The American-Israeli war against Iran is now in its fifth week and shows no signs of ending anytime soon. Despite the heavy aerial and naval bombardment of Iran, the regime in Tehran is still intact, Iran retains control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the Iranian military is still capable of launching attacks against U.S. positions in the region.
Amid these challenges, the Trump administration’s objectives for the war keep shifting. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the American war aims are: 1) the destruction of Iran’s air force, 2) the destruction of its navy, 3) the severe diminishing of Iran’s missile launching capability, and 4) the destruction of Iran’s factories.
This list is different from the three-part mission Secretary of War Pete Hegseth laid out in the opening days of the war. On March 2, Hegseth said Operation Epic Fury’s three objectives were to destroy Iran’s offensive missile capabilities, cripple its navy, and prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Moreover, Rubio’s list makes no mention of other war aims that have been floated by President Trump, such as taking control of Iran’s nuclear materials (which was arguably the casus belli), regime change, or opening the Strait of Hormuz. Regarding the strait, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Trump has told aides that he’s willing to end the war even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, “likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.” The reason for Trump’s sudden willingness to compromise, we’re told, is that a mission to reopen the strait would extend the conflict beyond Trump’s four- to six-week timeline.
Clearly, the administration views its war aims as malleable, or at least believes it has some flexibility in the definitions of its objectives. In light of this, and the mounting challenges the U.S. faces in Iran, is it time for Trump simply to declare victory and end the war? Would that even work, since Iran is still fighting?
It might. And it might also be Trump’s best option in a slate of bad ones. Rhetorically, he’s already there. The president has repeatedly insisted that we’ve already won the war and that Iran is “militarily defeated.” By signaling that he’s willing to end the war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Trump seems to be laying the groundwork for ending the war unilaterally.
Such a move would have to paper over the fact that, as of this writing, Iran is still fighting and is by no means defeated. Last week an Iranian missile destroyed a $300-million U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry (an early warning aircraft with a signature large radar dome) in a strike on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The missile attack also wounded ten soldiers, destroyed a KC-135 tanker, and damaged five others. It marked the first time an E-3 has ever been destroyed in combat. The Iranian missile strike, and others like it, are the fruit of China and Russia now giving Iran targeting coordinates on U.S. military forces.
And of course Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global oil and LNG trade. Commercial traffic through the strait has ground to a standstill, raising energy prices worldwide, and it seems there’s nothing the U.S. military can do about it at the moment. We hear almost daily about how Iran’s navy and air force have been destroyed, but it’s not Iranian warships or fighter jets that are keeping the strait closed. It’s small, fast attack boats and cheap drones that can take out oil tankers and are difficult to intercept in the narrow strait. The New York Times reports that Iran is now moving to implement a toll plan for the strait, requiring vessels to pay fees for transiting the waterway, despite earlier threats from Trump that the U.S. would bomb Iran’s power plants and desalination plants if the strait isn’t opened.
According to the Journal’s reporting, Trump appears to have changed his mind about opening the strait by force. Instead, he’s focused on achieving the main goals of degrading Iran’s missile capabilities and its navy, and plans to diplomatically pressure Tehran to open the strait after winding down hostilities. If this doesn’t work, the administration would pressure European and Gulf allies to take the lead in opening the strait, the Journal reported.
When asked about all these challenges, the White House and Pentagon tend to recite a litany of data points purporting to show how well Operation Epic Fury is going: more than 10,000 targets destroyed since February 28, more than 140 Iranian naval vessels destroyed, Iranian missile and drone attacks down by 90 percent, and so on. Those numbers are impressive, but they don’t speak to larger questions about where the war is headed, what the administration’s theory of victory is, and how the White House plans to achieve it.
Trump does seem aware that time is not on his side. Domestically, the war is unpopular. A consistent and sizable majority now disapproves of military strikes on Iran, and amid rising gas prices and general anxiety about the economy, Trump’s favorability rating has reached a record low for his second term. The unpopularity of the war will likely increase as time goes by, as will Trump’s disapproval rating.
Escalation in the form of the deployment of U.S. ground forces would deepen the war’s unpopularity. One recent Ipsos poll found 55 percent of Americans would not support the deployment of any ground troops to Iran, and only 7 percent would support a large-scale invasion of the country. Yet such an escalation seems to be in the works. The Pentagon is in the process of sending thousands of American soldiers and Marines to the Middle East in preparation for potentially weeks of ground operations in Iran, according to recent reporting from the Washington Post.
The White House therefore appears, at times anyway, to be operating under the assumption that the only way to deescalate the conflict at this point is to escalate, hoping to find a point at which the pain inflicted on the Iranians is sufficient to compel them to accept a negotiated settlement and acquiesce to U.S. demands.
That might work, but even if it does it will take time, and Trump and the GOP will pay a heavy political price domestically for it, both in the midterms and in 2028. It also might plunge the U.S. into a Vietnam-like quagmire, unable to win decisively or to extricate itself from the war.
The other option — one that Trump employed to some extent last June after Operation Midnight Hammer — is simply to declare victory, assert that U.S. war aims (which were never that well-defined to begin with) have been achieved, and end the war. When U.S. airstrikes hit three Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program and future enrichment capabilities had been “totally obliterated.”
That wasn’t entirely true, of course, because a mere eight months later the U.S. launched a war under pretext that Iran remained an unacceptable nuclear threat. But it didn’t stop Trump from declaring victory after Midnight Hammer and declining further escalation. The challenge of trying the same approach now, of course, is that Iran is far less likely to stop fighting than it was in June 2025, when the regime was content to respond to U.S. strikes with a largely symbolic volley of missiles at a U.S. airbase in Qatar.
The stark truth is that the president has no good options, and the best course of action at this point might be to leverage the apparent malleability of declared U.S. war aims to assert that they have in fact been achieved, while reserving the right to attack again if Tehran pursues a nuclear weapon or continues to target U.S. bases or allies in the region.
It would not be an ideal victory, but it would be less than an outright defeat, and it would avoid a quagmire like Vietnam or a decades-long misadventure like Afghanistan. It also would be a settlement the American people would probably welcome. And it might be as good as Trump is going to get in this war.
