There is an old military principle, so obvious it barely needs stating: before you start a war, know what winning looks like. Know how it ends. Have a plan for the morning after. The United States and Israel, in launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran on 28 February 2026, appear to have skipped that chapter entirely.
Two weeks in, the picture is not pretty. It is not even coherent.
Two weeks in, the Trump administration is no closer to settling on a defined strategy for finishing a conflict that has grown only more complicated and unwieldy by the day. That assessment comes not from Tehran or Moscow but from CNN’s own sources inside the administration.
The Trump administration’s talking points on the Iran war have been a moving target, with officials giving sometimes conflicting takes on the operation’s goals in language that evolves in real-time.
On day six, Trump demanded unconditional surrender. By the end of the same week, he was floating the possibility of talks with Iranian leaders, though he allowed it was something he didn’t really need to do. Asked on Fox News when the war will end, the Commander-in-Chief delivered what may be the most consequential military doctrine of the 21st century: “When I feel it. Feel it in my bones.”
God help us all.
Senator Mark Kelly put it plainly: “They didn’t have a plan. They have no timeline. And because of that, they have no exit strategy.” That is not a Democrat talking point. It is the observable reality.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio credited a completely different rationale for the war from his own colleagues, arguing that the US became aware Israel was planning military action and pre-emptively attacked Iran because of an imminent threat of retaliatory strikes against American forces.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been at pains to reassure the American public that the operation was not a “democracy-building exercise” and that “this is not Iraq. This is not endless” — an assurance Trump immediately undermined by saying he was not bound by post-Iraq “yips” and would have no qualms about sending in ground troops “if they were necessary.”
So the war is not about regime change, except when it is. It’s a short excursion, except when they haven’t won enough yet. It will end soon, but important targets remain. It is not endless, unless it needs to go further.
This is not strategic ambiguity. This is a government that had a target and a trigger and no plan for what came next. They bombed their way into the quagmire and are now looking for signposts in the smoke.
The Carrier and the Illusion
Nothing captures the gap between American military mythology and asymmetric reality quite like the running saga of the USS Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln is a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, 1,100 feet of floating American exceptionalism, the crown jewel of a force built for an era when air supremacy was the decisive factor in any conflict. When deployed, the 36-year-old carrier is a small town in and of itself, hosting roughly 5,500 sailors. Trump described its arrival in the Arabian Sea, along with a second carrier group, as an “armada.” The word was presumably meant to inspire awe.
Iran’s response has been to repeatedly claim it struck the Lincoln with ballistic missiles and drones, alleging significant damage and forcing a withdrawal from its operating position in the Sea of Oman.
The US military denies this, has released photographs of the carrier conducting flight operations, and has accused Iran of recycling fabricated footage. US military officials confirmed that none of the missiles launched by Iran came close to hitting the carrier, and a viral video purporting to show it on fire was traced to Arma 3 game footage first posted in June 2025.
Fair enough. But the propaganda war around the Lincoln is itself revealing. Iran has claimed several times during the 14-day war to have struck the vessel, with its army spokesperson saying the nuclear-powered carrier was put “out of operational service.”
And even setting aside Iran’s claims, an Iranian vessel sailed close enough to the Lincoln that US forces fired on it, missing many times with a naval cannon before destroying it with helicopter-launched Hellfire missiles. The most powerful warship on earth, firing its deck gun repeatedly at a small Iranian vessel, and missing. That is not a headline. That is a parable.
The carrier is the central image of American power projection as it was imagined in the 1980s and 1990s: massive, nuclear-powered, bristling with aircraft, capable of dominating any sea lane on the planet. What it was not designed for is a theatre in which the enemy has invested heavily in saturation missile attacks, drone swarms, sea mines, and the sheer tactical patience of asymmetric warfare.
The Lincoln is already a 36-year-old ship. It is expensive to operate, hard to replace, and increasingly a liability in a conflict where its adversary doesn’t need to sink it; only to keep the world watching the spectacle of an empire swatting at drones.
The Enemy on Its Own Ground
The foundational miscalculation of Operation Epic Fury is the assumption that Iran would fold. Trump and his team embraced the optimistic projection that Iran could be quickly and decisively defeated, eliminating it as a threat and opening the door to a popular uprising.
“It’s shock and awe times 10,” said one administration official. They had convinced themselves that Iran’s leadership had been weakened by the January 2026 protests, that the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei would decapitate the regime, and that the population would rise in gratitude. The Venezuela operation; a quick snatch-and-grab that ousted Maduro overnight, apparently convinced some in the administration that difficult states could simply be knocked over like bowling pins.
Iran is not Venezuela. It is a nation of 90 million people, a civilisation with 2,500 years of continuous identity, a military with decades of preparation for precisely this scenario, and a population that, whatever it thinks of the mullahs, does not welcome foreign bombers over Tehran. The military offensive has broadly succeeded in tactical terms, but failed to meet Trump’s high hopes that it would cow the regime into submission or spur a mass surrender of Iran’s combat forces.
Of course it didn’t. Nations defending their own territory fight differently from nations pursuing imperial agendas abroad. The Americans are far from home; they are burning through munitions, materiel, and political capital at rates that worry even their allies. Iran is on its own soil. Every drone it launches, every missile it fires, every ship it threatens in the Strait of Hormuz is an act of resistance that resonates domestically, regardless of tactical outcome. Washington forgot the basic asymmetry: for Iran, this war is existential. For America, it is optional.
Iran has already demonstrated it can disrupt regional energy flows, striking oil tankers and targeting infrastructure across the Gulf. Brent crude surged more than 8 percent in a single day, and Qatar temporarily suspended LNG production after drone strikes on its gas facilities.
The global economic tremors from a conflict the US chose to start are spreading in ways that will not be easily contained. Russia’s UK ambassador stated plainly: “We still are trying to understand what are the goals of President Trump in this campaign.” If Moscow can’t work it out, one suspects Tehran is coping fine.
The Proxy Problem and the Greater Israel Dream
Let’s be honest about what Israel’s stake is here. The Netanyahu government has pursued, with extraordinary single-mindedness across decades, the goal of eliminating every regional military counterweight to Israeli dominance. Hamas, Hezbollah, and now Iran itself.
What his government and its settler-movement patrons actually envision; a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan to the sea, and beyond; is not a defensive posture. It is a project of territorial expansion dressed in the language of existential threat.
And Washington has been the indispensable enabler throughout. The United States has provided the munitions, the intelligence, the diplomatic cover, and now the carrier groups. It has done so at the expense of its own strategic interests, its own Treasury, its own relationships with the broader Islamic world, and, as is now becoming evident, its own military credibility.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has made clear his support for Israel encompasses not American strategic interests but Christian prophecy. He has said it would be “fine” if Israel took over the Middle East. That is not a diplomat speaking. That is a Baptist minister in a diplomat’s suit, serving not one country’s interests but a theology that regards the expansion of Israeli territory as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ.
Which brings us to the most unsettling dimension of this whole catastrophe.
When God Gives the Orders
Since the strikes on Iran began on 28 February 2026, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported over 200 complaints about commanders telling troops across branches of the US armed forces that the current war with Iran was part of a divine plan, invoking biblical ideas about the “end times.” More than two hundred complaints. From troops inside the actual military chain of command.
John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered a sermon the day after the strikes began declaring the war part of a divine plan: “Prophetically, we’re right on cue.” Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon podium and described Iran as a regime “hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions”; a phrase that the Council on American-Islamic Relations noted appeared to be a reference to Shia beliefs about the end times.
The man criticising religious delusion from behind a Pentagon lectern was doing so while American military commanders were telling their troops the war was God’s will.
Whistleblower reports from the military detailed accounts of American commanders telling troops that the new war in the Middle East was part of a divine plan to bring about the battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ. President Trump hosted a score of influential evangelical leaders in the Oval Office to lay hands upon him.
This is the thing that doesn’t make it into most mainstream analysis, because it sounds too medieval to credit in the world’s most powerful democracy. But the ideology is real, it is documented, and it has a name: dispensationalism.
It dates to the 1830s in Britain; not to biblical antiquity as its proponents imply, and holds that human history is divided into ages culminating in a final tribulation centred on Israel, after which Jesus returns. In this worldview, the United States and Israel share a dual role in jump-starting the Biblical End Times, usually involving a battle against Iran, modern Persia, explicitly named in Ezekiel 38-39.
You cannot fully understand why the United States is fighting this war without understanding that a significant faction of its political and military establishment believes, at some level, that they are enacting scripture. That they are not just defending American interests or Israeli security, but hastening the return of Christ. This is not peripheral. It is in the room.
A scholar interviewed by Salon observed that Israel is “exploiting this theology for its own purposes,” and that the partnership between Christian Zionism and Israeli Zionism has produced a project of conquest being exported to Lebanon and Iran.
The dark irony is that dispensationalist theology ultimately sees Jews not as worthy of their own expression but as instruments of Christian apocalypse; a species of religious anti-Semitism dressed as philo-Semitism, and Netanyahu’s government takes the weapons and the carrier groups and doesn’t ask too many theological questions.
What They Got Wrong, and What Comes Next
The list of miscalculations is long. They underestimated Iran’s resilience and depth. They assumed air power and carrier strike groups would be as decisive as they were against Saddam’s static military in 1991, not understanding that modern asymmetric warfare, with drones, dispersed missile batteries, and naval mines, is a fundamentally different proposition.
They assumed the Iranian population would rise. They assumed Gulf allies would quietly absorb the blowback. They assumed the economic consequences would be manageable.
They were wrong on all of it.
The US has destroyed more than 60 Iranian ships and eliminated an entire class of Iranian warships. That is a genuine tactical achievement. But it does not end the war. It does not open the Strait of Hormuz. It does not topple the regime. It does not answer the question Senator Kelly asked from the start: what is the exit?
Russia has pledged unwavering support to Tehran, with Putin writing directly to Iran’s new Supreme Leader. Iran has more than 2,000 Shahed drones in the field, weapons it has been manufacturing for years and battle-testing in Ukraine. The Strait of Hormuz remains under threat, through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies pass.
And the USS Abraham Lincoln keeps launching aircraft from the Arabian Sea while Iran keeps claiming it has been struck, and CENTCOM keeps releasing photographs of it looking entirely undamaged, and the world watches the strange theatre of the most expensive military machine in history trying to assert dominance over an enemy that simply needs to keep fighting to win.
That is what this war looks like, three weeks in. Not shock and awe. Not unconditional surrender. Not a popular uprising. Not the dawn of a new Middle East.
What it looks like is a superpower that confused its weapons budget with strategic wisdom, its carrier fleet with invulnerability, its proxy’s ambitions with its own interests, and its evangelical base’s fever dreams with operational planning.
Iran is defending its own ground. America is a long way from home. And the bones of mad King Donald have yet to feel anything that resembles an exit.
Urban Wronski Writes 