"A week into the United States’ war on Iran, there are a few things we know—and many, many more that we don’t"

 

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