Early Saturday, the United States launched an open-ended war on Iran. And nobody really knows why.
For the past several weeks, the United States has been amassing forces in the area — with an estimated 40 to 50 percent of its entire deployable air fleet in the region. Throughout this time, the Trump administration has refused to give any kind of straightforward public justification for the buildup: a clear accounting of why they were considering war with Iran, what such a war would entail, or what victory would look like.
After the war began, President Donald Trump gave an eight-minute speech explaining why the war had begun. The speech ran through a series of grievances with the Iranian government: its anti-Americanism, its history of supporting terrorist groups, and its nuclear program (which he had previously claimed to have “completely obliterated” after airstrikes last year).
“For these reasons,” Trump said, “the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”
This looks, from Trump’s description, to be a more open-ended military operation than his previous attacks on Iran. There is no specific defined singular objective, like setting back the nuclear program or killing an individual general. Instead, he speaks of a “massive” campaign dedicated to the broad goal of preventing Iran “from threatening America.”
But what does that mean? What is the real objective here, and how far is he willing to go to get there?
At first, Trump seemed to suggest that the war will focus on Iran’s military capabilities: that the US would “raze their missile industry to the ground,” “annihilate their navy,” and “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”
But later in the speech, he said the ultimate goal was regime change.
“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
These objectives are fundamentally different.
Iran’s missile industry and nuclear program are not tools of domestic repression. If the goal is for the Iranian people to rise up, as Trump said, that would require a much more expansive military operation targeting Iran’s ground forces, including police and the Basij paramilitary involved in slaughtering thousands of peaceful protestors earlier this year. Most likely, a full toppling of the regime could not happen without some kind of ground invasion — and a significant one at that.
So which is it: a major bombing campaign targeting Iran’s military capabilities, or an even more expansive war of regime change? Or is Trump blustering, and a few days of bombing will give way to a climb down in which little ultimately changes?
It is literally impossible to say from Trump’s speech, or any other official communication from the US government.
All we know for sure is that Trump has announced what he described as a “massive” war for no clear reason — the result of a warmaking process that no longer follows constitutional procedure, and instead more closely resembles the way dictators make war on whims.
The autocrat’s war
In the past, when the United States launched a large-scale military operation, presidents felt obligated to explain what they were doing. Even the 2003 Iraq war, one of the most confused and disastrously planned in US history, began with months of discussion of Iraq’s alleged WMD program and a congressional vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Nothing like this has happened with Trump’s Iran war.
It’s not just that his speech was confusing and contradictory: it’s that the administration had not, at any point in 2026, articulated a straightforward justification for its military buildup and threats of war against Iran.
That’s true both in public-facing communications and in private consultations with Congress. Just yesterday, Jack Reed — the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee — said the White House’s thinking was a mystery.
“I have yet to see the administration define a very clear-cut objective of what they are trying to do by massing all these naval forces, and other forces, in the area,” Reed told my colleague Josh Keating during a Q&A at the Brookings Institution.
On one level, this is not a new problem. For the past two decades, presidents have amassed more and more power to use military force unilaterally. This began with George W. Bush’s expansive vision of the war on terror, but every subsequent president built on what he had started. Congress, stymied by partisan divisions, did little to try and claw its power back.
The only constraint on the 21st-century presidency’s warmaking powers, it appears, is the president’s own judgment. When undertaking military actions, Bush, Obama, and Biden all made the case publicly, arguing that major hostilities were within the president’s legal powers.
In Trump’s second term, though, the remaining few informal checks on the president’s warmaking powers have fallen by the wayside. Several second actions, ranging from the boat bombings in the Caribbean to the attack on Iran’s nuclear program last summer to the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro in January, illustrate that the current approach to using force is basically “if we feel like it.”
Now, it appears, they feel like engaging in something much bigger than raids or small-scale bombing: an open-ended war against a country of 90 million, one that might be “merely” focused on destroying its military or could really be about regime change.
“This war is nothing short of a chaotic lashing out of an aimless administration that doesn’t know or care what it wants for Iran,” writes Hussein Banai, an expert on US-Iran relations at the University of Indiana-Bloomington.
The closest analogy to this kind of decisionmaking is not any previous American war. Rather, it recalls the Russian invasion of Ukraine back in 2022.
Before that war started, many credible observers thought that it wasn’t going to happen. Invading Ukraine made no sense for Russia; there was no obvious security or economic interest that could justify the enormous risks associated with trying to annex an entire country. How could Putin, a calculating operative, possibly be so stupid?
The answer, we’ve learned since, is that the Russian president was exactly that stupid. Animated by a series of bizarre historic grievances, Putin had convinced himself that Ukraine was a fake country populated by people best understood as Russians stolen from their motherland. Such a country would, he thought, be a pushover — and the yes-men serving below him were incapable of contradicting the leader. With no constraints on his power, Putin was free to launch a war that has since proven to be a catastrophic quagmire.
The Russian invasion is an object lesson in why authoritarian states built around a charismatic or all-powerful leader tend to make bad decisions. But what we’ve done in the United States, seemingly by accident, is create a presidency imbued with the same warmaking powers.
And this is how the United States end up in an open-ended conflict with no clearly defined objective or exit strategy — and a million different ways it could go wrong.
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