The case against Iran was real. The plan to win was not.
Five weeks ago, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a decapitation strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, obliterated chunks of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, and lit the Persian Gulf on fire. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil has spiked over 40%. Marines from the 82nd Airborne are rotating into the theater in what the Pentagon now describes as the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And the administration says it’s negotiating.
I want to be honest about where I come in on this, because I think a lot of people in my political neighborhood are struggling with the same tension. Pragmatic, center-left, allergic to both neocon adventurism and reflexive anti-interventionism.
The case was real
Iran was the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. That’s not a Fox News talking point; it’s a bipartisan assessment every administration since Reagan has endorsed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps funded and armed Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and a constellation of militia groups across Iraq and Syria. Iran’s nuclear program was accelerating. Its government was massacring thousands of its own citizens in the streets during the largest protests since 1979. The regime was a destabilizing force across the entire region, and had been for decades.
If you told me in the abstract that a coalition had degraded Iran’s missile production, neutralized key leadership, and created an opening for the Iranian people to chart a different future, I’d say that sounds like a defensible use of American power. In the abstract.
But we don’t live in the abstract. We live in the aftermath.
There was no plan for “after”
The strike worked. The exit strategy didn’t exist. And that’s the part that should terrify everyone, regardless of party.
The administration’s apparent theory was that killing Khamenei would be so psychologically devastating that Iran’s remaining leadership would rush to the negotiating table. It’s the same magical thinking that predicted Iraqis would greet us as liberators, that toppling Gaddafi would usher in Libyan democracy, that the Taliban would fold once we showed resolve. Decapitation strikes are tactically impressive and strategically incomplete. They answer the question “Can we hit them?” while ignoring the harder one: “What happens on Day 30?”
We’re on Day 35. Here’s what Day 30 and beyond looks like: Iran has fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones. Thirteen American service members are dead. Over 300 are wounded. Thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed, including children in schools and patients in hospitals. The Strait of Hormuz remains choked. Global energy markets are in crisis. Japan is draining its strategic oil reserves. The OECD warns the UK economy faces the worst damage of any major nation. And the Iranian regime, far from collapsing, has consolidated around a new supreme leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, and publicly rejected every American peace proposal as “unreasonable.”
The administration didn’t plan for this because it didn’t believe this was possible. That’s not strategy. That’s arrogance with cruise missiles.
TACO, and its limits
Wall Street has a term for the president’s negotiating style: TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out. The pattern was established during the tariff wars. Announce something dramatic, watch the market tank, then reverse course, declare victory, and move on. It worked with tariffs. It worked with Greenland. It sort of worked as a market-timing strategy that savvy traders learned to exploit.
The problem is that TACO requires a counterparty that lets you leave. Tariffs are unilateral. You can raise them and lower them from the Oval Office. Wars are bilateral. Iran has a vote.
As Bloomberg’s John Authers put it, the window for an easy TACO exit has closed. The administration keeps running the old playbook: Trump announces “productive talks,” markets briefly rally, then Iran publicly denies any dialogue is happening and the cycle resets. Last week he set a 48-hour deadline, extended it to five days, then extended it again to April 6. Each extension looks less like strategic patience and more like a man searching for an off-ramp that doesn’t exist.
The fundamental problem is one the administration created for itself: the U.S. launched this strike during active negotiations. Iran and the U.S. were in the middle of indirect nuclear talks in Geneva. Iran’s foreign minister had said a “historic agreement” was “within reach.” Then we bombed them. This wasn’t a failure of diplomacy. It was a betrayal of it. And it means the one thing the U.S. needs most right now, Iranian trust in American words, has been incinerated along with everything else.
Watch what they do, not what they say
Here is the part that keeps me up at night.
The president says we’re negotiating. The Pentagon is deploying 82nd Airborne paratroopers and Marine Expeditionary Units. The USS Tripoli arrived last week with 2,500 Marines and sailors. Reports indicate the U.S. could soon have over 17,000 ground troops positioned near Iran. The Pentagon is reportedly planning for “weeks of ground operations.” Possible targets include Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, Kharg Island (Iran’s oil export lifeline), and potentially even Iran’s remaining nuclear material.
Last Saturday, the president said he’d prefer to “take the oil in Iran” and suggested seizing Kharg Island.
These are not the actions of an administration looking for an exit. These are the actions of an administration that said one thing while the bombs were being loaded, and is saying another thing now while the troops are being positioned. The pattern isn’t TACO. The pattern is the pattern from before the war started: talk peace, prepare for escalation, and act surprised when the world notices the gap.
Representative Nancy Mace came out of a classified briefing last week and hinted that the administration is planning a ground invasion. Iran’s parliament speaker has accused Washington of “secretly plotting a ground attack despite talking publicly about negotiations.” At a certain point, when your allies, your adversaries, and your own members of Congress are all saying the same thing, maybe the speeches about diplomacy deserve a harder look.
Where this leaves us
As I write this, a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle has been shot down over Iran. An F-35 took Iranian ground fire and limped back to base two weeks ago, but this is different. This is the first crewed American warplane that didn’t come home. One of the two crew members has been rescued. The other is believed to be alive somewhere inside Iran, with both American and Iranian forces searching for him.
Let that sit for a moment. Five weeks into a war the administration said would be swift and decisive, an American pilot is on the ground in hostile territory, and we are mounting a combat search-and-rescue operation inside a country we were supposedly negotiating with days ago. The Pentagon had spent weeks assuring the public that Iran’s air defense network was largely suppressed. That claim is now burning in a field somewhere in southwestern Iran alongside the wreckage of a $90 million fighter jet.
I don’t have a clean answer to what comes next, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The war can’t be un-started. Khamenei can’t be un-killed. The Strait can’t be un-closed by presidential tweet. We are in it, and the realistic options are all some shade of bad.
But I do think a few things are clear:
The administration needs to be forced, by Congress, by the press, by the public, to articulate an actual endgame. Not “productive talks.” Not a deadline that gets extended every 48 hours. An actual theory of how this ends, what “winning” looks like, and what we’re willing to concede to get there.
The troop buildup needs congressional authorization. If the plan is a ground incursion into Iranian territory, even a “limited” one targeting an island, that is a war, not an extension of the February strikes. The War Powers Resolution exists for exactly this moment.
And Americans need to be honest with themselves about a harder truth: the TACO pattern, whatever comfort it once provided, does not apply here. You cannot chicken out of a war the way you chicken out of a tariff. The other side has missiles, grievances, and a 3,000-year sense of national identity. They are not going to fold because the S&P dipped. They just proved they can still knock an American jet out of the sky.
The case for confronting Iran was real. The way we did it was reckless. And the gap between what this administration says and what it does is growing wider by the day, with American lives, Iranian lives, and the global economy falling into the space between.
Published April 3, 2026
