Trump & Iran: Losing Control? | Policy

Four Western newspapers and magazines paint a similar picture of the current Iran war. They see that US President Donald Trump made the decision to go to war against Iran, but he no longer controls its course, and it does not seem that he has a clear plan for its end.

These newspapers believe that the war is continuing today amid strategic fog, shifting goals, contradictory messages, and the absence of an exit plan, not to mention internal division in Washington.

“He lost control from the first moment.”

In an interview with the French magazine L’Express, Emma Ashford, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, said that Trump lost control of the situation from the moment he decided to launch these attacks.

Ashford believes that the strikes lacked a “clear strategic justification,” and that the administration moved under time pressure and Israeli pressure, without specifying what the operation actually wanted to achieve.

She points out that the president sends contradictory signals, sometimes talking about regime change, sometimes about a limited process, and sometimes about negotiations, and concludes that Trump does not seem to know himself what specifically he wants.

The most dangerous thing, in her opinion, is that the bet was on a quick strike that would open the door to exit, but there is no guarantee that Tehran will accept a return to negotiation, which means the possibility of crossing the “point of no return.”

Justifications change and goals shrink

In a report in Le Point magazine, the picture of confusion becomes clearer, as the president presented a series of changing justifications, from a military nuclear program, to ballistic missiles, to the freedom of the Iranian people, and then the “imminent threat.”

But the magazine pointed out in its report that Pentagon officials informed Congress that there was no Iranian plan to strike American forces unless Israel was attacked first.

Even the definition of “imminent threat” presented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed ambiguous, as it represented the possibility of an Iranian response to an expected attack. Defense Minister Pete Hegseth confirmed that the goal was purely military, denying any intention to “build a state” or engineer a democratic transition.

Thus, Le Point says that the narrative of overthrowing the regime suddenly disappeared, and was replaced by the language of destroying military capabilities, while the question remained, “What next?” No answer.

A war without a plan

In turn, the British newspaper The Guardian reported an article by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, at the beginning of which he said that he had spent the past few days communicating with foreign policy experts, analysts and specialists in the Middle East to find out their understanding of Donald Trump’s true goal in Iran, and how anyone, including Trump himself, would know that he had achieved that goal.

Reich: The generals have the field picture, but they do not develop an exit strategy, because they do not consider defining the meaning of victory to be their responsibility

Reich, an emeritus professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, quoted some of these experts as saying that what is happening is “a war without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear vision of where it will lead or how it will end.”

He adds that the decision-making institutions are in a state of confusion, and that no one is in a position of actual leadership.

According to this proposal, Reich says that the generals have the field picture, but they do not develop an exit strategy, because they do not consider defining the meaning of victory to be their responsibility.

On the other hand, some experts believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a key player, committed to a long campaign to destroy Iranian missile capabilities, which may prompt Trump to continue the bombing so that he does not appear less resolute than he is.

Freak war

The writer Edward Luce’s proposal is not different from what Reich mentioned, as he described in an article in the Financial Times newspaper this conflict as a “war of whims,” stressing that Trump’s moment of maximum power was the decision to start, but after that he “lost his monopoly over its course,” as Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states all now have the ability to expand the scope of the confrontation.

In the absence of a rapid collapse, the war, according to Luce, turns into a test of attrition. The more Iran continues to launch Shahed drones, the higher the risk of significant losses, and thus the conflict becomes a race between Tehran’s ability to send the drones and Washington’s ability to intercept them.

Luce: As the confrontation continues, the economic and security costs escalate, and the risk of the region sliding into wider chaos, which even Washington’s Gulf allies do not want, deepens.

Here he points out that the open equation is: Who lasts the longest? Drone production lines or defense systems? As the confrontation continues, the economic and security costs escalate, and the risk of the region sliding into wider chaos, which even Washington’s Gulf allies do not want, deepens.

Between talk of overthrowing the regime, destroying missiles, returning to negotiations, and testing the endurance of the drone war, the question remains open: Does Trump actually have a vision for the end of this war, or has the region entered into a conflict without a compass, the outcomes of which are determined on the battlefields more than they are drawn in the decision rooms?