If you think Donald Trump’s plans in regards to Iran don’t make sense; you’re not the only one. It turns out, even the president is not quite sure what he’s trying to accomplish with his strongarm tactics.
On Saturday, Trump directed the U.S. military to conduct strikes in Iran while the two countries were in the midst of nuclear negotiations. The strikes killed the Middle Eastern country’s supreme leader and top military brass, provoking the IRGC to launch widespread attacks against U.S. military bases and allies in the region.
The attacks from both sides have resulted in death and destruction across the region, embroiling the U.S. and the neighboring Arab nations in yet another “endless war.” You know, the kind that the POTUS actively campaigned against when he needed the votes to get into the White House.
Per the Iranian Red Crescent, there have at least been 200 civilian casualties and more than 700 injuries on the first day, with HRANA, a US-based human rights watchdog, confirming that a girls’ school in southern Iran was hit, killing 148 people, many of whom were children. And that’s beside all the people killed as a result of Iranian missiles raining down on cities in Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Globally, the ramifications of this war could reverberate for years. Iran is attacking oil vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and the shipping traffic has come to a halt according to Newsweek. When markets open tomorrow, analysts have warned that Brent could hit $100 per barrel, and more conservative estimates put the initial jump at $5 to $7 per barrel from the current $72 on Friday.
No endgame in sight
It’s unclear what President Trump’s endgame is here. He has repeatedly said that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, but even reports from the U.S.’s own intelligence agencies (per PBS News) seem to suggest that Iran is nowhere near completing work on a bomb, nor does it intend to do so. There’s also the fact that Iran is not currently enriching uranium, so even a nuclear deal — as pursued by the Trump administration over the past month before he torpedoed the talks yet again — doesn’t make much sense, as there are no concessions from either party.
There were also no guarantees that killing the supreme leader and running an air bombing campaign (per CBC) would result in a regime change. Even barring the fact that America’s regime change operations have always ended in human catastrophe in the Middle East and beyond, the Trump administration has offered no roadmap for what a post-Islamic Republic Iran would even look like.
It looks like the only player in the region that could benefit from a war with Iran is Israel, but why Washington seems so hell-bent on risking the often-hard-won stability in the Middle East, not to mention the lives of countless innocent people and even American servicemen, just to appease Benjamin Netanhayu, is anyone’s guess.
Published: Mar 1, 2026 04:24 pm