Before the first strike he didn’t explain to the American public why military force was justified.
There is a particular kind of political misery reserved for leaders who launch bold military campaigns without a clear picture of how they end. Examples that come to mind include Napoleon marching into Russia, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden seizing the Suez Canal, or US President George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, while the war raged for another eight years. Donald Trump has now joined this unhappy fraternity, not because he struck Iran, but because he didn’t understand what he was authorising at the time and cannot decide what to do now that he has.
The strikes themselves were unquestionably punishing, by any military measure. American and Israeli forces degraded Iran’s military infrastructure in ways that a year ago would have seemed implausible. The theocracy that spent four decades projecting power across the Middle East through proxies, ballistic missiles and nuclear ambition, found itself, for the first time, genuinely vulnerable. Project Freedom, the operation to open the Strait of Hormuz to Gulf Arab oil exports, showed real promise in its opening hours, and the assembled U.S. forces in the region represented formidable leverage. Had the trap been properly set, however, it might have sprung cleanly. But Trump didn’t set the trap. He blindly walked into one.
Donald Trump’s problem is that before the first strike he didn’t explain to the American public why military force was justified; whether the goal was regime change, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the destruction of its terrorist networks, or some combination of all three. He didn’t brief members of Congress. He didn’t consult NATO allies, Gulf partners, or Indo-Pacific friends who depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil flowing freely through the Strait of Hormuz.
When George H.W. Bush assembled the coalition for Desert Storm in 1991, he spent months building international legitimacy, congressional authorization, and strategic clarity. True to form, Trump, who considers himself to be the greatest strategist who ever lived, did none of those things. He simply struck, and now he has no framework for what comes next.
The absence of preparation has consequences that go beyond the diplomatic. If regime change were ever part of the objective, it required coordination with forces inside Iran capable of filling the vacuum. The conditions were not unfavourable. Half of Iran’s population is under thirty. The nationwide demonstrations of January, eventually crushed with characteristic brutality, revealed the depth of popular opposition to the Ayatollahs. Since the morality police killed Mahsa Amini in 2022, Iranian women have mounted a sustained and open challenge to the regime’s foundational claim to religious legitimacy. Iran’s Kurdish and Baloch minorities have reached levels of discontent unseen in decades. These were kindling waiting for a match. Trump provided the strikes but not the spark.
Instead, the remnants of the regime are doing what authoritarian governments always do when given time: reconsolidating. They are emerging from the rubble, reasserting control, and playing for the clock. They understand something that Trump clearly does not: his domestic political troubles vex him far more than the distant prospect of a reconstituted Iranian militarized theocracy. For the Iranian regime, every week of negotiation is a week of rebuilding, of restoring ballistic missile programs, reconstituting terrorist networks, and laying the groundwork for resuming nuclear weapons development. Tehran is not interested in a deal. It is interested only in survival, and survival requires time.
The ceasefire proposal, denounced by Trump as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” after Iran rejected the U.S. framework, was always going to be met with delay and deflection, because delay and deflection are exactly what the regime needs. Last week it was reported that Iran has already rebuilt most of its missile infrastructure along the Strait of Hormuz, as well as restoring operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along and around the chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes.
Winston Churchill, watching Eden’s Suez debacle unfold in 1956 after American pressure forced Britain to abandon its campaign to seize the canal, offered a remark that cuts directly to Trump’s predicament: “I don’t know whether I would have dared to start, but I would never have dared to stop,” said Churchill. Trump started. Trump stopped. And now he finds himself hoping that the Revolutionary Guard’s remnants will hand him a diplomatic exit that preserves something he can call victory. So far, and completely predictably, they have declined the invitation, having restored about 70 percent of Iran’s pre-war missile stockpile and mobile launchers. This leaves Trump with two options, neither of them comfortable, but both of them preferable to what he is currently doing, which is drifting without a rudder.
The first is to acknowledge that the ceasefire is over and resume the destruction of Iran’s instruments of state power. Critics, including, reportedly, elements of his own CIA, believe substantial military work remains before Iran’s capacity for regional destabilization is genuinely broken. If that is the honest assessment, then the logic is inescapable: finish it. The assembled U.S. forces are still in the region, but the window of military opportunity does not stay open indefinitely.
The second option is more limited but still consequential: militarily open the Strait of Hormuz to commerce while maintaining the blockade against Iran. This is not merely about oil prices, though the economic relief to American consumers would be immediate and significant. It is about something more foundational: the “freedom of the seas”, a principle of U.S. foreign policy for two and a half centuries, with direct implications for every other contested waterway in the world, including the South China Sea. If Iran can close the strait and face only diplomatic consequences, it will close it again whenever the strategic calculation favours doing so. Tehran will flip it like a switch, raising and lowering pressure at will, holding the global economy hostage on a recurring basis. Establishing military deterrence now, through active destruction of Iran’s fast boats, anti-ship missiles, and drone capabilities, is the only way to prevent that future.
What is not an option, although it appears to be Trump’s current preference, is a gradual diplomatic process that allows Iran’s regime time to reconstitute itself while appearing to negotiate in good faith. That path leads not to victory but to a replay of every failed nuclear deal, every violated ceasefire, every agreement Tehran signed and subsequently dismantled. The regime’s incentive structure has not changed. Only its military circumstances have, and those will heal if given sufficient time and insufficient pressure.
There is a version of this story in which Trump could have done all of this correctly. He could have built the coalition, briefed the Congress, coordinated with Iranian dissidents, defined the objectives clearly, and then struck with the full weight of international legitimacy behind him. Being the imperial all-knowing Trump, he did not. That failure of preparation is real, and it has made everything that followed harder than it needed to be. But a mistake in phase one does not require compounding it in phase two. The choice now is not between a good option and a bad one. It is between two imperfect paths and the drift into a third, far worse outcome. Churchill’s ghost haunts this moment. Trump dared to start the war. The question is whether he will dare to finish, or whether he will be remembered as America’s Anthony Eden, the leader who launched a campaign he lacked the will to complete, and handed his adversaries a victory they could never have won on the battlefield.
The Strait of Hormuz is still contested, and Iran’s regime is still breathing. The U.S. forces are still assembled, and the trap into which Trump blindly walked is still escapable. But not for long, and not without decisiveness that, so far, has been conspicuously absent from the White House.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
