President Eisenhower famously said that "plans are worthless, but planning is everything." The joint Israeli-American offensive against Iran validates this observation.
Israel's objectives—destroying Iran's nuclear, missile, terrorist, and conventional capabilities to threaten its existence—make sense and have clearly been long planned. As Israeli military historian Danny Orbach observed, "The goal is not for the regime to fall, but to create conditions that will enable the Iranian people to topple it."
For Israel, this goal is understandable given 47 years of Iranian-backed efforts to destroy the state, culminating in Hamas' attacks on 7 October 2023 and Hezbollah's missile strikes.
Two wars, no strategy, and Moscow knows it
But if we think clearly, this means Israel's objectives entail regime change. Yet Israel lacks the means to achieve regime change in Iran and must rely on American power to bring about the outcome both countries desire.
American objectives, as articulated by President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and Secretary of State Rubio, center on eviscerating Iran's military capabilities. All three deny that Washington is pursuing regime change—yet Trump has repeatedly stated that regime change is the objective.
As a result, the US has entered this war with contradictory objectives and what appears to be total disregard for Eisenhower's wisdom.
The administration's strategic incoherence on Iran follows the same pattern in its Ukraine policy—improvisation dressed as strategy, contradictory signals, intelligence as prop. But Iran isn't a parallel failure. It's a compounding one.
Every week this war drags on is a week Moscow gains leverage at the Ukraine negotiating table without firing an extra shot. And that conforms to Trump’s tactics in pressuring Ukraine but not Russia.
Ultimately, Ukraine and Europe will have to join together in resisting Russia, because Trump neither understands nor really cares about European security as a whole, and the US’ interests and resources will be further consumed by this new war.
Not enough Patriot missiles to stop 60 Russian Iskanders a month. The Iran war is draining what’s left.
This will not be a short war
This avoidance of strategic responsibility may yield tactical success in eliminating much, if not all, of Iran's capabilities, but it almost certainly leads to strategic failure, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was evidently no effort to coordinate with Iranian opposition forces/marker], and clearly no effort to recruit the Gulf states in advance—although Iran's ill-advised strikes on them may save Washington from the consequences of this omission.
Trump now warns that Iran may face an even bigger offensive—a "big wave"—but air power has never triggered regime change anywhere.
The history of US campaigns against Iraq and Afghanistan should induce caution, not the misplaced braggadocio that this campaign will last only a few weeks. Nor is a bombing campaign of a few weeks likely to destroy Iran's military capabilities.
Nobody seems to have accounted for Iran's drones, which, as seen in Ukraine, are effective while American and Israeli air and missile defense systems are far more expensive. This will probably not be a short war.
Ukraine will help Gulf states shoot down Iran’s Shaheds — if their leaders push Putin toward a ceasefire
The administration can't agree on why it started
Beyond duration, the planning failure will produce other equally serious consequences.
First, Administration spokesmen continue to insist that Iran was planning strikes against US and Israeli targets—and that if Israel responded preemptively, Iran would attack American forces. While Israel can and has struck threatening forces preemptively, the Pentagon's own intelligence briefers admitted there was no imminent threat.
This justification for war falls apart.
Although Administration officials insist the threat was real, the fact remains that the US has gone to war on demonstrably false intelligence —an action that will undermine domestic and foreign support for the war and confidence in the Administration's judgment and veracity. Polling already shows public opposition to the war and lack of confidence in the Administration's judgment; much of this distrust stems from a sense that planning was insufficient.
That lack of confidence will almost certainly grow as the war drags on.
Second, the lack of planning leads not only to reliance on faulty intelligence—and, to put it bluntly, official mendacity—but also to competing justifications for starting the war.
Trump claims the US struck first because Iran was building long-range missiles and a nuclear capability; Rubio insists the US struck because Washington knew Israel's attack was coming and Iran would retaliate against American forces.
Administration spokesmen cannot get their story straight, and the Pentagon cannot produce corroboration that either rationale has a basis in reality. This betrays a failure to plan and think strategically—and will inevitably breed mission failures.
Regime change without a plan for regime change
Third, these varying rationales suggest that either the Administration does not understand that its actual goal is regime change, or it is, to be frank, lying to retain public support. Either way, there is no strategy for achieving this revolutionary objective.
Iran's population—predictably—is hiding and fleeing, not demonstrating. Alex Vatanka, Founding Director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute, observes that "Asking a population to risk their lives in the middle of an active bombing campaign, without a roadmap or visible network to join, is not a strategy. The regime has already signaled it will be more ruthless than in January toward anyone who steps out."
Thus, the true strategic objective entailed in coercively disarming Iran—regime change—depends not on the success of air strikes, but on the hope of a popular uprising. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.
Fourth, if the Administration seriously intends to realize its military goals, it cannot do so by air strikes alone.
No campaign has ever achieved regime change without control of the ground. But there are not enough American or allied forces to control developments inside Iran, and deploying ground forces means falling into what is already emerging: a deliberate Iranian strategy to extend and prolong the war, betting that America is unwilling to bear the long-term costs involved.
Moscow benefits from the quagmire
If land forces are ruled out in advance, as Administration spokesmen say, then the war is likely lost from the outset because regime change will not occur.
The Administration—deliberately or not—has fallen into the abiding delusion that a short war can solve all its problems. Having deceived themselves and the public, they have begun a war from which it will be far harder to extricate the country than they can begin to imagine.
Moscow doesn't need Iran to survive. It needs Iran to last. A quagmire that consumes American attention, credibility, and political capital is worth more to the Kremlin than any arms shipment Tehran ever provided.
The administration that couldn't articulate a coherent Ukraine strategy now has two wars it can't define—and the bandwidth for only one. Russia knows which one Washington will choose.
Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.
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