President Donald Trump had just arrived at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, Feb. 27, when he got word from U.S. intelligence officials: they believed they had located Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Months had passed since Trump began preparing for the possibility of war with Iran. In recent weeks, he had instructed military officials to draw up operational plans for a joint strike, coordinated closely with Israel. Eight months after bombing three Iranian nuclear sites, he was once again getting edgy about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The latest round of negotiations in Geneva had done little to reassure him. Trump was suspicious that Tehran was preparing an attack on American and Israeli targets. Though the U.S. had positioned a carrier strike group in the region, with another on its way, Iranian negotiators showed little urgency to reach a deal, he notes, proposing to meet again in a week with U.S. envoys. “When I heard that,” Trump says, “I said, you know, they’re going to hit first.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As guests partied on one side of his oceanfront mansion and private club, Trump huddled with top military and intelligence brass on the other, where he made the decision to launch a decapitation strike against the Iranian regime. “We went way early,” Trump explains in a March 4 phone call with TIME. “We were going to do it in another week.”
In the early hours of Saturday morning, the start of the workweek in Tehran, Operation Epic Fury began. American long-range missiles and drones moved in concert with Israeli jets, striking hundreds of Iranian military installations: missile batteries, naval vessels, air-defense systems, and command centers. It was one of the region’s most expansive air operations in decades. The bombardment killed Khamenei, who presided over a repressive regime for 36 years. Also dead were a cluster of senior Iranian officials envisioned as potential successors. “I’ve killed all their leaders,” Trump says. “That room is gone.” The attacks also inflicted significant damage to civilian areas. In the far south of Iran, more than 150 people were killed when a barrage hit a girls school.
Iran retaliated with missile and drone bombardments against U.S. bases and allied territory, targeting military facilities across the Gulf, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. One Iranian drone killed six American service members at a U.S. command center in Kuwait. Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. “I guess,” he says. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.
Trump promised to end wars, not start them. Instead, he has deployed military force in increasingly dizzying ways. No other modern American leader has directed assaults in as many countries in such a short span of time. Since returning to office, Trump has authorized attacks in eight nations, three of which have never before been directly targeted by U.S. forces. In 2025 alone, he approved more individual airstrikes than his predecessor did over four years.
Trump has ordered a major campaign of airstrikes targeting Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen; authorized naval attacks on vessels from Venezuela suspected of drug trafficking; and signed off on the operation that seized that country’s authoritarian President, Nicolás Maduro, left more than a hundred dead, and placed the Venezuelan leader on trial in New York. Just days after the onslaught against Tehran, the U.S. took part in joint military operations in Ecuador, targeting “designated terrorist organizations.” His Administration has also fixed its sights on Cuba, where President Miguel Díaz-Canel has ramped up military exercises amid reports that Trump has asked advisers to devise plans to end the island’s six-decade communist rule.
In short, if Trump campaigned as a President of peace, he has governed as the opposite. Now he has drawn the U.S. into the kind of conflict he long pledged to avoid. Having ousted the tyrannical ruler of Iran’s theocracy, he has committed the U.S. anew to regime change in the Middle East, telling TIME he intends to play a role in shaping the next government of a regional powerhouse home to some 90 million people. “One of the things I’m going to be asking for is the ability to work with them on choosing a new leader,” he says. “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei. I want to be involved in the selection. They can select, but we have to make sure it’s somebody that’s reasonable to the United States.”
It’s impossible to know how all this will unfold. There was little sympathy internationally for the Ayatollah, who reigned over a brutal Islamist regime; throughout Tehran and across the Iranian diaspora, crowds have rejoiced in the streets upon hearing the news of his demise. To some, Trump’s attacks are historic in the best sense, eliminating an avowed adversary who sought to destroy the U.S. and whom Washington has long viewed as the head of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
But the gambit carries extraordinary risks—for Trump’s presidency, for Iran’s fragile political future, for regional stability, and for the safety of Americans at home and abroad. The gravest decision a President can make is whether to send American troops into harm’s way. Trump, who once defined himself in opposition to foreign entanglements, has pivoted with astonishing alacrity toward open-ended confrontation across multiple theaters.
In his interview with TIME, Trump says his goals are to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat once and for all, to dismantle its ballistic-missile program, and to install a Western-friendly government. “We have to be able to deal with sane and rational people,” he says. Yet Trump launched a war before making a case to the country or to Congress, and his Administration has offered unclear—and at times contradictory—explanations of the mission’s objectives. The most unnerving possibility is that Operation Epic Fury is not the culmination of his shift toward a war presidency, but rather the beginning of a new chapter.
The path to war with Iran was paved by a pair of meetings, one year apart, with Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Feb. 4, 2025, the Israeli Prime Minister visited the White House for the first time since Trump’s return to power. Seated at a long table in the Cabinet Room, Netanyahu began with a bracing reminder, according to U.S. and Israeli officials present at the meeting: Iran, he noted, had plotted to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Law-enforcement officials disclosed that they had disrupted what they described as two Iranian plots to kill Trump. (Tehran denied the allegations.) Trump has long fused geopolitics with grievance, and Iran’s clerical leadership occupied a singular place on his list of adversaries. When TIME asked him in a November 2024 interview about the prospect of war with Iran, Trump did not dismiss it. “Anything can happen,” he said.
Sensing an opening, Netanyahu walked through a slide deck. It showed stockpiles of highly enriched uranium climbing, centrifuges spinning faster, inspectors reporting gaps. Ever since Trump withdrew from President Barack Obama’s nuclear accord in 2018, Tehran had incrementally expanded its enrichment program, moving closer to breakout capacity. By the time Trump was inaugurated a second time, international inspectors assessed that Iran possessed enough weapons-grade uranium to place it mere weeks from assembling a bomb. “Look, Donald,” Netanyahu said, leaning in, “this has to be tackled, because they’re racing forward.” He paused, locking eyes with the President. “You can’t have a nuclear Iran on your watch.”
But Trump was not ready to greenlight an Israeli strike. He wanted a diplomatic attempt first, and tasked his longtime friend, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, with exploring a solution. U.S. and Israeli officials settled on a 60-day framework to test whether an agreement was viable. The Israeli officials say the deadline was strategic. When Iran exceeded it without concessions, they argue, Trump’s skepticism hardened. “It proved to Trump that we have nobody to talk to,” one Israeli official says. “It was a ruse.”
After the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had concealed aspects of its nuclear development in violation of prior commitments, Israeli intelligence was shared with the White House, purporting to show Tehran was slow-walking negotiations while covertly assembling components necessary for a weapon. On June 13, 2025, Jerusalem launched a wave of strikes that broke through Iranian air defenses and disrupted supply lines. Trump was impressed—and, as one of his advisers put it, eager not to be a spectator to history.
On June 22, Trump authorized Operation Midnight Hammer, a tightly coordinated onslaught on three of Iran’s most critical nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. Fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs were delivered by B-2 Stealth bombers in what officials described as the largest such mission in American history. The objective was explicit: penetrate hardened facilities and degrade Iran’s capacity to cross the nuclear threshold. Assessments of the damage varied. Though analysts urged caution, Trump declared the facilities “effectively destroyed.” When Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on U.S. bases appeared largely symbolic—intercepted or limited in scope—he proclaimed the “12-day war” over. Tehran would have a choice, he said: negotiate a permanent end to its nuclear ambitions or face further consequences.
Over time, Trump saw the strike as a success on multiple levels. After his Administration helped broker a Gaza cease-fire that secured the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, he framed Operation Midnight Hammer, along with his first-term assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, as leverage—proof that credible force could reset diplomatic equations. “It would have been impossible to make a deal like this before,” Trump told TIME last fall. “No President was willing to do it, and I was willing to do it. And by doing it, we had a different Middle East.”
To some, Midnight Hammer validated a doctrine of decisive action—limited in duration but maximal in force. To others, it normalized Trump’s ordering preventive strikes against sovereign nations with uncertain long-term consequences. Either way, the operation fed Trump’s own sense of momentum. It also created the foundations of a new template: apply overwhelming force, declare victory, then offer negotiation from a position of dominance. By year’s end, Trump was no longer speaking of war as something to avoid at all costs, but as an instrument to achieve his ends.
Smaller operations soon flickered across the map: Military strikes against suspected narcotics vessels in the Caribbean. Joint raids with regional partners targeting cartel infrastructure along Venezuela’s coast. Covert actions against criminal networks in Ecuador. The crescendo came in January, when American special-operations forces launched a predawn assault in Caracas that ended with the capture of Maduro, and his transfer to the U.S. to face narcoterrorism charges.
The focus of diplomacy then shifted back to Iran’s nuclear program. Trump tapped two trusted envoys to pursue a deal: Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had negotiated the Gaza deal and were leading the Administration’s efforts to broker a peace between Russia and Ukraine. Their mandate was straightforward, if ironic: to secure an agreement not unlike the Iranian nuclear accord forged by Obama, the very deal Trump had excoriated and withdrawn from during his first term.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic was violently suppressing antigovernment protests across the country. Trump saw an opening. He told the demonstrators that “help is on the way” and warned Tehran a military response was on the table—though took no action as Iranian authorities shut down the internet and slaughtered as many as 30,000 people. According to senior Administration officials, Trump thought pressure from the streets, combined with American threats, could force Iran to the negotiating table.
But Witkoff and Kushner’s attempts to forge a deal in Geneva went nowhere. When the envoys returned empty-handed, Trump concluded the Iranians were playing for time, using what one senior U.S. official described as “games, tricks, and stall tactics.” Iran refused to entertain negotiations over two issues that Western officials considered central: its ballistic-missile program and its support for regional proxy forces, including Hezbollah and Hamas.
Then two developments accelerated the shift toward confrontation, according to two Trump officials familiar with the deliberations. The first was an intelligence assessment indicating that Iran was preparing ballistic-missile strikes that could be used “potentially pre-emptively” against American forces in the region. “The President decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the Middle East to absorb attacks from conventional missiles,” one official told reporters. The second was Netanyahu’s parallel march toward war. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said March 2. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
On Feb. 11, Netanyahu returned to Washington for a meeting with Trump that participants describe as unusually grave. There were none of Trump’s customary wisecracks, no theatrical asides. For three hours the two men sat together at the White House, working through operational plans and the parameters of a coordinated campaign. Trump has previously told TIME he does not trust the Israeli Premier—“I don’t trust anybody”—but now they were working in lockstep on an operation that would alter the balance of power in the region. By the time Netanyahu left Washington, the outlines of the attack were set. In a little more than two weeks, the first bombs would fall on Tehran.
Even those with only a passing familiarity with Middle Eastern history can imagine the grim scenarios that could unfold from here. When George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, members of his administration predicted that American troops would be greeted as liberators after the fall of Saddam Hussein. For a fleeting moment, that seemed plausible. Then the war curdled into a quagmire that destabilized the region, drained American lives and treasure, boosted Iran, and helped fuel a wave of radicalization whose repercussions still ripple through global politics. It was amid the fatigue and disillusionment from those wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—that Trump forged his “America First” identity.
He has now launched a war that could carry many of the same risks. “Even in scenarios where we had, like in Iraq or Afghanistan, some degree of planning for the day after, it ended in grief,” says Ali Vaez, an expert on Iran with the International Crisis Group in Geneva. “This time around, it is really based on wishful thinking.”
Trump made only a cursory effort to notify Congress before launching the attack, briefing a small circle of congressional leaders shortly before the operation was underway and leaving most lawmakers to learn of it after the fact. There had been little public debate beforehand about the possibility of war, including at his State of the Union address just days earlier. In the aftermath, some officials framed the strike as a necessary act of pre-emption against an imminent threat; others described it as a long-planned effort to cripple Iran’s military leadership and force a broader political reckoning in Tehran. Rubio’s statement—that Israel was preparing an attack of its own and that Washington moved first to weaken Iran before it could retaliate against American targets—was yet another rationale.
In his phone call with TIME, Trump described the mission as preventative. “America First is really about keeping America healthy and well, and not having other countries, you know, hit us,” he says. “There are occasions when you have no choice. This was an occasion.” The aim, he says, is to prevent Iran from having the capacity to endanger the U.S. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon. That’s number one, two, and three. Number four, no ballistic missiles,” he says. Another objective, Trump tells TIME, is installing “somebody that is rational and sane” to lead Iran.
Some experts say the U.S. may not be able to engineer a successor government more stable than the one it seeks to replace. “This is not a regime of individual leaders. It’s a regime of well-entrenched institutions that have a monopoly on coercion,” says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. “Other than just a continuous process of assassination, I’m not entirely clear on how the President anticipates he’s going to be able to determine the next leader of Iran.”
Others argue that the danger may run deeper still: that the fall of the Islamic Republic could fracture Iran rather than reform it, unleashing internal power struggles, proxy conflicts, or even a civil war. The Trump Administration is betting on the possibility that Iran’s population might welcome outside pressure against the clerical regime. Iran is a young country—more than 40% of its population is under 30—and many of those citizens have lived their entire lives under sanctions, repression, and economic stagnation. Trump’s advisers believe that resentment toward the ruling establishment could produce change, particularly if a new government could quickly align with regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that have grown closer to the U.S. and Israel in recent years.
But that hope collides with a harsher reality. Popular dissatisfaction does not automatically translate into revolution. Protesters lack weapons and organization; the Iranian security apparatus does not. If the regime endures, or violently suppresses unrest again, the U.S. could face a decision it has tried to avoid: whether to send in ground forces to finish the job.
Trump has not ruled out that possibility. He has said he believes the objectives of the campaign could be achieved within four or five weeks, though he concedes the timeline could stretch longer. The war will continue, he suggests, until those objectives are accomplished. “I have no time limits on anything,” he says. “I want to get it done.”
Trump’s abrupt reversal on foreign intervention is testing the coalition that carried him back to power. Fissures have emerged on the right, with longtime allies questioning the scope and purpose of the campaign, reviving the anti-interventionist strain that once defined the MAGA movement. Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have each accused Israel of dragging the U.S. into a misadventure overseas. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once among Trump’s most steadfast allies but now an increasingly vocal critic, accused him of betraying the movement. “This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be,” she wrote on X. “Shame!” Other detractors have argued that the war may come to resemble a “wag the dog” moment for a President facing soft approval numbers, the Epstein scandal, and economic unease ahead of the midterms.
How Trump responds to those pressures may determine how long the war continues, especially if it grows unpopular. The dynamic is one that haunted Bush, whose war in Iraq became so politically toxic that members of his own party abandoned him. The irony would be profound: Trump, who electrified Republican politics in part by repudiating the foreign policy legacy of the Bush family, could find himself ensnared by the very forces that helped undo that dynasty.
Trump believes the outcome will be different this time. In the past, such as in Venezuela, he has launched dramatic military actions and disengaged before they hardened into protracted wars. But this is a far bigger and riskier gamble, as he readily acknowledges, and the consequences are less predictable. As the conflict unfolds, the question that hangs over Washington is the same one that has haunted Commanders in Chief for generations. Presidents may choose how war begins. But they don’t get to decide how it ends.
—With reporting by Brian Bennett, Leslie Dickstein, and Simmone Shah
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