There are, as it turns out, a few small gaps in the Trump administration’s war planning and execution.

For example: doing any advance preparation for new leadership on the ground, or even identifying forces who might step into the vacuum if the regime collapses.

Or explaining to the American people why we are there in the first place. The administration has now offered seven different answers to that question, which suggests that no one really knows—least of all the supposed leader of the free world.

Or preparing for the spike in oil prices that follows when Iran blockades—and now mines—the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply moves.

Or, most importantly, explaining how this mess ends, and what success even looks like.

By the raw metrics of aerial bombardment, the United States is delivering. Pete Hegseth has promised that each day will be more intense than the last, and the strikes around Tehran and other strategic targets are confirming the boast. Israel has nearly obliterated Iran’s air capabilities.

As the bombing increases, the war expands. There are now about a dozen countries involved. The spillover has also unsettled America’s traditional partners, who now look less like allies in a shared strategy than like governments nervously calculating how close the blast radius might come.

What Iran cannot do against the United States or Israel, it now does against countries in the Persian Gulf, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Even Turkey, a NATO member, now finds itself caught in the expanding vortex. Russia reportedly lends technical assistance to Iran’s drone program, one of the few military capabilities Tehran still operates effectively.

The war has broadened well beyond any semblance of the mission the administration ever offered the public.

None of that is success.

It is metastasis.

Of the shifting rationales the administration has offered, the one that seems arguably in our strategic interest would be regime change. Of course, that is a patently illegal reason to start a war, but the war’s illegality is a given, as I and many commentators have noted.

Since the ascent to power of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 1989, the regime has been a powerhouse in the Middle East and a force for repression at home and instability abroad—silencing dissent, brutally crushing protests, executing opponents, restricting the rights of women and minorities, and funding militant proxy groups across the region.

But our campaign to date, as damaging as it has been to Iran, has not advanced the cause of regime change. In fact, no sustained aerial campaign in modern history has produced regime change on its own. You need boots on the ground. You need, before the bombs ever fall, a cultivated opposition, a prepared population, a political infrastructure capable of stepping into the vacuum.

This administration laid none of that groundwork—because, it appears, no one thought that far ahead.

The prospects for regime change plummeted with the selection of the son of Supreme Leader Khamenei to succeed his father, a pointed and deliberate act of defiance against President Trump, who earlier this week remarked that he wished to have a say in the next leader of Iran.

The move signals, with unmistakable clarity, that Tehran does not intend to yield.

Trump has suggested the new leader would not last long without American approval, but there’s no real basis to believe that. Indeed, intelligence reports indicate the Iranian regime remains largely intact and is not at risk of collapse, even after weeks of sustained US and Israeli bombardment.

Meanwhile, the domestic situation in Iran is extraordinarily dangerous for any would-be rebels, who would face the regime’s full security apparatus with no assistance or protective umbrella from the United States.

Then there is the nuclear question—the only other justification for the war that survives serious scrutiny.

Here is the nightmare scenario the administration has conspicuously declined to address: if the Iranian state destabilizes sufficiently, what happens to that material and who controls it?

Iran’s enriched uranium sits buried deep underground. The bombing has not reached it.

The prospect of enriched uranium passing into the hands of some ragtag successor faction, or worse, is a critical question. The administration not only provides none; it gives no indication it has even seriously considered it.

Trump, meanwhile, in Trumpian fashion, says everything and nothing simultaneously.

In an interview with CBS News, he declared the war “very nearly complete.” Markets moved on the word. Oil prices dipped briefly; stocks jumped.

Then, within hours, he reversed course—the war would end “very soon,” but “we’ve got much more to do.”

By afternoon: “We have won in many ways, but not enough.”

These slight changes of key carry worldwide consequences. Oil prices have gone through the roof—gas at levels Americans have not seen since the energy shock of 2022—and the political advisers in the White House, you can be certain, watch that number with the focused dread of men watching a fuse burn.

Iran, for its part, has decided that defiance is its only wartime currency. It has announced, with some bravado given the circumstances, that Tehran will decide when the war ends.

Meanwhile, the war is stunningly, historically unpopular with the American people.

Every American war, even ones that later passed into historical disrepute, began with a surge of popular support.

Pearl Harbor: 97 percent.
Afghanistan, in the raw aftermath of September 11: 92 percent.
The Persian Gulf War: 82 percent.
Panama: 80 percent.
The Iraq war, for all that followed: 76 percent.
Korea: 75 percent.

Twelve days into this war, Americans support it by an abysmal 41 percent—the lowest opening number for any American conflict on record.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll puts support at 27 percent. The Fox News poll—not exactly a Democratic house organ—finds 50 percent.

The spread itself tells a story: public opinion is still forming, which means it has nowhere to go but down as the costs come into focus.

The American people did not choose this war. No one prepared them for it, consulted them, or gave them a framework for understanding it.

They woke up one morning to find the United States bombing Iran.

No Colin Powell moment at the United Nations. No sustained public case or national debate. George W. Bush, for all his failures of candor on Iraq, at least made his case before the American people. He gave them an argument.

Trump gave them a fait accompli.

That failure to prepare the public mirrors the failure to prepare the ground.

They are expressions of the same underlying disorder: a president, and therefore an administration, that moves on impulse; disregards law, morality, and consequences; and confuses raw strength and destruction with foreign policy achievement.

So here is what we have to show for the war: a widening conflict, an undefined mission, an undisturbed nuclear program, a regime that shows no signs of collapse, a historic spike in oil prices, and a president who cannot give two consecutive sentences pointing in the same direction.

The paramount question—how to exit, on what terms, under what framing, with what claim to success—has no prepared answer.

Because preparation, of any kind, was never part of the plan.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.