Nobody in the Trump administration seems to have planned for the Iran war, which started in late February, to still be ongoing into August. But here we are. Militarily, as has typically been the case with modern American wars, we have gone from one victory to the next. But Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means remains undefeated. We have not accomplished our political goals because it’s not clear that we have any.

This war was launched without a clear sense of its political objectives — and certainly, without communicating those goals to the American people or obtaining the approval of those goals from Congress. Without a clearly defined and realistic objective, that’s how you win and win and win and find yourself still not having won. The political, economic, and diplomatic costs of this have been obvious enough. We should think harder about the moral costs.

I start with my initial premises when the war began. Last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer dealt a major blow to the Iranian nuclear program. How major a blow depends on how you interpret evidence you don’t have, because it’s classified and we have to trust that the intelligence has been properly collected and communicated to policymakers by more than a dozen agencies that don’t always agree with one another or cooperate, and that Trump and other untrustworthy figures have accurately conveyed that intelligence to the public.

This is one of the troubles with making war for the goal of disarming the enemy: Victory and defeat can look exactly the same to the common citizen. That is so even when there is a genuinely compelling case for those kinds of strikes. And it’s also why some of us still believe that character, experience, and credibility matter so much in the presidency: because we have no choice but to trust the president on things we can’t verify (this goes just as much for not making war as for making war), and because a president who can’t win the public’s trust is weaker than one who can.

***

The United States entered 2026 with ample justifications for making war on Iran and good reasons for doing so. But to say that we had a case for a war does not mean we had a case for this war. In Vietnam, for example, we had a compelling case for resisting North Vietnamese aggression. That did not mean we had a compelling case for putting half a million Americans on the ground. My baseline assumption in February was that a second round after Midnight Hammer was sensible and justifiable only if we were there to finish the job by toppling the regime. That would be a more permanent solution to the regional problem, the nuclear problem, the terrorism problem, and the problem of Iranian alliance with China and Russia. We have taken some steps, such as decapitation strikes at Iranian leadership, that really made sense only if that was our political objective. But we have not had a visible strategy to make the end of the regime the objective of the war, and there are reports that we restrained the Israelis from executing their own strategy in that direction.

What does that leave? There are two other ways to think about a case for this war. The simple one is that this is Midnight Hammer Redux. On this theory, whether or not you consider Midnight Hammer a success, the job of defanging the Iranian offensive threat was sufficiently unfinished that it was important to go back a second time and take out missile installations, sink the Iranian navy, and the like. I could be persuaded that this was necessary — but again, the information required to persuade me on that point is, to a large extent, not something I can personally review. Moreover, if the operation was supposed to be Midnight Hammer Redux, there doesn’t seem to be a great argument for why it should have lasted more than a few weeks, tops, or why it involved gratuitous strikes against the regime itself.

So what exactly is the case for making a war that is bigger than necessary in order to do Midnight Hammer Redux, but smaller than necessary to accomplish regime change? There, we require more Machiavellian theories of realpolitik, which might be arguable as benefits of the war in retrospect but seem highly unlikely to have been planned by the people actually in charge. While Trump might sign off on a complex diplomatic strategy, he’d never come up with one (he’s an opportunist and a chancer, not a strategic thinker) and couldn’t be relied upon to stick with one.

Thus, for example, it may be that this war has drawn both us and the Israelis closer to the Sunni Arab states; that it has drawn us away from Europe in a situation that has pressured the Europeans to step up and take more responsibility for Ukraine; that it has driven deeper fissures into the Iranian regime and made it even less popular with its people; that it has given Israel a freer hand to degrade Hezbollah and isolate Hamas; and that it has driven more global and regional commerce away from the Strait of Hormuz, making it harder for Iran to use the leverage of the strait in future conflicts.

This grab bag of consequences may reflect side benefits to the war. Even if planned, as I doubt, they don’t seem much like a moral or political case for taking the nation to war for months on end, at cost to our citizenry and great cost of life and property to the Iranian people. Nor do they provide us with the strategic clarity that is required to define how a war is fought and know when to end it and how to assess whether it was won or lost. Fundamentally, this kind of Bismarckian long game is at odds with our national character as a self-governing people, which explains why the administration hasn’t tried to sell the war in such terms.

Finally, we have what I have dubbed the nation-probation strategy: the idea that we simply ought to smack around enemies such as Venezuela and Iran every now and then to keep them in line by the deterrent threat that we’ll do so again. In the 1850s, this was the dictum of Lord Palmerston, British foreign minister and prime minister: “These half-civilized governments . . . require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order.” But even Palmerston exhausted his public’s patience with continual conflict. Nation probation inevitably raises a strategic and political problem: The deterrent effect lasts only so long as the president is committed to using such force, which a Democrat is unlikely to do — and so is JD Vance.

But there’s also a moral problem with this sort of thing. The justice of war doesn’t always require that a nation act in the best interests of its own national enemies. But at least wars to topple tyrannical regimes offer two moral arguments in their favor. One is that they aim at a long-term solution (such as we have now with Japan, Germany, Italy, and for that matter Iraq) rather than a permanent commitment to perpetual violence. The second is that ridding a nation of a warmongering tyranny is itself a blessing, or at minimum an opportunity, for its people. By having the war without either of those aims, we pay the moral price of violence without its redemptive virtues.

How to end this? The memorandum of understanding (MOU) that was supposed to resolve the war always seemed to me to be worse than just walking away. It bore all the hallmarks of Obamaist thinking: an agreement that gives the Iranians benefits they wouldn’t have if we ended the war unilaterally, and that drove a wedge between the U.S. and Israel and constrained our own future freedom of action, with a number of its benefits being illusory unless the Iranians lived up to pledges of future good conduct, and no obvious mechanisms to punish them if they didn’t. It is not surprising that this was negotiated and publicly defended in good part by Vance, given the extent to which the MOU would discredit the idea of the war in the first place and demoralize its supporters. In any event, the MOU approach has now been tried and proved an even more spectacular and immediate failure than any of its critics predicted.

At present, there is a case for continuing to fight, albeit one that could never have justified the war in the first place. That is the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Free navigation of the seas has been a vital American interest since the 1790s, one for which we went to war not only against the Barbary pirates but against the mighty British Empire in 1812 and Germany in 1917. The closure of the strait is one that no American government at any point in our history could have tolerated. The Iranians had to know that. But the potentially protracted fight to ensure that the strait reopens is, once again, one for which Trump did not prepare the American people, nor one that Congress has authorized him to wage.

***

Part of the challenge of critiquing this war — exacerbated by the lack of presidential leadership in communicating its aims — has been the incoherence of a war that seems run by a committee, veering back and forth based upon who has Trump’s ear. Even more so than is usual with wars (most of which are to some extent collectively devised and managed), the Iran war is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of theories from disparate foreign policy schools stitched together. So, instead of this being Trump’s war, or JD Vance’s war, or Marco Rubio’s war, or Pete Hegseth’s war, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s war, we get a mixture of goals, strategies, and tactics that pleases nobody.

At times, it looks as if the hawks got to pick the war, and the doves got to decide how to fight it, which is a recipe for making both camps miserable. The “realists” or “restrainers,” many of whom often seem more interested in venting at “neocons” than offering any sort of workable strategies of their own, seem perennially surprised when agreements with the bad guys get broken and half measures only buy us more war. The hawks, by contrast, have often been stuck trying to explain why a war that makes sense as a regime-change project can still run if you remove the engine.

The MOU seems like the last chance for the Iranians to walk away looking like victors, but as Abba Eban famously once said of the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Divided themselves, they may now be unable to either make peace by agreement or by backing down, yet they are also unable to accomplish anything by fighting. The Israelis can’t afford to go further than we can tolerate. That leaves it back with us — and with our president, who seems still unsure what he’s fighting for, or how to stop.