It should not be this hard to figure out what Donald Trump intends to do in the Iran war, even if he now quaintly describes it as an “excursion.” Twenty years of exposure to the man as a celebrity, candidate, and president have sharpened our ability to unscramble his word salads and extract some semblance of meaning from his inveterate incoherence.
But listening to him over the past several days as he tries to clarify whether he is satisfied with the progress of U.S.–Israeli operations and what he sees as his own goals in the conflict is enough to drive a reformed boozer back to the bottle. The ten steps forward, six steps sideways, punctuated by the occasional pirouette, make you wonder what Trump himself may be spiking his Diet Cokes with.
The confusion is not merely stylistic. It extends to the most basic question about the war: Is it essentially over, or only just beginning?
The U.S. military says it has struck more than 5,000 targets in Iran and damaged or destroyed more than fifty Iranian vessels during the campaign. Trump has pointed to those numbers as proof that the operation has been highly successful. In a phone call with CBS News, he even suggested the war was “very complete,” implying that Iran’s military capabilities had largely been eliminated.
Yet in other appearances he has sounded far less certain about the war’s endpoint, insisting that the United States still needs to achieve “ultimate victory.” If Iran interferes with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, he warned, the United States would respond “TWENTY TIMES HARDER.” Speaking to reporters in Florida, he simultaneously hinted that the mission might soon conclude—“We’re way ahead of schedule”—while also insisting that “we could go further, and we’re going to go further.”
And the surprises keep coming. On Tuesday morning, as Western governments debated releasing strategic oil reserves to contain war-driven price spikes, U.S. officials said such a move would be premature, echoing Trump’s expectation that the conflict might soon wind down. Less than two hours later, however, after what was reportedly a presidential “change of heart,” the same officials were urging allies to proceed with a coordinated emergency oil release. “The whiplash reflects the volatility of the Trump administration’s decision-making as it prosecutes the war with Iran,” the Wall Street Journal observed—surely a masterpiece of understatement.
As columnist Thomas Friedman recently summed it up, Trump has been “all over the map when talking about the morning after in Iran — and saying truly ridiculous and often contradictory things that reveal a commander in chief who is just making it up as he goes along. One day it’s regime change, one day not; one day he doesn’t care about Iran’s future, the next day he will have a say in choosing the country’s next leader; one day he’s open to negotiations, the next day he is demanding ‘unconditional surrender.’”
In other words, if you are searching Trump’s remarks for a coherent strategy, you may be performing an essentially literary exercise, like trying to reconstruct the plot of a novel from the ravings of a distracted narrator.
Which suggests a rather uncomfortable possibility.
If you really want to know why the United States attacked Iran, or where this war is headed, the most efficient approach might be to dial up the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted at that possibility more than a week ago when he suggested that Israel had effectively accelerated a pre-programmed sequence of events by delivering the first blows itself. Once Israel began the strikes, Washington suddenly found itself dealing with the safety of American citizens and diplomats scattered across the region. The momentum toward U.S. involvement quickened exponentially.
Rubio did not say outright that Israel had forced Washington’s hand. But the implication was difficult to miss. Israel moved first, and the United States moved next.
And that raises a more serious question.
Israel’s priorities, strategic blueprint, and long-term objectives in this war do not necessarily match our own.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, speaking on background, confirmed to Axios that Israel’s aim is to destroy Iran’s military capacity so thoroughly that it can never again threaten Israel. The weekend strikes on Iran’s oil infrastructure appear lifted directly from a familiar operational blueprint: the Dahiya Doctrine.
As I have previously written, this doctrine, which was refined during Israel’s campaigns in Lebanon, holds that defeating an enemy requires destroying not only hostile forces but also the infrastructure that sustains them—financial networks, energy systems, transportation corridors, and civilian assets seen as enabling the adversary’s war effort.
In other words, it does not merely target armies; it targets the economic and political foundations that keep them functioning.
By that measure, striking Iran’s petroleum industry makes perfect sense.
But it apparently caught Trump’s team off guard. According to multiple reports, administration officials were surprised and dismayed that Israel had targeted Iran’s oil facilities—an action that, combined with the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, promptly sent global oil prices soaring.
That reaction suggests the White House may not have fully grasped the strategic premises of the war it had joined.
There is another factor at work —another echo of the Dahiya concept—that should keep Trump’s head spinning.
Israel stands to gain when a hostile neighbor is wracked by persistent economic and political chaos, because a crippled adversary poses less danger. For years Israel managed its confrontation with the Assad regime in Syria through periodic strikes that kept Damascus in a state of near-permanent instability. A similar dynamic has shaped Israel’s handling of Lebanon.
From Jerusalem’s perspective, therefore, the long-term outcome of the Iran war does not have to be tidy. A weakened, fragmented Iran—its economy battered, its military capabilities degraded—may serve Israeli interests perfectly well.
Trump, however, appears to be operating under a different assumption. He seems to believe that installing some malleable regime in Tehran might satisfy both American security concerns and Israel’s.
The logic behind Israel’s military doctrine argues otherwise. Israel’s interests would hardly be served by leaving enough of Iran’s wealth, infrastructure, and military capacity intact for a successor government, even a Trump-approved one, to reconstitute a meaningful threat.
There is another divergence as well.
Spiking oil prices rightly alarm Washington and its allies across Europe and the Middle East. But Israel can tolerate global energy disruptions more easily than the United States or Europe, because its electricity sector now runs largely on domestic natural gas rather than imported oil. Israel would not, of course, be immune to the shockwaves of a prolonged global oil crisis, but in a moment when everybody is playing for time, its substantial natural gas reserves give it more time to play with than most.
That difference alone ought to give Washington pause. A war plan that treats energy markets as expendable collateral may look comfortably rational from Jerusalem. It looks rather different from Washington, Berlin, or Riyadh.
Trump’s rhetorical improvisations have, understandably, left observers struggling to decipher what the United States is actually trying to accomplish in Iran. But if the real playbook is being written by Netanyahu and his generals, the president’s wandering commentary begins to make a certain grim sense.
In that case, the real danger is not his loose logic. It is that he may not be able to answer for the strategy guiding this war, defining our priorities and determining how, or whether, it ends in a way that truly serves American interests.