The Perils of Goal‑Free War

The military strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “War is a continuation of politics [policy] by other means.” What he meant was that war is a tool in the statesman’s quiver that is to be used to achieve a higher policy goal. In other words, when going to war, one should have a clear policy purpose.  

A corollary might be: war for war’s sake, primarily out of an emotional hatred for the enemy, should probably be put on the shelf. Along this more restrained vein, British politician Tony Benn presciently concluded, “War is the ultimate failure of diplomacy.” These thoughts lead to the conclusion that war should be used as a last resort, when all other alternative policy options—such as diplomacy, economic action, or even more modest, secretive covert action—are either impossible or have failed.

Of course, pre-planned symbolic restraint might be undertaken just to make the eventual resort to war more palatable in the psyche of its initiators or adopted first for domestic political consumption in democracies (for example, George H. W. Bush imposing economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the early 1990s but then not giving them enough time to work before going to war). However, if the goal of the war is immoral or inadvisable, war may still be a bad choice.

Shifting Goalposts

Donald Trump’s war with Iran in 2026 flouted all these laudably prudent premises. He originally asserted that the U.S. unprovoked attack on Iran, executed along with Israel, was in support of Iranian protesters and urged them to go to the streets to oppose the theocratic regime. As with a similar callout during the Hungarian revolt of 1956 against the Soviet occupation in 1956 and during a post-Persian Gulf War rising by the Kurds and Shi’ites against Saddam, the United States provided only limited help to the political opposition.

In the case of Iran, the cause of the protesters ultimately may have been harmed by the attacks. Trump then moved on to more (ultimately unsuccessful) direct regime change as the goal of the Iran War through decapitation of the regime’s top leaders. After regime change failed, he touted achieving the goal of destroying the regular Iranian navy and significantly reducing Iran’s missile arsenal. Trump has finally moved back to the goal of terminating the Iranian nuclear program, which he had earlier claimed to be obliterated after the June 2025 joint U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. And sometimes goals need to be added in the midst of war: getting Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t closed to oil tankers and other maritime traffic before hostilities started, and to permanently stop striking Israel and U.S. Persian Gulf allies with drones and missiles, both of which were very predictable possible Iranian retaliatory measures before the war began.

So we can conclude that Trump didn’t have an overriding goal for his military campaign. Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, let slip that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whose goal was to get the United States to help him degrade the power of Israel’s main regional foe, apparently convinced Trump to join his planned unprovoked attack.

When the goal of a war is not clear, it makes any negotiation for achieving a face-saving solution very difficult, especially when the opponent has the strategic advantage. The history of American war has always involved starting and stopping them with an eye toward the election calendar. Unfortunately, the sophisticated Iranians are aware of this fact. They have every incentive to appear reasonable in any negotiations, but stall in an American election year. They understand that Trump and the Republicans will get ever more desperate and be willing to make ever greater concessions to get rid of the martial tar baby as an election nears, in which the Trump administration has already made Republican prospects dim. 

As is already obvious, without allied help, the U.S. does not have enough warships to make its naval counterblockade air-tight or have a robust capability to clear any mines Iran chooses to dump in the water (clearing them is much slower and more arduous than laying them from the air or from small boats). For a blockade, the United States needs to control the seas, but Iran only has to deny the use of them to maritime traffic. Even using a complicated naval quarantine to pressure Iran to open the strait, as long as Iran has enough mines, missiles, and aerial and underwater drones to threaten commercial ships going through the waterway, shipping companies and maritime insurers will not allow their expensive ships to traverse the dangerous strait.

Remaining Off-Ramps

About the only viable option Trump has at this point is to try to negotiate a limit on Iran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for Iranian relief from economic sanctions—similar to the deal Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump tore up during his first term—and to create some sort of international body or commission, which includes Iran, to govern the strait in the future.

Any such agreement might be dressed up as a victory for the Trump administration, but it would hardly be so. After two unprovoked attacks on Iran, Trump would get only what Obama got without a shambolic and expensive (in lives and money) war. Also, an international arrangement for governing the strait—itself an erosion of open navigation for all—would not necessarily prevent Iran from using its newfound leverage over commerce in the strait to threaten it in the future. Thus, Donald Trump may eventually get rid of his disastrous war in time for the election, but it will likely not be in victory.