President Donald Trump is set to address the nation from the White House tonight, where a White House official says he will tout the military’s progress across all of Operation Epic Fury’s stated objectives. There’s just one problem: There is little agreement about what those objectives are.
“I had one goal: They will have no nuclear weapon,” Trump said on Tuesday, referring to Iran. “And that goal has been attained.”
But that’s not what his own cabinet has said. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified four goals for the war: destruction of Iran’s air force, its navy, its factories and the “severe diminishing” of its capability to launch missiles. That’s different from the three goals he laid out on March 9, which made no mention of Iran’s air force and called for the destruction, not just the “severe diminishing,” of Iran’s ability to launch missiles. It’s different from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has maintained that while the operation’s goal was “ensuring they never have a nuclear weapon,” it was also the much more amorphous objective of preventing Iran “from threatening the U.S. forces, partners and interests in the region.”
U.S. military commanders have offered yet another accounting. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine and CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper have consistently avoided any mention of nuclear weapons, focusing instead on three more concrete goals: destroying Iran’s ballistic missiles, navy and defense industrial base.
On Tuesday, Rubio attempted to reconcile these competing framings in a video posted by the White House arguing, in effect, that the military’s objectives and administration’s objectives were the same thing. Iran, he said, had been constructing a “conventional shield” — an arsenal of missiles and drones large enough to deter any future strike on its nuclear program. Dismantling that shield was the point.
“We were on the verge of an Iran that had so many missiles and so many drones that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program in the future,” Rubio said. “That was an intolerable risk.”
The remarks, coupled with Trump’s Oval Office comments Tuesday, could buy the president time as he weighs his next move — or provide political cover for an off-ramp as his self-imposed six-week deadline approaches. Tonight’s address may offer the clearest signal yet of which direction he’s leaning.
Regime change
Harder to explain is regime change — a goal that has been central to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims, if not always Trump’s.
“We have had regime change,” Trump said on Tuesday, adding it hadn’t been one of his goals. “Their leaders are all gone, that’s why we have regime change. We have nice new leaders.”
But the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is widely considered more hardline than his father, whom he replaced. The Iranian people have not taken to the streets, nor is there clear indication they will once they aren’t facing a constant barrage of bombings by the country that has promised to help them.
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Meanwhile, Rubio has repeatedly criticized current Iranian leadership for “terrorist acts” and called them “radical lunatics.” Speaking on Fox News on Tuesday night, he did not distinguish between the new regime or the old one. “This is a regime led by people who believe that it is their calling and their purpose in life to usher in the end of the world,” he said. “These people want nuclear weapons.”
The question of what comes next extends beyond Iran’s borders.
Strait of Hormuz
Perhaps the most glaring loose end is the Strait of Hormuz and an economic crisis that did not exist before the war began.
The administration was caught flat-footed when Iran moved to weaponize the waterway, having failed to secure allied commitments before launching strikes. In the days since, Trump has oscillated between threatening to bomb Iranian civilian infrastructure — including desalination plants, a move that would violate international law — and washing his hands of the problem entirely. Barely a day later, Trump said he’d be leaving Iran “very soon,” effectively leaving U.S. allies to manage the fallout.
“They’ll be able to fend for themselves,” he said of European countries, like France, who rely on oil transiting through the Strait of Hormuz. “There’s no reason for us to do it.”
Tonight, Trump is expected to make his case that the mission was accomplished. The harder question is which mission he means.
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.