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Trump pledged a quick end to the Iran war, but he hasn’t explained how
From the moment that President Trump launched the war with Iran, he has laboured to persuade anxious Americans that it will soon end. But he has not been able explain how it could, short of the military battering Iran’s leaders into agreeing to concessions
- PUBLISHED: Sun 5 Apr 2026, 9:35 PM
From the moment the Iran war started, President Donald Trump has been laboring to persuade anxious Americans that it will soon end.
“I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly,” he promised Wednesday from the White House. “Very shortly.”
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Days earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, just back from a trip to the Middle East, insisted that the war he witnessed was nothing like the one he had fought two decades earlier in Iraq. That war had been a grinding treadmill.
“It was always about the next rotation, never knowing when the mission would end,” he recalled.
This war — Operation Epic Fury — was the “exact opposite,” he said.
“It was sheer mission focus,” he said of the conflict, now entering its sixth week. “It was the American warrior unleashed.”
The message from Trump and Hegseth: America was not engaged in an endless war.
The problem: Neither Trump nor Hegseth has been able explain how the war will end, short of the U.S. military battering Iran’s leaders into agreeing to concessions that, thus far, they have been unwilling to make. Those prospects grew even more complicated Friday after Iran downed an Air Force F-15E fighter jet, undercutting American claims of having achieved near-total air superiority.
Trump and Hegseth launched the Iran war convinced that they had corrected for the mistakes that produced the quagmires of the past. U.S. troops, they vowed, would not take on ill-defined or impossible nation-building missions as they had in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military, unencumbered by “stupid rules of engagement,” would employ overwhelming force, Hegseth promised.
Perhaps most important, Trump would ensure that the war’s objectives remained vague and flexible. That way, he could decide when those aims had been met and the war was won.
Trump’s approach worked in Operation Midnight Hammer, the campaign in the summer to strike Iran’s nuclear sites. It produced swift results in what Trump described as the “perfectly executed” raid to capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
The continuing war in Iran, however, has revealed the biggest flaw in Trump’s approach. When the stakes are at their highest, the enemy often refuses to quit.
“If you corner a regime into fighting for its life, the incentive for it to escalate is significant,” said Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. “That’s what we’re seeing today.”
Trump and Hegseth have sought to work around this uncomfortable reality by demanding that America’s reluctant allies take up the fight so that U.S. troops can leave. They have called on U.S. allies in Europe and Asia to mount an operation aimed at forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Arabian Gulf channel that normally carries 20% of the world’s oil.
“Go to the strait and just take it,” Trump said Wednesday from the White House. “The hard part is done. So it should be easy.”
A few seconds later, he threatened Iran’s leaders, saying that if they did not accede to U.S. war aims, he would destroy Iran’s power generation plants. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages,” Trump vowed.
Then he speculated that such an escalation might not actually be necessary. Iran’s most obstinate officials had been killed. “The new group is less radical and much more reasonable,” Trump said. Perhaps, he suggested, a peace deal was in the offing.
Finally, he suggested that the military could sidestep a risky raid by U.S. ground troops to secure 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium, which international inspectors say is most likely buried at two sites in Iran. Instead, Trump proposed monitoring the sites via satellite and striking them from the air if necessary.
He did not explain why such a strategy was not possible before he launched the costly war.
Trump was confronting a problem that has bedeviled U.S. presidents and Pentagon leaders for decades. In the 1991 Arabian Gulf War, Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out a doctrine that aimed to prevent long, losing wars like the one he had fought as a young Army officer in Vietnam.
The U.S. military, he argued, should be used only in conflicts in which it could employ overwhelming force, in pursuit of clear objectives, with the full support of the American people. “When our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support,” Powell wrote in his 1995 memoir, “My American Journey.”
The “Powell Doctrine,” however, failed to prevent the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both instances, the U.S. military scored swift battlefield victories. Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, was determined to end the conflicts as quickly as possible.
“We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast,” Rumsfeld wrote in an April 2003 memo as U.S. troops were streaming into Baghdad. “If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.”
But U.S. troops stayed to restore order, put down insurgencies and install governments that were not hostile to U.S. aims. Year after year, U.S. generals and presidents promised that the next few months of military operations would prove decisive.
So far, the U.S. military has struck more than 12,000 targets in Iran. “We’ve done it all,” Trump said. “Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten.”
Some military strategists have argued that the U.S. and Israeli ability to find and rapidly kill Iran’s senior leaders has upended some of the old rules of war that kept U.S. forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the opening days of the war, the U.S. and Israeli militaries killed much of Iran’s senior political and military leadership using precision munitions, new surveillance tools and targeting systems propelled by artificial intelligence.
“What happened at the beginning of this war wasn’t a decapitation strike,” said John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute. It was something far more powerful “that’s never been possible in a war in history,” he said in an interview with the “School of War” podcast.
The barrage of strikes, however, has not stopped Iran’s battered military and government from continuing to fight and inflict pain on the United States and its allies.
Today, the Trump administration is facing a dynamic similar to the one that confronted U.S. policymakers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They will never frame it this way, but part of what they want is to try to affect the governance of Iran,” said Thomas Wright, a senior director for strategic planning in the Biden administration. “And that’s what gets you into the mission creep of keeping going.”
For U.S. policymakers in the White House and the Pentagon, the easiest path forward is often to keep striking targets and killing enemy fighters. “You can never argue against trying to reduce the enemy’s capability,” said Jason Dempsey, an Afghanistan War veteran and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “But is it doing anything to change the enemy’s behavior or political will? At what point would it? We never really have the answer to those questions.”
The challenge facing Trump is that it is almost impossible to win a war just by obliterating the enemy’s military. “The enemy always has survivors who have choices and can keep shooting,” said Stephen Biddle, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University who advised the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a result, almost all modern wars end in settlements between warring parties, Biddle said.
For now, Trump and Hegseth seem to be betting that a few more weeks of punishing strikes will change the Iranians’ position and make them more amenable to a settlement on U.S. terms.
“Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” Trump wrote on social media late Thursday. “New Regime leadership knows what has to be done, and has to be done, FAST!”
While there are few outward signs that Iran’s leaders are moderating their terms, Hegseth remained optimistic.
“The upcoming days,” he recently promised, “will be decisive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.