Trump is searching for an endgame to the Iran war

WASHINGTON- After two weeks of war with Iran, the Trump administration is being forced to temper its expectations for a quick end to the conflict, with U.S. intelligence and defense officials expressing doubts about its ability to overthrow Iran’s government and destroy its nuclear program by military means.

It was an outcome predicted by analysts at the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon, who together alerted the administration to the pitfalls that a full-scale war with Iran would bring before President Trump decided to move forward, two U.S. officials told the Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Some Operation Epic Fury military goals set early in the war are still considered achievable at the Pentagon, with U.S. and Israeli strikes progressing steadily, degrading Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure, drone program and navy.

But a prewar assessment by U.S. intelligence that an airstrike was unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic remains valid, with the intelligence community now doubting that the attack had a greater political effect than radicalizing a government already dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the harm of the United States.

A military procession in Tehran carries the coffin of Ali Shamkhani, political advisor to Iran’s last supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was also killed in US-Israeli attacks.

(Atta Kenaré / AFP/Getty Images)

Concern has only grown that Iran’s new government will make the fateful strategic decision to build a bomb after the war, unless Trump decides to escalate the conflict with a perilous ground invasion. And the White House now faces an imperative new mission, created by its decision to start war itself, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to vital shipping traffic that carries 20 percent of the world’s daily supply of oil and liquefied natural gas.

The foreign policy strategy that Trump publicly presented as his strategy for the conflict — going after the government hard, decapitating its leaders and hoping that what is left will beg for mercy — has not worked, with Tehran seeking new ways to expand the war and maximize the pain for the U.S. administration.

Trump downplayed the conflict as an “excursion” that would end “very soon,” while calling it a war, promising to take whatever time he needed to “finish the job.” He says the project will end whenever he decides to end it.

It remains possible that a declaration by Trump that the fighting is over could result in a ceasefire, as was the case in June last year, when Trump demanded an end to 12 days of war between Iran and Israel. But Iranians also have the right to vote — and the Islamic Republic’s top leaders have made clear they plan to keep fighting this time around, whether Trump likes it or not.

On Friday, the Pentagon announced that an additional expeditionary unit of 2,500 Marines was being deployed to the region to support the effort.

“Starting wars is an easy matter,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on social media. “Ending it doesn’t happen with a few tweets.

“We will not leave you until you recognize your mistake and pay the price,” he added.

It’s a painful lesson for a president whose decade of public life was characterized by an exceptional ability to distort reality to his liking.

“The White House has created a dilemma for America: If it declares victory and ends the war, it leaves in place a weakened Iranian government with the means and renewed motivation to pursue nuclear weapons,” said Reid Pauly, a professor of nuclear security and policy at Brown University.

“If he continues the war,” Pauly added, “it risks causing the kind of mission creep that could eventually find American troops on the ground.”

In a press release last week, the White House said that “from the opening hours of this historic campaign, the goals were clear: wipe out Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and production capacity, annihilate its navy, end its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure that the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism will never acquire a nuclear weapon.”

Yet at the start of the operation, Trump promised the Iranian people that by the end of the US-Israeli campaign, Iran’s military and paramilitary infrastructure would be so severely hampered that a rare generational opportunity would arise for him to take over their government.

“To the great and proud people of Iran, I say tonight that your time for freedom is at hand,” Trump said. “Stay safe. Don’t leave your house. It’s very dangerous out there. Bombs will fall everywhere. When we’re done, take control of your government. It will be yours to take. It will probably be your only chance for generations.”

Trump said in the days that followed that he would need a say in the next leader, after assassinating the country’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Iran’s system of clerics and activists defied the president, choosing in Khamenei’s son a man seen as even more hostile to the West than his father was.

Israeli leaders have also made regime change the goal of the war. Yet even their officials now say that a substantial change of direction in Tehran is an unlikely outcome.

Trump will then insist on the “unconditional surrender” of the Iranian government, a demand he said would be met by neutralizing the Iranian military.

Reiterating his belief that the war will end soon, Trump told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade in an interview Friday that he would order an end to the fighting “when I feel it. When I feel it in my bones.”

“The problem with the administration’s approach is that it has constantly shifted its goals. Some are achievable, like degrading Iran’s conventional force. Others are not, like choosing Iran’s next leader,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The mixed messages have caused confusion in the country,” Takeyh added, “and the lack of planning to deal with oil shortages and to get Americans out of the region shows that process and personnel can really matter.”

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign was always designed to proceed in three phases: degrading Iran’s ability to wage war, reducing Iran’s ability to suppress democratic forces inside the country, and finally, encouraging the Iranian people to rise up.

“The president controls the strategy, but no president completely controls the end game because the regime gets a vote,” Dubowitz said. “The end game is not a scripted political transition led by Washington. It is a regime under simultaneous military, economic and internal pressure – to deprive it of its capabilities for war and repression – and it is Tehran that will ultimately decide whether this produces succession, fracture or collapse.”

Whether the conflict will result in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is an equally serious question in Washington, where officials are debating a list of tough options on how to physically destroy, bury or recover fissile materials that Tehran could use to build a nuclear weapon – a threat seen as even more serious under the leadership of an angry and vengeful government.

“The war was publicly justified, to the extent that it was, in terms of destroying Iran’s nuclear program. However, very few strikes were directed against nuclear-related targets – almost certainly because those that survived last June’s attacks are invulnerable to air attack,” said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Unless the United States and Israel attempt high-risk special forces operations or a ground incursion,” he added, “Iran will end the war with its surviving nuclear infrastructure largely intact and with greater incentives to build the bomb.” »

Pauly acknowledges that it is unrealistic to expect that the United States and Israel can destroy Iran’s nuclear program through air power alone. The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that Iran has about 440 kilograms – about 970 pounds – of highly enriched uranium to 60 percent, possibly spread across several facilities.

“Securing this material will require either U.S. ground troops or, after a coercive agreement is reached, international inspectors,” Pauly said.

In an exchange with reporters last week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had few details to offer on U.S. options for removing or eliminating a stockpile of accessible uranium, enriched to near weapons-grade levels, that was buried last year in a U.S. operation designed to wipe out the nuclear threat.

Diplomacy, he suggested, might be necessary to secure the material.

“I will say we have a whole range of options, until Iran decides to give them up,” he told reporters, “which we would obviously welcome.”