Now what?
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 what comes next, probably because it’s all bad news from here.
This is what Trump’s backers recently termed the “Donroe Doctrine”—a moniker he adopted after U.S. Special Forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicólas Maduro last month. It’s a foreign policy of reckless action and spectacular violence—and no clear strategic objectives beyond creating content for social media. Now what? No one in the Trump administration is asking that question because strategic considerations and the long-term security of the United States are for losers, weaklings, and pencil pushers. Killing leaders, bombing schools, thwarting domestic and international law—that’s the goal.
Operation Epic Fury—has there ever been a dumber name for something so horrific? Has there ever been a more fitting one?
“Epic Fury” suits an administration devoted to cheap jabs that “own the libs,” livestreams of Cabinet members awkwardly attempting pull-ups, AI videos of our obese and sundowning president flying fighter jets or posing with glistening muscles and ripped abs. “Epic” once meant sweeping, glorious—it was Lawrence of Arabia or The Ten Commandments. Now it’s just another piece of pandering slopspeak, the kind of thing that spews out of Elon Musk’s mouth as he boasts about his fascistic, child porn-generating AI chatbot.
Still, this operation is, I suppose, epic—the largest air assault since the start of the Iraq War. It is furious too, though that fury itself raises a question this administration has not been able to answer because it cannot be provided: Why are we going to war in Iran?
One explanation is simply that the president and his Cabinet are simply gripped with indistinct fury and rage, as are many of their supporters, and they are desperate to find outlets for release. They have vented their violent impulses in Venezuela, and in Minneapolis, and in the federal government itself, all of which have been decimated as part of the administration’s larger pursuit of destruction. Trump and his backers are obsessed with power and strength and are desperate to showcase that they and the country they ostensibly lead are powerful and strong and that no one—not their political opponents or critics, not the “international community,” to the extent that it exists at all, not Congress or the Constitution—can do anything to stop them.
In practice, this usually means terrorizing immigrant communities or weaker nations. It means kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland and dispatching thousands of armed federal agents to snatch up law-abiding immigrants who came to this country for a better life and now risk being disappeared or held in detention for months or dropped outside in the cold and left to die. “One suspects,” wrote Marc Lynch in a typically astute post, “that acting in defiance of international law, expert opinion, and the role of Congress is its own reward for this team.”
Some strategic goals—Israel’s, for instance—are easier to understand. Israel wants chaos, if not outright civil war: It wants Iran to become a failed state and hopes murdering Khamenei will help bring that about. It is safe to say that the United States—and the Arab states it counts as its allies—do not want that. While Trump’s bellicose and incoherent foreign policy often risks chaos and catastrophe, the administration itself has shown little appetite for true uncertainty. These guys aren’t at all adept with tying up loose ends.
Venezuela, which has been led by Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez since his kidnapping, is helpful to think about here: It suggests the administration is not just suspicious of full-scale regime change but that it’s largely fine with a degree of continuity—so long as the new leaders do what the United States wants, as Rodríguez has, despite being a fully-committed Chavista and no one’s idea of a democratic reformer. In the case of Iran, that would most likely mean the country’s military—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—taking power, something the CIA has floated as a potential outcome. If that would possibly be acceptable for the Trump administration, it is almost certainly a nonstarter for Israel. And that’s basically the big problem and unanswered question underlying Operation Epic Fury: What happens when Israel and American objectives diverge? And what about his promise to Iranians that they will be allowed to “take back” their country? There is simply no chance that will be allowed to happen.
The short answer, at this point, is that no one knows what tomorrow holds. That is alarming for a number of reasons. It’s terrifying for the Iranian people, who are now caught in a military operation with no clear strategic objective, which means that it has no clear endpoint—the death and destruction may very well be only just beginning. For the wider Middle East, that uncertainty suggests that a regional war or a sectarian one on par with Iraq is still very much in the cards.
And for the United States it’s terrifying too because it’s not at all clear that the administration can simply stop when it decides to. Israel is intent on pushing Iran into chaos and it needs America’s help to do it. So far, Trump has been a willing partner. He may very well intend to call a halt to the operation when he decides it’s gone far enough. But the fact that none of this has been thought through in advance means there are a host of tail risks involved: This conflict can very easily drag on; the United States could quickly find itself with thousands of ground troops in Iran; this could all end with Iran becoming a failed state.
In the meantime, Trump burbles on as if long-term implications are woke. “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs],’” he told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Saturday, in an interview where he insisted he had several—unstated—potential “offramps.” Israel, meanwhile, has floated a different timetable—one not of days or years but “weeks.”
Three days. Three weeks. Three years. More? How long will this continue? Trump, as always, is convinced that he decides when things start and when things end. When the time comes he will declare victory based on a set of criteria that he will invent for the sole purpose of crediting himself with yet another glorious “win.” He will say that the United States has eliminated a maniacal and evil foe and freed the Iranian people from his clutches. He will claim that he has ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity both in Iran and in the wider Middle East. He will be lying and this will be incorrect
The only thing we know for sure is that Trump is completely untroubled by the fact that he has launched a massive military operation without a clear purpose or goal. He, moreover, is fully convinced that he is in complete control of these unfolding events. He is lying to himself. Neither he nor, it seems, anyone in this administration is cognizant of the fact that this war could very easily careen out of control—despite so many of them being sold to the public as the only administration that knew better than to stumble into forever wars.
So we will keep bombing Iran until such times as Trump infers from whatever vibes he’s feeling that he’s “won.” But there are many other forces–Israel, the Gulf states, the IRGC, and the Iran people themselves—that have much clearer ideas what they want and they are all in tension with one another. Their objectives—be they chaos, stability, preservation, or democracy—are a spiralling array of contradictions. Ask Trump to ponder this fact, and he’ll dismiss it as extraneous fluff. But the vacuum of his diffidence will be filled by all these conflicting interests all the same. How will they respond when Trump decides not to do what they want? No one with any real power in the administration seems to have considered this.
That is all very bad, of course—which is really all there is to say about what’s happening in Iran right now. As Operation Epic Fury continues, the president and his allies will likely begin to concoct justifications for it and will likely start to articulate objectives that will become a set of moving goalposts. Trump may very well declare “victory” in the coming days. But make no mistake: No one in this administration can say why they are doing this or what they want from it. They don’t care; just thinking about pesky little problems like strategic objectives, let alone foreign policy, just requires too much work.
The real point of this is to prove that the United States is strong by killing foreign leaders, military personnel, and yes, schoolchildren, all while making it clear that no one can slow down the murder machine—not public opinion, not the (ostensible) opposition party, not the United Nations, not our (ostensible) allies. Under Trump, the United States does whatever it wants, stops only when it wants to, and walks away from the carnage without looking back. Trump thinks he is in control; it’s not at all clear that he is.
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