With the second week of the war in Iran underway, the same questions that dominated the public conversation a week ago remain unanswered. Americans still don’t know why Donald Trump launched the war, how long the offensive will last, how much it will cost or whether the mission is even legal.
But just as notably, there are related questions about the president’s objectives and what it would take to end the conflict.
On Friday morning, Trump appeared to break new ground, declaring by way of his social media platform that he expects Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
It was a needlessly provocative line, made worse by the fact that no one seemed to know what it meant. On Friday afternoon, for example, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “What the president means is that when he, as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of ‘unconditional surrender,’ whether they say it themselves or not.”
Or put another way, according to the president’s chief spokeswoman, when Trump decides Iran is no longer a threat, the Middle East country will have effectively surrendered, even if its leaders won’t admit it. The president made similar comments to Axios soon after, saying Iran’s “unconditional surrender” could be “when they can’t fight any longer.”
What the White House pitched, in other words, is the idea that the war will end when Iran surrenders — and Trump will decide when that standard has been met, even if Iran hasn’t actually surrendered.
Stepping back, there’s a broader problem that’s every bit as important. Trump’s demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” wasn’t just a muddled mess, it was also new, peddled on the sixth day of the war, alongside an evolving and meandering list of rationales. The Wall Street Journal summarized:
In less than a week after launching a massive military assault on Iran, President Trump has gone from telling its people the future is ‘yours to take’ to insisting he will decide on a new leader and demanding the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the current regime.
The rapid shifts continue to muddle the administration’s endgame in Iran, and raise the stakes for Trump — who built his ‘America First’ movement on the promise of avoiding foreign entanglements — if he now seeks to dictate the political outcome of a country of 92 million in the world’s most combustible region.
As things stand, the public doesn’t know what Trump hopes to achieve in the war he launched for reasons he has struggled to explain — not because Americans are ignorant, but because the president appears to be winging it and making up new justifications and objectives on the fly.
It’s tempting to say there is no endgame in the administration’s policy, but it’s more accurate to say there are all kinds of endgames, and Trump’s meandering support for each is based on a combination of whims and whoever had his ear last.
New York magazine asked Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut whether he believes the White House is likely to deploy ground troops in Iran.
“I think it’s impossible to know because of the incoherence and incompetence of this administration,” the senator replied. “They are making it up as they go along.”
It’s an assessment with broad applicability.
