is responding to America’s campaign in a very logical way, albeit “logical” in the context of having very few good options. Iran’s strategic deterrence and a decent amount of its military capacity were already destroyed in 2024 and 2025, the power of its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza even more decisively shattered. So they’re launching missiles and drones everywhere they can to try to expand the conflict into some new configuration that is better than Iran facing the U.S. and Israel on its own. The challenge is that they’re launching attacks against basically all the countries in the region who might be most likely to rein the U.S. in, as well as those who have kept up at least reasonably robust ties with Iran.
The more viable strategy is to create an international energy and economic crisis by shutting down the oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — something those attacks are also making possible. Iran can’t blockade the Strait. But with missile and drone fire and perhaps whatever Navy it has left, it can probably make passage dangerous enough that international shippers will stop trying to send ships through.
There’s an uncanny duality to everything that I’m describing. None of this is surprising. And thus you can’t exactly say it’s “going badly” since this is what you’d expect to happen if you started a war that the Iranian government viewed correctly as a battle for regime survival. If you start from the premise that the U.S. had good reason to start this war or no choice but to do so, then you’d say it’s dangerous, it’s not going to be fast or bloodless, but this is what you’d expect. On the other hand, if you start from the premise that there was no good reason to do this and in fact the Iranian regime is weaker than it’s been in decades, you start to think, was this a good idea? Are we prepared for the consequences and ready to put out all these fires? In political terms, we know that a decisive majority of the American public (around 60%) was against this in the first place.
There are clearly some long time Iran hawks who are decidedly in the first category — they were prepared for this war in whatever form it might take. But the problem for the White House is, again, that this war started with the country close to overwhelmingly against this. And that was before all the bad stuff we’ve seen this week came into view. More to the point, there’s very little in Donald Trump’s history or his behavior that gives me the slightest confidence that he’s ready for any of what’s coming. That assumption gets extra support from how all over the place Trump has been in explaining what the goal of the whole operation is. It’s regime change or maybe it’s regime change if the Iranian public wants it to be and if it’s not then too bad for them. It may be about setting back Iran’s nuclear program. Or maybe it’s just further degrading the country’s missile capacity. Trump seems mostly to have ruled out anything but airpower, except when he occasionally says the opposite, which of course he usually does. And airpower alone never unseats governments. You can possibly weaken a state enough that a domestic insurgency becomes more possible. But such an insurgency tends to be a long shot when a hostile foreign power is actively bombarding the country.
I think we’re in this war because the Venezuela operation went pretty well for Trump, certainly in the short-run. That was fun. So why not do it again in Iran? And he’s escalating abroad in general because escalation, vast expression of power and violence, amount to a kind of psychological compensation for loss of power and popularity at home. It’s a kind of presidential self-care making use of the prerogative powers of the American presidency. I see little evidence Trump is ready for this level of chaos or economic shocks with a war few Americans thought there was any reason to commit to in the first place.