Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country’s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into “World War III,” he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.
U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East—going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. The details were different in each case, but the pattern is unmistakable. And Trump, notwithstanding constantly shifting justifications for the war, is now well on track to repeat it.
Of all the head-spinning aspects of the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, perhaps none is greater than the fact that it was launched by a president who was partly elected on the basis that he would never commit such folly. U.S. President Donald Trump touted himself as the country’s only recent leader to have avoided war while in office and insisted that while his Democratic opponents might drag the United States into “World War III,” he, on the other hand, would keep the peace and avoid the mistakes of the past. Despite promising to tear up the playbook that previous administrations repeatedly used to launch regime-change wars in the Middle East, Trump is writing its latest chapter.
U.S. interventions to change regimes in the broader Middle East—going all the way back to the 1953 coup in Iran but more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—all followed distinctly similar patterns. Once the president decided to act, he and his top administration officials would exaggerate the threat, inflate the benefits of action, prematurely declare victory, discover a range of unintended consequences, and then find themselves facing a costly political and strategic disaster. The details were different in each case, but the pattern is unmistakable. And Trump, notwithstanding constantly shifting justifications for the war, is now well on track to repeat it.
Start with exaggerating the threat. In his Feb. 28 statement announcing the start of the war, Trump said he was acting to eliminate “imminent threats” from Iran, which he did not substantiate. Early claims of intelligence about Iranian preemptive attacks quickly proved to be false. When pressed to justify such claims a few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio came up with the notion that “the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked—and we believe they would be attacked—that they would immediately come after us,” oddly suggesting that an Israeli strike that the United States could somehow not prevent was the reason the country had to go to war.
To further demonize the Iranian regime, Trump also said that Iran was “probably behind” the 2000 attack on the USS Cole and that it had missiles that could “soon” reach the U.S. homeland. He provided no evidence for the former claim, which experts believe is dubious, and the latter directly contradicts his own Defense Intelligence Agency’s assessment from last year, which found that Iran was a decade away from possessing such missiles.
As the war’s costs started to rise, the Trump team turned to other and even more exaggerated justifications for military action. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff asserted that Iran was “a week away from having industrial grade bomb-making material” and “there was almost no stopping” it from enrichment. Rubio claimed that Iran was a year away from a ballistic missile force that would give it “immunity” from attack, adding that “if we don’t hit them now … they will be able to do whatever they want.” White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly claimed that Iran was “stockpiling near-weapons grade enriched uranium” at the Tehran Research Reactor, an assertion Witkoff dubbed a “Perry Mason” moment. And Trump, not to be outdone, cited his belief that if the United States “didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon” and that Iran had planned to “take over the entire Middle East.”
Again, there is no evidence to back any of these claims, which are also hard to square with the White House’s earlier statements that last summer’s U.S. and Israeli strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program and removed the threat for at least several years. In fact, after three rounds of conflict with Israel and the United States since 2024—which had decimated Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, proxy forces, military leadership and air defenses—the threat from Iran was probably less “imminent” than it had been for years. But that didn’t stop the Trump administration from claiming the opposite.
Like some of its predecessors, the Trump administration has also begun exaggerating the likely benefits of military action (while downplaying its costs). If Trump were describing the operation merely as a way to further degrade Iran’s nuclear and military capacities, then his claims would plausible. Instead, he and other officials are describing the war as one that will ultimately free the Iranian people, eliminate Iran’s threat to the region and the West, end its support for terrorism, and bring down global oil prices. In his statement announcing the war, Trump told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and the government will be “yours to take.” A week later, faced with rapidly rising oil prices, Trump insisted not only that “they’ll come down very fast” but that “we will have gotten rid of a major, major cancer on the face of the earth.” Also downplaying the risk of higher oil prices, White House senior advisor Jarrod Agen insisted that, in the long run, “we’re not going to have to worry about these issues in the Strait of Hormuz because we’re going to get all of the oil out of the hands of terrorists.”
It is possible, of course, that “Iranian patriots” will, in fact “take over your institutions” as Trump called upon them to do and that they will democratize their country, get along with their neighbors including Israel, and end the country’s chokehold over international oil markets. But in the more likely scenario where things don’t play out that way, Trump will have taken his place in the line of past U.S. presidents who promised freedom or safety to a people only to be unable or unwilling to deliver as their hopes are violently crushed. There is every reason to believe that if this war’s costs continue to rise, the Iranian people’s “hour of freedom” will not be Trump’s priority and the protestors will be left to their fate.
Trump’s comment on March 9 that the war was already “very complete, pretty much,” along with other officials such as Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listing war aims that did not include a change in Iran’s leadership, hinted at the possibility that he will indeed “declare victory and go home” before regime change is achieved. At the same time, however, Trump called Iran’s appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s previous ruler, as the new supreme leader “unacceptable” and said he was open to killing him if he did not cede to U.S. demands, which suggests regime change remains very much on the table.
Unintended consequences are also featuring heavily in this conflict. Flush with the perceived easy success of the three previous military exchanges with Iran since 2024, Trump seemed to not have anticipated that this time, instead of focusing on a distant and well-defended Israel, Iran would lash out at its regional neighbors, striking at regional airports, Western hotels, oil refineries, gas terminals, and shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump called that response “probably the biggest surprise” of the war and seemed entirely unprepared to deal with its consequences, which include a sharp rise in oil and gas prices, a shortage of missile defense interceptors, and the stranding of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens in the region. And this is happening less than two weeks into a conflict that could produce many other unintended consequences over time, including terrorist attacks in the West, an oil revenue bonanza for Russia, instability in Iraq, China taking advantage of the deployment of U.S. military assets away from Asia, civil conflict or the territorial breakup of Iran, or the rise of a repressive military regime in Tehran.
The Trump administration has not yet “declared victory” in Iran, another tragically familiar part of the regime-change playbook but give it time. Last week, Trump gave the U.S. military effort at least a 12 on a scale of 0-10, announced that “just about everything’s been knocked out,” and referred to the Iran conflict as a war “we’ve already won.”
War is unpredictable, and we will see. But if we’ve learned anything from past regime-change efforts in the region, the declaration of “mission accomplished” is hardly evidence that a conflict is over or that victory is assured. It’s only a sign that the lessons of the past have not been learned.
