https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/what-endgame-iran
What Is the Endgame in Iran? Trump Needs to Figure Out What He Wants—and Quickly
Colin H. Kahl, March 10, 2026
he fog of war is thick in Iran, but two things are already crystal clear. No one can question the unrivaled military prowess displayed by the United States and Israel. Since February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, struck thousands of military targets across Iran, and significantly degraded the country’s missile launchers, drone stockpiles, and naval assets. Nor should anyone doubt the cruelty of the Iranian regime they are targeting, which has spent decades killing Americans, brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors with missiles and terrorist proxies, and racing to build up its nuclear program.
But so much else about this war of choice remains unclear, and the biggest questions have gone unanswered by the Trump administration. In particular, how will this war end? And what will be the ultimate strategic implications of the Iran gamble? The history of American military intervention offers a consistent lesson: wars begun without clear political objectives rarely end well. When political goals are undefined or contested, the war lacks a logical stopping point. Tactical successes raise questions of what comes next, while tactical setbacks become justification for doing more. The mission expands, the timeline stretches, and the original rationale fades into the background as the war gains its own momentum. The nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that war is politics by other means. But the corollary is equally important: without a clear political purpose, war becomes an end in itself.
BYSTANDER’S DILEMMA
Washington’s objectives for launching the war in Iran are far from clear. The Trump administration started the war with the stated goal of regime change. “Take over your government,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on February 28. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.” Yet in the days since, administration officials have been all over the place. Is the goal to select a more “acceptable” government, as the United States did in Venezuela? Is it “unconditional surrender”? Is it to destroy the nuclear program? Or is it simply to leave whoever survives incapable of projecting military power and declare victory? Clearly defining objectives matters because achieving regime change, behavior change, ending Iran’s nuclear program, and degrading Iran’s ability to project power are not variations on the same goal. They require fundamentally different wars, with different resources, timelines, definitions of victory, and postconflict planning.
This uncertainty has been reinforced in recent days with Trump sending conflicting signals about the war’s duration. On Monday, he sought to calm markets and slow surging oil prices by hinting that the U.S. military was “very far ahead of schedule” and the war could end soon. But hours later, he backtracked. “We have won in many ways, but not enough,” he told a gathering of Republican lawmakers, adding, “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”
Strategic ambiguity leaves both the Iranian people and the U.S. military in a quandary. Many Iranians celebrated Khamenei’s death and want to see the regime gone. U.S. intelligence officials reportedly see regime change as unlikely. But what happens if courageous Iranians seize the historic opportunity Trump claims to have provided, and the regime responds with extreme violence, as it did in January when it killed thousands of civilian protesters?
Wars begun without clear political objectives rarely end well.
History offers grim warnings. After the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. President George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to rise up—and then watched from the sidelines as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein slaughtered them. In Libya in 2011, the Obama administration did the opposite—intervening to protect civilians challenging the dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, only to see regime change descend into state failure and civil war. Today, if Iranians rise up and the regime cracks down, Trump would face a similar dilemma: stay out at tremendous cost to American credibility or go all in and risk mission creep, entanglement, and chaos.
Instead of grappling with this dilemma, the Trump administration appears to be making it more acute. As the prospect of near-term regime change fades, both the United States and Israel seem to be flirting with fomenting internal fragmentation as a fallback. Reports indicate that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish militia forces in northern Iraq, while Israel bombs frontier posts, police stations, and military positions along the northern Iran-Iraq border to clear a path. In recent days, Trump has suggested he is backing away from this scheme, but Israel has not. Indeed, Israeli leaders seem to view the destabilization of Iran as a preferable backup if regime change proves impossible, potentially pushing Iran into the kind of state fragmentation seen in Libya, Syria, and post-2003 Iraq. In a country of 90 million people at the crossroads of Eurasia, that outcome would be profoundly destabilizing, not just for Iranians but for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.
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Gautam
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THAAD radar, Jordan
THAAD radar, Jordan
