The White House has offered three broad but competing explanations for what it’s trying to achieve. The first, and grandest, is that the U.S. is seeking full-scale regime change in Iran.
“All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Washington Post on Saturday. In his initial Saturday morning video announcing the strikes, the president urged the Iranian people to “take over your government.”
Some of the earliest U.S.-Israeli strikes were aimed at just this: The former supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed while meeting with top leadership in Tehran on Saturday, alongside seven senior Iranian security officials and a dozen associates and members of his family. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have begun large-scale attacks targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the military branch that controls much of Iran’s economy and underpins the regime. The IDF has also hit the command centers of the Basij, paramilitary militias that massacred civilians while putting down protests last month.
And multiple outlets have reported that Iranian Kurdish militias operating in Iraqi Kurdistan and the U.S. have discussed a potential ground invasion, with the U.S. providing air support and CIA-supplied weapons. U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday that hundreds of fighters affiliated with Iranian Kurdish groups invaded Iran, occupying areas over the Iraqi border.
But in other ways the White House has also backed away from the regime change language since the weekend. “The mission of Operation Epic Fury is laser-focused,” Hegseth said on Monday during a press briefing. “Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and they will never have nuclear weapons.” He also stated, slightly confusingly, “This is not a so-called ‘regime change war.’ But the regime sure did change.”
The second explanation for the operation is that this is intended to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the U.S. replaces Iran’s leader with a more politically pliant one but keeps the basic structures of the Islamic Republic in place. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect, scenario,” Trump told the New York Times on Sunday. He repeated the point on Tuesday, during a White House press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “Venezuela was so incredible because we did the attack, and we kept government totally intact. And we have Delcy, who’s been very good.” The president was referring to Delcy Rodríguez, the current president of Venezuela, who swiftly replaced Nicolás Maduro after his capture by U.S. forces.
But before capturing Maduro, the U.S. established multiple contacts within the Venezuelan government. No such communication appears to be taking place with Iran. “There are no signs of anyone from inside the Iranian regime that wants to deal with Trump, or has been given the option to deal with Trump,” Alex Vatanka, a specialist in Iran and Middle Eastern security at the Middle East Institute, told TMD. “Anybody right now inside the Islamic Republic who might have had secret channels of communication with Trump, if they emerge in public and say so, most likely they’ll be killed,” he said.
Aspiring Iranian leaders don’t only have their own security services to worry about. According to Trump, the U.S. and Israel are killing leaders as soon as they appear. “Their leadership is just rapidly going,” he said on Wednesday at the White House. “Everybody that seems to want to be a leader, they end up dead. It’s an amazing, an amazing thing that’s taking place before your eyes.”
For its part, the Iranian government has given no sign that it intends to negotiate with the U.S. “We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions,” Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, declared on Sunday before tweeting Monday that “We will not negotiate with the United States” in response to a Wall Street Journal report that he was reaching out to resume negotiations with the U.S.
Iran’s ability to transfer power also seems to be intact, with its Assembly of Experts, a body of Shiite clerics, set to meet to decide upon the country’s next supreme leader even after an Israeli strike targeted the building where they traditionally meet. Mojtaba Khamenei, the late ayatollah’s son, is seen as a major contender for the position, and his selection would likely signal that the regime is still committed to the same hardline policies as his father. He also has close ties with the security services, especially the IRGC, which has reportedly taken the lead in directing the military response to U.S. and Israeli attacks.
If Khamenei is selected, “you still are left with a recalcitrant, dangerous, violent regime that’s going to repress its people in the region,” Suzanne Maloney, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told TMD. “The upside, of course, would be that he would have fewer tools at his disposal, at least in the near term, as a result of the campaign.”
Without an imminent collapse of the Iranian regime or the installation of a cooperative strongman, U.S. officials are now arguing a limited explanation of the war: that the operation is to degrade Iran’s offensive capacities. On Tuesday afternoon, the White House released a fact sheet outlining its war aims, claiming that it sought to destroy Iranian missiles and its missile industry, destroy Iranian naval forces, prevent proxy groups from being able to “destabilize the region,” and ensure that “Iran can NEVER have a nuclear weapon.”
Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy and a major foreign policy decision-maker in the administration, told the Senate Committee on the Armed Services during a public hearing Tuesday that the U.S. military campaign is “focused on addressing the ability of the Islamic Republic to project military power against us, our bases, our forces, et cetera, as well as our allies and partners in the region and beyond.”
He also played down speculation about regime-change ambitions. “Those are Israeli operations,” Colby told the committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, when asked why Iranian leadership was targeted if the goal was to reduce Iran’s military capabilities.
But multiple reports have confirmed that the CIA worked hand in hand with Israeli intelligence for months to prepare for the strike on Khamenei, and the inconsistent messaging from the White House undercuts any claim that U.S. aims were limited to striking military targets.
“The horse is out of the barn,” Maloney argued. “Going big, taking out the Supreme Leader, making this an existential moment for the regime, put us in a different set of circumstances.”
Along with being unclear about the objectives of this operation, the administration has also been loath to discuss how long it sees the campaign lasting. “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding,’” Trump argued Sunday. Hegseth has been similarly uncommitted to a hard timeline. “You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three,” he said Wednesday.
For now, neither the endpoint nor the definition of victory has been any clearer to the lawmakers and citizens whose country is fighting this war.
