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Reading: Matthew Petti, A Pointless War in Reason (June 2026).

Trump still expected a quick and unambiguous surrender when he and Netanyahu launched the war a few days later. Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a first strike, and Trump said that he was anticipating a situation like with Delcy in Venezuela.

A month into the war, Trump admitted at an Easter dinner that he had told the British prime minister the war would last only three days. He gave a similar timeline to skeptical Middle Eastern leaders before the war began, telling them it would only take 100 hours, according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a pro-diplomacy nonprofit, who also broke the news of Iran’s 2003 offer.

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Whether or not the truce holds past April, Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals.

The war has led to an outcome that neither Iranians nor Americans wanted. But it has fulfilled the vision of Netanyahu, who declared from the rooftop of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv that bringing the U.S. directly into the war allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.

Ironically, it has also fulfilled the vision of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who foreshadowed his plans in a 2022 speech: By God, I see it with my own eyes, a war that will change the face of the globe, a regional religious war that will burn both the green and the dry. The American political class helped pile a lot of the kindling, and it doesn’t know how to put the fire out.

— Matthew Petti, A Pointless War
In Reason (June 2026).

It is easy to look at this appalling mess and come away with the conclusion that Donald Trump is especially foolish, rash, inconstant or callous and dangerously careless with deadly fights he cannot control. Donald Trump is all of those things, but his rudderless war is not just the latest expression of his peculiar vices or malign influence. The real fact, whether about Trump’s wars or the decades of American wars in the Middle East before this one, is that whether the War President is a fool or a mastermind or just some guy, they never have the control they think they have over the wars they bring into the world. War is not a tool you can wield; war is not a weapon you can aim. War is a fire, which grows out from where you set it, and burns on with a life of its own.