Theaters of war

• Objectives that keep expanding. On the first day, Trump cited four goals: destroy Iran’s missiles, sink its navy, prevent a nuclear weapon, and cut off Iran’s proxy funding of militant groups across the Middle East. By Tuesday, U.S. Central Command’s mandate had grown to include dismantling the regime’s security apparatus. By Wednesday, Trump told reporters he must be “involved” in choosing Iran’s next leader. By Thursday, he called Mojtaba Khamenei—the deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son—“unacceptable” as a successor to Iran’s supreme leadership. By Friday, Trump demanded unconditional surrender—though he later told Axios that could mean Iran simply being unable “to fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt estimated fighting would continue for four to six more weeks. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he’d counted four or five stated objectives. No one has clarified an endgame.
• The Venezuela template. Trump has repeatedly and explicitly invoked Venezuela. “It’s going to work like it did in Venezuela,” he told CNN. In Venezuela, the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro, replaced him with his deputy, kept the governing system in place, and called it something other than regime change. That template—decapitate, install someone amenable, declare victory—might explain why the administration simultaneously denies regime change while insisting on choosing the next leader. But Venezuela was a 48-hour operation against a diplomatically isolated autocrat with no military capacity and no ability to retaliate. Iran is a regional power fighting back with missiles, drones, intelligence from Russia, and the capacity to shut down 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
• Whose war? According to reporting from Axios, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump on February 23 with intelligence that Khamenei and his top advisers would all be in one location the following Saturday. The CIA confirmed the intelligence on Thursday. The Geneva nuclear talks collapsed the same day. Trump gave the green light. “One side of the house was negotiating and the other side of the house was doing joint military planning,” a U.S. official said, per Axios. Netanyahu, who’s pushed successive American administrations toward confrontation with Iran for more than two decades, has met Trump seven times since his return to office—including a three-hour closed-door session on February 11, after which the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, departed for the Mediterranean. None of this means the president was dragged into the war—a proposition Trump denies—but the question of whose objectives it’s serving is still as unclear as the question of what the objectives are.
• The Strait of Hormuz. The administration’s stated objectives, as far as they go, are all military: destroy, dismantle, prevent. No mention of the global economy. But Iran shut down roughly 20 percent of the world’s traded oil with a handful of cheap drones near the Strait of Hormuz—not a naval blockade, just enough strikes to spook insurers and shipping companies. By Tuesday, maritime traffic through the strait had dropped to near zero. Qatar halted liquid-natural-gas production after its facilities were struck. Kuwait began shutting down oil fields for lack of storage. Oil recorded its biggest weekly gain since 1983. Qatar’s energy minister warned that continued disruption “could bring down the economies of the world.” If the war’s stated purpose didn’t account for the most predictable consequence of starting it, it raises a question about how much of this was planned beyond the opening strikes.
• Russia enters the picture. The Washington Post reported on Friday that Russia is giving Iran targeting intelligence on the locations of American warships and aircraft—the first indication of a major power entering the conflict on Tehran’s side. CNN has reported that U.S. intelligence also suggests China may be preparing to supply Iran with spare parts and missile components. The four original objectives were all scoped to Iran alone. None accounted for a third party with a sophisticated satellite constellation feeding the other side. Hezbollah has re-entered the war, and Israel has launched a ground offensive into Lebanon. Iran has struck targets in Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Iraq—countries that got no prior notice of the operation. The conflict’s geography now extends from Beirut to the Indian Ocean—where a U.S. submarine sank the Iranian frigate Dena with a torpedo 2,500 kilometers from the nearest strike zone—but the rationale hasn’t expanded to match.
• Congress stays out. The U.S. Senate voted 47–53, largely along party lines, to block a war-powers resolution—a legislative mechanism that would have required congressional authorization for continued military operations. The House of Representatives rejected a companion measure. The votes worked less as a debate about objectives than as tests of party loyalty. The result is that the largest American air campaign in decades proceeds without anyone in a position of authority having required the administration to define what success looks like. Several Republican senators said they’d reassess if the administration deployed ground troops—an eventuality the White House hasn’t ruled out. Without institutional pressure to answer the question, the administration can keep expanding its stated objectives—and has.
• Cuba on the horizon. On Sunday, the day after the strikes began, Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News: “Cuba’s next.” On Thursday, Trump told reporters that Marco Rubio’s “next one is going to be ... special. Cuba.” He said Rubio wanted to “get this one finished first,” then added: “We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen.” On Friday, he told CNN that Cuba will “fall pretty soon” and that he’s sending Rubio. The president is publicly discussing the next regime he intends to change, while the current war has yet to produce a stated theory of how it ends.

The pattern that seems to be emerging—tentatively, and it may not hold—is that the U.S. administration is operating from an improvisational playbook in which targets of opportunity (Khamenei’s location, the Dena in the Indian Ocean, Cuba’s fragility) substitute for strategic objectives. Netanyahu provided the intelligence on Khamenei’s location; Trump seized it. The objectives expanded afterward to match the scale of what had already been set in motion.

The Venezuela comparison keeps surfacing, it would appear, because it’s the only recent precedent the administration has for taking out a head of state—but that precedent involved a country that couldn’t fight back. Iran can, and is. Russia is helping it fight back. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The Gulf states, who said no one gave them a heads-up, are intercepting missiles over their capitals. And the American president is already talking about Cuba.

None of this resolves into a single explanation. It’s possible the administration has a strategy it hasn’t disclosed. It’s possible the strategy is still forming. It’s possible there is no strategy—that the war has its own momentum now, and its protagonists are writing their objectives to flow with it. What’s most glaring, though, is the gap: between the spectacular scale of what’s happening and the virtual absence of any articulated purpose that would allow anyone—allies, adversaries, Congress, or the public—to reckon meaningfully with whether it’s succeeding.

See “Inside Iran,” “Moving targets,” and “Open water.”