Iran as target, improvisation as doctrine
After several days of bombardment against Iran, the most striking fact is not only the violence of the offensive but the political confusion surrounding it. Donald Trump launched this war while speaking at once of destroying Iran’s nuclear program, wiping out Tehran’s ballistic missile arsenal, overthrowing the regime, and even pushing the Iranian people to take control of their government. Too many objectives, too different from one another, not to lead to one elementary conclusion: Washington entered a military escalation without clearly defining either its political end or its criterion for success. And when a war begins this way, improvisation ends up becoming a doctrine in itself.
Within a matter of hours, Trump offered different and incompatible versions of the same war. On February 28, while celebrating the “great military operation,” he spoke of destroying the nuclear infrastructure, neutralizing Iranian missiles, and bringing down the regime. Yet on that same day he told Axios that there could be many “ways out”: continue for a long time, take everything, or stop after two or three days and simply tell the Iranians that the United States would see them again in a few years if they rebuilt their nuclear program. Then on March 1, in a conversation with The New York Times, he even revived the comparison with Venezuela, calling it “the perfect scenario” for Iran. In just a few sentences, the conceptual failure of the entire operation is already visible: total destruction, short war, regime change, temporary compromise. Everything at once. Which means, in the end, nothing clearly defined.
The illusion of an armed people that has no arms
Trump’s call for the Iranian people to rise up adds another layer of political irresponsibility. In recent years, those who have taken to the streets against the regime have paid with thousands of arrests, repression, and blood. To think that they could now overthrow the system while remaining unarmed, while the police, the army, and above all the Revolutionary Guards retain their full coercive power, means either not understanding, or pretending not to understand, how the Islamic Republic actually works. The Revolutionary Guards are not just another armed force: they are a power bloc with around 190,000 men, immense economic interests, political extensions, and a central role in the survival of the system. When Trump asks them to lay down their weapons and “surrender to the people,” he is not outlining a strategy. He is uttering a slogan.
Even the comparison with Venezuela is revealing, though in the opposite sense from the one intended by the White House. In Venezuela, the United States and its oil companies maintained relations, interests, and channels of influence for decades. Nicolás Maduro, who remained in power after contested elections, also relied on a bureaucratic apparatus mainly concerned with preserving privileges and rents. Iran is something else entirely. Between Washington and Tehran, there have been no commercial ties since the birth of the Islamic Republic almost half a century ago. Iran’s security structures are not separate bodies; they are fused with the economy, with institutions, and with the state’s ideological narrative. One can strike, destabilize, even infiltrate: in fact, the CIA and Mossad apparently have been able to rely on enough internal support to locate and eliminate scientists, officers, and officials killed in the February 28 bombings. But there is a gulf between that and the idea of a collapse of power.
A target hit is not victory
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in the March 2 press conference, tried to give the operation a more institutional outline by listing objectives such as the destruction of the nuclear program, the ballistic missile arsenal, and the Iranian navy. But he carefully avoided talking about regime change and even refrained from invoking the Iranian people as a lever of the conflict. That is proof that even within the American administration there is no coherent line. Trump speaks as if war were a mix of campaign advertisement, mafia-style intimidation, and geopolitical gamble. The Pentagon, by contrast, is already letting fears surface that the conflict could spiral out of control.
Trump himself, in a phone interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, used the language of slaughter, saying the Iranians were being “massacred,” that the attack was going “great,” that they had not even begun to hit them seriously yet, and that “the big wave” would come soon. But that is precisely where the limit of Trump’s logic becomes clear: bombing does not mean winning. Killing a leader does not mean toppling a regime. Destroying sites and depots does not mean breaking a power structure. In Iran, the fundamental structures of command still stand, while the provisional government has already broadened its response across the region, striking not only Israel but also the Arab states hosting American bases.
A region on fire and a war spreading outward
Meanwhile, the war is already presenting its bill. On March 1, just one day after the offensive began, serious concern reportedly started circulating in the Pentagon and among Trump’s advisers. One source spoke of a “tense and paranoid” atmosphere. And it is not hard to see why. So far, six American soldiers have been killed. Iranian missiles and drones have caused ten deaths in Israel, four in Syria, and nine in the Gulf states. In Lebanon, Israeli raids against Hezbollah structures have caused at least seventy casualties. According to the Iranian press, American and Israeli strikes have killed 1,045 people across the country, including at least 150 pupils at a girls’ primary school, almost all of them young girls, in Hormozgan province. It is a terrible figure, because it shows that the war is sold to Western public opinion as a precision operation while on the ground it produces the classic effect of every air campaign: devastation, fear, and civilian deaths.
On March 2, during a meeting at the Pentagon, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the first phase of a “difficult and grinding” operation was underway. Translation: this is not a decisive blitz but the beginning of a long war. New forces are expected to be sent to the region to support the tens of thousands of troops already deployed there. Trump said the conflict could continue for four or five weeks. Hegseth, in a phrase that sounded more like the opposite of reassurance, replied that it could be four, two, or six weeks, or longer still. When even the duration is left to the leader’s verbal improvisation, it means politics has already lost control of the war’s timetable.
Netanyahu and war as a form of government
If Trump seems dominated by incoherence, Benjamin Netanyahu appears driven by a dark and ruthless kind of coherence. For the Israeli prime minister, war is no longer merely an extreme option of national security: it has become an ordinary form of government. Barely eight months ago, after the ceasefire with Iran, he spoke of a “historic victory” destined to last for generations. That victory did not even last a year. That alone is enough to unmask the official rhetoric. The truth is that today’s attack adds to the destruction of nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guard infrastructure another propaganda objective: liberating the Iranian people from the rule of the ayatollahs. Netanyahu even wrote that the operation would create the conditions for the courageous Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.
The problem is that this rhetoric dissolves the moment images of civilian victims emerge. When schoolgirls in uniform are killed in Iran, the humanitarian pretense of bombing collapses by itself. What remains is naked force, and the conviction that military superiority also grants a monopoly on morality. And that, as the most lucid Israeli critics point out, is the heart of the matter: not a war for freedom, but the assertion of an order in which the strongest dictates the rules and also claims the right to declare them just.
The psychology of permanent war
Netanyahu has understood better than anyone else an unsettling truth about Israeli society: war has become the system’s strongest political cement. Every time conflict reignites, the opposition closes ranks, differences fade, and emergency replaces political judgment. Even those who fully understand how far Netanyahu’s government has dragged Israel into an unprecedented moral and strategic crisis end up aligning themselves once the smell of war fills the air. It is an almost automatic mechanism that turns the military machine into an object of collective veneration.
That is Netanyahu’s sinister talent: he has grasped that, in the absence of peace, endless war can become the most reliable political strategy. If in wartime there is neither majority nor opposition, then keeping the country in a state of near permanent mobilization becomes the most effective way to govern. From this point of view, the Israeli prime minister is not merely a political leader, but the radical interpreter of a collective psychology that seems to recover meaning, unity, and even identity only through attack, destruction, and the perception of an endless existential threat.
The West without a plan
In the end, what this war reveals is a reality that is both simple and grave. The United States is striking without truly knowing what balance it wants to produce after the bombs stop falling. Israel is fighting as if war were a permanent necessity of its own political system. Iran, though hit hard, does not appear close to collapse. The region is burning. Civilians are dying. American bases are becoming targets. And the very idea of a political exit is receding.
The real news, then, is not only Trump’s blind fury, but the strategic failure of an entire Western camp that continues to mistake firepower for political intelligence. The war against Iran was not born from a vision of the aftermath, but from a tangle of impulses: the desire to display force, Israeli pressure, the illusion of a decisive blow, the belief that bombing can substitute for strategy. But when politics abdicates and gives way to force alone, what follows is not order. It is chaos.
Trump, Netanyahu, Iran, MiddleEast, USForeignPolicy, Israel, RegimeChange, Airstrikes, Geopolitics, MilitaryStrategy, RegionalEscalation, NuclearCrisis, WarAndPower, SecurityPolicy, USIsraelRelations, ConflictAnalysis, StrategicFailure, WestAsia, PowerPolitics, InternationalSecurity
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