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Now on to the main event…

Americans awoke yesterday morning to the news that the U.S. and Israel had launched massive, country-wide
strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s military and political leadership. Congress had been notified, but not exactly consulted, and early polls find the U.S. public ambivalent about a military action that is, in some ways, similar to the one we saw two months ago in Venezuela. Both operations, everyone could
agree, took out horrible dictators. But hadn’t everyone also agreed, after Iraq, that regime change wasn’t the way to go? Moreover, as with Venezuela, President Trump’s stated explanations for attacking Iran haven’t been exactly clear: Is this about nukes? Regime change? Oil? Freedom for an oppressed people? All of the above?

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Then again, it hasn’t even been 48 hours since the bombing started, and we still don’t know where any of this
will lead. “I can go long and take over the whole thing,” Trump told Axios, “or end it in two or three days.” The president had warned on Saturday that American lives would be lost, and it didn’t take long for the prophecy to come true: Three U.S. servicemembers have been killed and five seriously wounded as of this writing. That could be just the beginning—or
not.

Trump has learned from personal experience—in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, and Iran—that launching military strikes is not necessarily the same as starting a protracted war. None of those other campaigns resulted in the Iraq-style quagmires that experts had warned about. Nor did Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites last June, or the assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in his first term. The Iranian retaliation in those cases looked more like
box-checking than anything else. But this operation is of an altogether different scale. By Sunday night, Trump was outright saying that “there will likely be more” American casualties.

Still, Trump’s previous military adventures have clearly taught him that he can plow forward, naysayers (and congressional authorization) be damned. If anything, this latest operation is teaching
him that the naysayers would rather be on the winning team. Saudi Arabia, which had been privately counseling Trump against striking Iran, issued a statement on Saturday morning supporting the strikes, even as Iranian missiles hit Riyadh. Even Canada, whose premier, Mark Carney, excoriated Trump’s might-makes-right foreign policy in Davos a month ago, came out in support in the early hours of the attack. So did the governments of the U.K. and Australia. Russia and
China, Iran’s big backers, have shown that they have no intention of getting into the fray beyond boilerplate statements condemning the U.S.-Israeli operations. That, too, is a lesson Trump learned long ago: If you win, critics eventually turn to cheerleaders.

Yet, I’ve found it hard to answer the question of what the U.S. aims to accomplish in Iran. Behind the
bravado and the patriotic chest-thumping, what, exactly, are we doing? What are America’s goals and how are we achieving them? It’s hard not to find joy in the footage of Iranians celebrating the ayatollah’s death, especially after he had shot so many of them in the streets just over a month ago—but we’ve seen such footage before.

We saw it a decade ago in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt; two decades ago in Iraq and Afghanistan; and three
decades ago in Russia: the overwhelming relief that occurs when a people brutalized by a repressive dictator collectively realize that the dictator is gone. It’s a beautiful moment that, in recent history, has proved to be rather fleeting. Life is not a movie, and it keeps going after the villain is vanquished and the credits roll. Without real institutional alternatives—and even with American support—countries can easily descend into civil war or revert back to autocracy. Joy and relief are not
antidotes to the darker sides of human nature and the laws of political gravity they create.

Trump has called on the Iranians to rise up. “Take over your government,” he said on Saturday morning. “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” He’s right in that sense, but how will Iranians take over their
government? The Basij still have the weapons and the people still do not. It’s why many of those who did rise up just in the last few months—tens of thousands of them, by some estimates—now lie dead. Unless the Basij and the other government enforcers melt away and give up their privileged status in society, the constants in this equation are still the same.

Even as he’s calling for an uprising, meanwhile, the regime in Tehran is planning to replace the ayatollah, and Trump is offering
them an off ramp. So it’s hardly clear whether Iran is destined for a new regime or simply a new leader, as in Venezuela. On the other hand, if Iranians themselves are expected to overthrow what remains of the Islamic Republic, what is the U.S. doing to help them beyond sneaking in Starlink terminals and offering verbal support? How long are we going to be bombing Iran, and what is our metric of success? When will we know it’s time to stop and go home?

Usually, it’s the job of a president
to formulate and articulate his goals—and offer answers to these questions—before the bombs begin to fall. But those expectations are a relic of the Before Times, and this president’s trademark is brazen disregard for Washington’s standard operating practice. If anything, he revels in what this town might call “strategic ambiguity.” After all, if you don’t define your goals before you start, no one will know if you’ve failed to achieve them.

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here with updates throughout the week. Until then, good night.
Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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