Much of Iran’s senior leadership died in the initial strikes, and the U.S. has
had considerable success against the Iranian navy. Iran
has retaliated with strikes against at least 10 countries.
But the Iranian regime shows no sign
of surrender. And President Donald Trump and his senior officials have offered
shifting and sometimes contradictory statements about the reasons for going to
war, why now, and the goals of the operation.
But first, what we know. An
Israeli strike in Tehran took out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other regime
leaders last Saturday. During Khamenei’s 36-year reign, he empowered the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and built up a network of terrorist proxy
organizations that threatened Israel and caused wider mayhem in the Middle
East.
In her obituary of Khamenei, Charlotte detailed the
supreme leader’s early years: “The new supreme leader, resentful of how little
authority he wielded as president, quickly moved to consolidate power under his
new office. He seized control of Iranian media, sidelined political opponents,
and hollowed out state institutions. Presidents of the Islamic Republic have
served more or less at Khamenei’s pleasure since Hashemi Rafsanjani’s term
ended in 1997.”
Where to begin with what we
don’t know. For starters, is Trump’s decision to launch a war constitutional?
It’s complicated, as our Dispatch Debate revealed. Ilya
Somin argued that
it’s “blatantly unconstitutional” and cited no less an authority than the
Founding Fathers: “Hamilton and Madison disagreed over whether the president
had the power to issue a neutrality proclamation.
But they were united on the
proposition that no one man could take the nation to war, and that the
executive must refrain from initiating such a conflict without congressional
authorization. There are few important constitutional issues on which there was
such broad agreement among the Founders.” On the other hand, Michael
Lucchese maintained that
the Founding Fathers favored a strong executive, noting that the Articles of
Confederation fell apart precisely because the new government lacked such a
position.
He wrote, “Simply put, as the Founders conceived it, executive
prerogative altogether defies legislation. They drew on an older, English
conception to define the concept, which John Locke articulated in his Second Treatise on Government when he defined
prerogative as the ‘power to act according to discretion, for the public good,
without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.’ This
tradition was common sense to the Framers who created the presidency.”
Legal or not, the United States
is at war. What are the goals of the operation, and what will accomplishing
those goals entail? Trump himself has offered different answers.
In a video
statement released after the airstrikes began, he didn’t promise regime
change—saying the mission was to “defend the American people by eliminating
imminent threats from the Iranian regime”—but he did call on the Iranian people
to “take over your government.”
But he’s also said he might be open to working
with a successor to Khamenei along the lines of Delcy Rodríguez taking over
after Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. He’s said the war might last four to five weeks. But reports emerged Thursday that
CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, has asked the
Pentagon for more intelligence officers to support the operation for at least 100 days.
Contributing writer Paul D.
Miller writes that
war with Iran is justifiable, citing its sponsorship of terror, attempts to
gain nuclear weapons, and its brutal crackdowns on its own people. And he runs
through the details of Iranian action against Americans. There is, however, a
“but.” He writes:
That is why the American
national security state has spent decades planning this war, why it unfolds
with cold precision, and why Trump is likely to declare victory, sooner or
later, over the smoking ruins of Iran’s military, its nuclear program, and the
headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
But neither Trump nor anyone
else has spent the equivalent time planning for the day after. The agencies
that had a mandate to think about such things—the State Department and the U.S.
Agency for International Development—are precisely those most damaged by the
DOGE-induced self-lobotomy of the federal bureaucracy last year.
The lack of a coherent strategy
and the conflicting messages have Nick Catoggio thinking about what Secretary
of State Colin Powell told President George W. Bush before the 2003 invasion of
Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” And Nick notes that Trump’s first campaign,
when he ran on ending “forever wars,” was a direct response to the failures in
Iraq.
The Donald Trump of 2016 treated
most norms of American government as a given, and so he accepted the Pottery
Barn rule on its own terms: If breaking a country meant buying it, then we
wouldn’t break it. But the Donald Trump of 2026 believes that norms of American
government exist only insofar as he’s willing to tolerate them, and he’s no
longer willing to tolerate the Pottery Barn rule.
“You break it, you bought
it”? Says who?
What we’re seeing in the war he
just started is an attitude we’d expect from a guy with a history of
bankrupting casinos: The United States may have broken Iran, but we’re not
going to “buy” it by trying to preserve order there. Why should we? Who’s going
to stick us with the bill if we refuse? Trump will do what he likes and
leaves someone else holding the bag, the same amoral worldview that’s served him
well his whole life. That view is now U.S. policy
The president is also creating
divisions within the MAGA movement. Jonah Goldberg noted in his Wednesday G-File that
the war has put Vice President J.D. Vance in an extremely
awkward position, and Michael Warren wrote a column about the most
prominent MAGA media personalities—Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn
Kelly—splitting with Trump over the war.
He writes that the GOP base supports
the war for now, but that it could change quickly if anything goes poorly.
He writes:
“Could Bannon and others in the MAGA universe be the proverbial canaries in the
coal mine warning Trump and his party that the broad support he’s getting for
the Iran war from his voters may evaporate quickly?”
You can check out our complete
coverage of the Iran war here.
Rest assured that we will have more next week—and the week after. Thank you for
reading and have a great weekend.
-Rachel Larimore, The Dispatch
