He listed four goals: “destroying Iran’s missile capabilities”, “annihilating” its navy, ensuring the nation “can never obtain a nuclear weapon”, and stopping it from “continuing to arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside its borders”.
A belated injection of clarity, there, after days of vacillation, bordering on incoherence, from Mr Trump and his administration.
Note what’s conspicuously absent from his list: any mention of regime change.
The same guy who not so many hours ago urged Iranians to “take over your government”, saying their “freedom” was a priority and raising hopes that a democratic transformation was possible, is now suggesting he’d be happy with an echo of the situation in Venezuela, where dictator Nicolas Maduro has been replaced by his similarly corrupt deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, and the same oppressive regime remains in power.
As recently as yesterday, Mr Trump was telling Iranians the US would “be there to help” them “take back” their country.
Meanwhile, he was telling American media he’d be open to negotiations with the current regime.
That contradiction seems to indicate not so much deception as indecision.
Days of confusion As the war began, two quite basic questions plagued the Trump administration: what had prompted its decision to strike, and what was it hoping to achieve? Typically, when launching a major conflict, a president would provide clear answers to those questions immediately.
He would address Americans from the Oval Office, explaining exactly why he’d decided to place their sons and daughters’ lives in jeopardy.
As I write this, six American servicemembers have already been killed by Iranian strikes.
Mr Trump instead spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort and barely communicated with the public.
He posted a couple of short prerecorded videos on social media and phoned some journalists, to whom he gave conflicting information.
For example, Mr Trump told one reporter he had three “very good choices” lined up to replace the now-dead Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
He told another those candidates had actually been killed in the initial US strikes.
He only returned to the White House on Sunday night, US time, and spoke to his country properly for the first time on Monday.
Meanwhile, there was silence from most of the Trump administration’s senior officials.
We didn’t hear from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio until today, and Vice President J.D.
Vance continues to lie low.
Perhaps he’s conscious of how silly he now looks, having insisted to voters in 2024 that Mr Trump was the anti-war candidate, and only the Democrats would get the US mired in another Middle Eastern mess.
The absence of those senior voices from the administration left a void, and left the rest of the world to speculate.
Had the United States launched a pre-emptive strike, hitting Iran before an imminent attack in the other direction? Had it been pressed to act by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Was there intelligence suggesting the Iranian nuclear program, which Mr Trump had declared “completely obliterated” last year, was making progress again? Were the Americans worried about more conventional weaponry, such as missiles capable of reaching Europe? Was Mr Trump merely fed up with Iran’s disingenuous stance in the two countries’ ongoing nuclear negotiations? Was he finally delivering on his promise to help pro-democracy protesters, tens of thousands of whom were murdered by the regime earlier this year? Had he seized a window of opportunity to kill Khamenei before it closed? Or was the war prompted by Iran’s long record of sponsoring terrorism? All plausible reasons for the administration’s actions (though few of them would be a justification for aggression under international law).
All floated in the public sphere.
And what was Mr Trump’s endgame? Did he want to re-obliterate Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities? Cripple its military? Assassinate its leaders? Was the idea to intimidate the regime into negotiating properly, or to tear it down entirely? If....
