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Six weeks after the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran, what was the political object? Not the military means and objectives — those are the hammer, not the nail. The nail is: What condition in the world, what durable change in Iran’s relationship to the United States and its neighbors, were these strikes meant to produce? That question was never answered, because it was never seriously asked. The Trump administration confused the instrument for the purpose and then changed the purpose whenever the instrument produced inconvenient results.
As our country’s most senior uniformed military leader, standing beside our secretary of defense, rattled off the numbers and percentages of Iranian air defense systems, ballistic missile storage facilities, drone storage facilities, ships small and large, naval mines, defense production facilities, and more destroyed by the formidable American and Israeli militaries, one might be forgiven for concluding that America’s war against Iran has gone pretty well. That would be a mistake. And it is a mistake with a time-honored but deleterious tradition: that of mistaking tactical success for victory and of operational excellence for a strategy.
War has a way of exposing the limits of anything short of victory. And while the war isn’t over (and may still last for weeks or even years), things are looking bad after great expenditures of American munitions and readiness: One of the world’s most important maritime trade routes is closed (a contingency the White House did not seriously anticipate), energy markets are in turmoil, the Iranian regime remains firmly in charge, and its stockpile of uranium remains in its possession (even if it is buried under debris and soil). Clearly, Iranian forces remain capable of waging warfare. And the Trump administration’s negotiators left Islamabad without a deal. Unless victory is defined merely as the degradation of Iranian military capabilities, no honest observer can say America is victorious in this war. And it is difficult to see how the path ahead gets much better for Washington.
The United States has not been able to realize discernible political goals in its war against Iran. It is worth digging into what that means, starting with the word “political,” which is the hinge of it all, and assessing what Washington has actually achieved against the yardstick of its ever-shifting declared aims.
When Americans hear “political,” they think of the thing that has poisoned Thanksgiving dinners for many years: red versus blue, cable news, the chaos of factions, and, more recently, the much-decried “Trump derangement syndrome.” When Carl von Clausewitz used the term (“politik”) in his famed text, On War, he meant something more serious: the purposive will of the state. In this sense, politics are the ongoing intercourse between states, conducted through diplomacy, commerce, and force, all in the service of some desired end in the world. This, of course, implicates and involves domestic politics, but not as the ultimate purpose.
For Clausewitz, war was “not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.” The crucial word there is “instrument.” A hammer is an instrument. It has a purpose external to itself. You don’t swing a hammer to experience the swinging — you swing it to drive a nail into a certain board to help hold a structure together. War, under all circumstances, is to be regarded “not as an independent thing, but as a political instrument.” The moment it becomes its own purpose, it has escaped its purpose entirely, and you are no longer conducting strategy. You are just hitting things. As Colin Gray wisely noted, there is more to war than warfare and “to approach war as if it is synonymous with warfare all but guarantees political failure.”
When the U.S. military launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, the administration had done remarkably little legwork in building a case for war or laying out its objectives. What followed was not a single coherent political aim but a rotating display of them, swapped out roughly every few days like specials on a diner chalkboard. On Truth Social, early in the morning of Feb. 28, President Donald Trump declared that the objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Later, he said, “All I want is freedom for the people.” That same day, the president’s video statement said the purpose of the strikes was effectively regime change. If you’re keeping track, that’s three different political objects before breakfast.
On March 2, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth narrowed the aims to four concrete military objectives: Destroy Iranian ballistic missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and ensure they will never have nuclear weapons. But since America’s problems with Iran are inherently political, military objectives cannot be proper war aims. And proper war aims are what’s missing: a desired end state that can be served by a ledger of destruction but must be more than the ledger itself.
Hours after that, Trump appeared at a Medal of Honor ceremony and debuted an amended list, merging two goals into one and adding a new objective about Iranian proxy networks. Hegseth charged that Tehran was building missiles and drones to create a “conventional shield” for its nuclear ambitions, while the same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio alleged Iran was producing 100 ballistic missiles a month which “they can hide behind.”
On March 6, one week in, Trump posted that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” Later that day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to hedge, stating:
What President Trump means when he says ‘unconditional surrender’ is when he, as commander in chief of the U.S. military and the leader of the free world — determines that Iran can no longer pose a threat to the United States.
The next day, Trump said that surrender had already happened because Iran’s president had apologized to neighboring countries for the missile strikes on Gulf states. “That’s a surrender right there,” Trump said. For those keeping score at home, that’s unconditional surrender demanded on Friday, redefined the same day, then achieved by apology to other countries on Saturday.
By March 13, Trump was saying it didn’t actually matter whether Iran said it surrendered, so long as the United States had a position of dominance. On March 20, the U.S. government lifted some oil sanctions on Iran to stabilize energy prices, which may have been the right decision, but it also enriched the Iranian regime by about $14 billion (almost 4 percent of that country’s GDP at once).
By late March, Trump was floating the seizure of Kharg Island — which handles 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports — and threatening to obliterate Iranian oil wells if no deal was reached. Meanwhile, Rubio was quietly walking back the missile objectives: Where in early March the goal was to “destroy” Iran’s missile program entirely, by March 30, he was describing the aim as a “a significant reduction in the number of missile launchers that they have.” Alongside that aim, Rubio identified the others as:
the destruction of their air force, which has been achieved; the destruction of their navy, which has largely been achieved … and we are going to destroy the factories that make those missiles and those drones that they are using to attack their neighbors and the United States and our presence in the region.
Also in late March, the president began claiming that the United States had already changed the regime in Iran, because so many of their original leaders were killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes. He said:
We’ve had regime change if you look already because the [first] regime was decimated … the next regime is mostly dead, and the third regime we’re dealing with different people … It’s a whole different group of people. So, I would consider that regime change.
I can understand why this is semantically appealing to the president, but it is plainly ridiculous. What we are seeing now is not regime change, but regime hardening.
On April Fools’ Day (and I suspect historians of the future will not let that timing go unremarked), Trump delivered an Oval Office address proclaiming: “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both militarily and economically and in every other way … the country has been eviscerated and essentially is really no longer a threat.” He then announced the war needed to continue for another two to three weeks. He threatened to “hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously” if no deal was reached. So, in the same speech, the president declared total victory and admitted it had not yet been achieved.
On April 8, the White House announced a two-week ceasefire and quietly revised the objectives, claiming that “from day one” the aims were only to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones, its navy, and its defense industrial base. Regime change, unconditional surrender, freedom of the Iranian people, proxies, Kharg Island … nowhere to be found. Maybe they will make a return.
On April 9, Adm. Bradley Cooper of U.S. Central Command described his mission as “dismantl[ing] the Iranian regime’s ability to project power beyond its own borders.” He went on to say that U.S. forces had “clearly accomplished this task,” saying that Iran had “suffered a generational military defeat.” His next sentence, however, defined projecting power downward by saying that Operation Epic Fury had only destroyed Iran’s ability to “conduct large-scale military operations for years to come” [emphasis mine].
Perhaps he is right, but I hope the reader will not blame me for being skeptical.
Clausewitz’s most profound warning was not that war is hard, or that enemies get a vote, or that fog and friction confound the best-laid plans — though he believed all of those things. His deepest warning was about what happens when the political object is unclear or absent from the start. A successful outcome on the battlefield is not the purpose of the war itself. Operations on the battlefield, however brilliantly performed, are without practical value if they do not contribute to achieving a worthy political objective. The enemy’s military can be the center of gravity, but war exacts a toll so severe that only the clearest and most necessary purposes can justify it. If, despite the figures of destruction trumpeted by Gen. Dan Caine, Iran is still in the fight and still able to exact major military and economic costs, then it is fair to ask what purpose this war truly serves.
The consequences are not abstract. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba — described by analysts as a more hardline version of his father — has assumed the top post. Near weapons-grade uranium remains buried deep in Iranian territory. And, unfortunately, if there is any strategic sense left in the Iranian regime, it now understands that having a nuclear weapon is no longer an optional hedge for its evil system’s survival and power. It is a strategic necessity. Iran has effectively established itself as gatekeeper of the Strait of Hormuz — a fundamentally different status quo than existed before the conflict, giving Tehran a durable form of economic leverage it did not previously possess.
Clausewitz would have recognized all of this immediately. The war has not failed because the bombs and missiles missed. The war failed because the men who ordered the bombing could not answer, before they ordered it or at any point thereafter, the one question that makes war something other than organized violence: What are we trying to get the enemy to do and how does this make them do it? In other words, what is our theory of victory — the connection between our aims and actions? It is, of course, true that aims may change throughout the course of a given conflict, but when you cannot answer that question consistently in the opening days, you have not lost control of the war. You never had it.
This seems to indicate the military campaign developed by Central Command and the Pentagon could not have possibly been scoped to an achievable end. The military will certainly act in the absence of strategy — we have seen that many times — but tactical brilliance cannot compensate for that. And without war aims and strategy, victory against Iran will be impossible.
This is not a new problem for America nor for Central Command specifically. The campaign plan in Afghanistan during the height of counter-insurgency operations (2009 to 2012) did nothing to meaningfully address the Taliban’s safe havens in Afghanistan nor the predation and corruption of the Afghan government. All the clearing, holding, and building in the world could never overcome that operational-strategic disconnect. And so, America lost — not because one president struck a deal with the Taliban and the next withdrew, but because there was no coherent theory of victory.
Similarly, even if the Iranian regime suffers enormously, that does not make it a victory for the United States. I don’t think the American people will be satisfied by an Israeli-style approach to “mowing the grass” every few years in Iran. And, as many have pointed out (including this administration in its own National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy), war in the Middle East is a massive distraction from more pressing challenges for America elsewhere in the world. So, all we have to console ourselves with is a tally of leaders, officials, equipment, and production facilities killed and destroyed, which do not a victory make.
The Iranian state still retains the ability to wage war, control trade in the region, and repress its own population. The Trump administration did not have a strategy to deal with any of that effectively, it seems, assuming the regime would collapse like a house of cards in the early days. That assumption proved fatal to America’s chances to win this war, whether the president cares to admit it or not. The American naval blockade of Iranian ports is unlikely to change matters, nor would the limited strikes reportedly being considered by the Trump administration.
Where does this leave the war? What happens next? I am not a seer, but I will offer a few thoughts:
The ceasefire seems likely to fall apart, but its collapse would merely be a symptom of the underlying disease. After Vice President J.D. Vance left Islamabad empty-handed, the administration faces the predictable consequence of its own conceptual vacuum: You cannot negotiate an end to a war when you cannot define what that end looks like.
Still, negotiations may continue in some form. Meanwhile, some in the Trump administration will surely be tempted to double down on the original error and escalate, perhaps through the introduction of ground forces on Iranian islands or coastal areas. Escalation in the pursuit of sunk costs in the Middle East has become something of an American military tradition. It is one this administration’s leaders — including the secretary of defense, the vice president, and the president himself — claim to have learned from and one they invoked on their way to power.
The key thing to understand, however, is this: The United States is not a victor imposing terms and garnering spoils. Until the White House realizes that a ledger of destroyed targets is not a substitute for a better and enduring political reality, we aren’t just walking the path to defeat — we are blindly sprinting down it.
Ryan Evans is the founder of War on the Rocks.
Image: Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons
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