If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Trump's unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself, it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning, or even basic strategic thinking, that has gone into it.
Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America's Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America's European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support.
To read about the administration's decision-making process is to learn that it did not really plan for or expect much in the way of anything that now defines the war. This raises two obvious questions: What did they plan for? And what exactly did they expect to happen?
It appears that both the president and the White House expected token resistance, followed by the collapse of the Iranian regime, the installation of a pro-American government -- or at least one we could tolerate -- and a return to the status quo ante: a replay, in essence, of the president's first intervention of the year, in Venezuela. Now that this replay fantasy has collided with a more complex, indeterminate and difficult reality, Trump is unable to explain his objectives or even give the country a sense of when the war might end. He told Fox News radio that he would "feel it in my bones." Let's just say that that is a far cry from traditional political leadership during wartime.
If anything, Trump is caught in a classic escalation spiral. When one approach fails, in this case the initial airstrikes, he moves to the next. When that fails, he bids higher. And when escalation still doesn't produce the desired result -- when he faces the choice between accepting defeat or stalemate or going even further -- he goes further. Which is how we have arrived closer and closer to the use of ground troops: Thousands of Marines -- and now paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne -- are headed to the Middle East as Trump weighs a new offensive tied to either the Strait of Hormuz or Iranian nuclear materials.
It should be said, here, that at no point has Congress either authorized this war or provided funding for ground operations. For his part, the president is either bragging about an incoming deal -- "They're gonna make a deal," he said of the Iranian leadership on Tuesday -- or threatening attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. "If I want to take down that power plant, that very big powerful power plant, they can't do a thing about it," Trump said during the same news conference.