GoKawiilSix weeks after the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran, what was the political object? Not the military means and objectives — those are the hammer, not the nail. The nail is: What condition in the world, what durable change in Iran’s relationship to the United States and its neighbors, were these strikes meant to produce? That question was never answered, because it was never seriously asked. The Trump administration confused the instrument for the purpose and then changed the purpose whenever the instrument produced inconvenient results.
As our country’s most senior uniformed military leader, standing beside our secretary of defense, rattled off the numbers and percentages of Iranian air defense systems, ballistic missile storage facilities, drone storage facilities, ships small and large, naval mines, defense production facilities, and more destroyed by the formidable American and Israeli militaries, one might be forgiven for concluding that America’s war against Iran has gone pretty well. That would be a mistake. And it is a mistake with a time-honored but deleterious tradition: that of mistaking tactical success for victory and of operational excellence for a strategy.
War has a way of exposing the limits of anything short of victory. And while the war isn’t over (and may still last for weeks or even years), things are looking bad after great expenditures of American munitions and readiness: One of the world’s most important maritime trade routes is closed (a contingency the White House did not seriously anticipate), energy markets are in turmoil, the Iranian regime remains firmly in charge, and its stockpile of uranium remains in its possession (even if it is buried under debris and soil). Clearly, Iranian forces remain capable of waging warfare. And the Trump administration’s negotiators left Islamabad without a deal. Unless victory is defined merely as the degradation of Iranian military capabilities, no honest observer can say America is victorious in this war. And it is difficult to see how the path ahead gets much better for Washington.
The United States has not been able to realize discernible political goals in its war against Iran. It is worth digging into what that means, starting with the word “political,” which is the hinge of it all, and assessing what Washington has actually achieved against the yardstick of its ever-shifting declared aims.
Politics and War
When Americans hear “political,” they think of the thing that has poisoned Thanksgiving dinners for many years: red versus blue, cable news, the chaos of factions, and, more recently, the much-decried “Trump derangement syndrome.” When Carl von Clausewitz used the term (“politik”) in his famed text, On War, he meant something more serious: the purposive will of the state. In this sense, politics are the ongoing intercourse between states, conducted through diplomacy, commerce, and force, all in the service of some desired end in the world. This, of course, implicates and involves domestic politics, but not as the ultimate purpose.
For Clausewitz, war was “not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.” The crucial word there is “instrument.” A hammer is an instrument. It has a purpose external to itself. You don’t swing a hammer to experience the swinging — you swing it to drive a nail into a certain board to help hold a structure together. War, under all circumstances, is to be regarded “not as an independent thing, but as a political instrument.” The moment it becomes its own purpose, it has escaped its purpose entirely, and you are no longer conducting strategy. You are just hitting things. As Colin Gray wisely noted, there is more to war than warfare and “to approach war as if it is synonymous with warfare all but guarantees political failure.”
The Seasons of Our Reasons
When the U.S. military launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, the administration had done remarkably little legwork in building a case for war or laying out its objectives. What followed was not a single coherent political aim but a rotating display of them, swapped out roughly every few days like specials on a diner chalkboard. On Truth Social, early in the morning of Feb. 28, President Donald Trump declared that the objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Later, he said, “All I want is freedom for the people.” That same day, the president’s video statement said the purpose of the strikes was effectively regime change. If you’re keeping track, that’s three different political objects before breakfast.
On March 2, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth narrowed the aims to four concrete military objectives: Destroy Iranian ballistic missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and ensure they will never have nuclear weapons. But since America’s problems with Iran are inherently political, military objectives cannot be proper war aims. And proper war aims are what’s missing: a desired end state that can be served by a ledger of destruction but must be more than the ledger itself.
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