As Iran war passes one-month mark, mission creep clouds Trump's strategy

WASHINGTON — Mission creep has stymied U.S. presidents in the Middle East and beyond, and now the escalation of President Donald Trump’s military operation in Iran has left him with no clear off-ramp as congressional Democrats lambaste his command of the war.

The commander in chief and his top war aides initially tried selling his decision to join Israel in its bombardment of the Islamic Republic as an undertaking focused on Iran’s drone and missile arsenals, crippling its military manufacturing base and ensuring it could never field a nuclear weapon.

But mission creep appeared on Feb. 28, the first day of the month-old conflict, when air strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989. Trump immediately found himself overseeing what foreign policy experts have called a “regime change” operation. The focus on Iran’s military stores and nuclear program quickly expanded, with Trump declaring that he wanted to helm the driver’s seat in choosing the country’s next top leader.

From there, Iranian launched attacks on a number of Gulf Arab states’ energy sector facilities and Tehran dramatically limited the number of tanker ships allowed to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway that supplies oil to a host of countries, including economic powers such as China, India, Japan and South Korea.

House Intelligence ranking member Jim Himes, during a March 19 hearing, highlighted how the scope of the U.S. mission in Iran has metastasized over four deadly weeks — but with oil shipments delayed and prices rising, and the Islamic Republic government still intact and firing missiles and drones.

“How do we feel about a new supreme leader who is more extreme and vicious and dedicated to the development of a nuclear weapon than the last one? Do we do a deal with him? How do we get him to open the Strait of Hormuz? Do we bomb more?” the Connecticut Democrat said. “And if we sail away and declare victory, are we back there nine months from now to re-sink a rebuilt navy and re-bomb rebuilt missile launchers? Is this going to be [an] every nine-month thing or is it going to be annual?”

Trump himself has been focused on Iran’s oil stores and infrastructure, as well as Gulf allies that initially were skeptical of the U.S.-Israeli military strikes but now view a wounded Islamic Republic government as too dangerous and unpredictable not to destroy.

Such worries were a reason Aaron David Miller, a former senior State Department adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations, said last week that what began as a war of choice for Trump has become one of “necessity.”

That became the case “once it got out of the ‘Israeli-American-Iranian triangle’ and elevated to a global crisis. Now you have helium, LNG, fertilizer prices way up,” Miller said in a Thursday telephone interview, using shorthand for liquefied natural gas. “Once you gave Iran the capacity, which they’ve always had, to determine who gets in and who gets out of the Strait, you now have a global crisis — and no way out.”

As Trump has lurched from one justification for the ever-expanding mission to the next, he tried — again — this week to describe the current situation in the Strait as other countries’ collective problem.

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Tuesday morning.

“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated,” he added. “The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

Yet, his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, a short time later said during a Pentagon briefing that returning Hormuz to its pre-war ship-passage rate had indeed become a focus of the administration’s mission.

“We would much prefer to get a deal. If Iran was willing to relinquish material they have and ambitions they have, open the Strait, great,” Hegseth said. “That’s the goal.”

‘Never be the same’

Like other presidents before him, Trump appeared on Feb. 28 to believe he could avoid mission creep. But Miller said the president’s pre-war thinking has “proven, so far, to be highly flawed.”

“No. 1, it was flawed to believe that American and Israeli military dominance would somehow force concessions or capitulation. No. 2, it was flawed to think that the regime would be hollowed out by decapitation strikes, and its command and control would be eliminated … by the death of Khamenei,” Miller said.

Trump mused publicly about identifying and somehow installing as Iran’s next long-term leader someone in the mold of Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, who took over after Trump sent U.S. military and law enforcement personnel to arrest former President Nicolás Maduro. But some Democratic lawmakers and analysts, including Miller, have said that’s a doubtful scenario, which would only further complicate and elongate the U.S. mission.

“Because whatever happens to Iran, Iran will never be the same country again. If Trump is looking for an Iranian Delcy Rodriguez, what he got in new supreme leader is most likely an Iranian Kim Jong Un — and not just one,” Miller said, referring to Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor to his father as Iran’s supreme leader. “Now there’s a couple of those sitting atop the government, and that’s a problem.”

Trump also has been pressed in recent days about whether he might send in American ground forces to seize and remove Iran’s 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium.

“Yeah,” he responded on March 23 in Palm Beach, Fla., to a reporter who had asked if he wanted to take Iran’s uranium stocks before winding down the conflict.

“And we want no enrichment. But we also want the enriched uranium,” he said before a trip to Memphis that included a stop at Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate, before appearing to shrug off the risks for ground troops: “If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want. And it’s also great for Israel, and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Qatar, all of them, Kuwait and Bahrain, in particular.”

Edward Lengel, a former chief historian for the White House Historical Association, said last week that Trump being so hands-on in managing the conflict and speaking frequently about it, has complicated his military commanders’ jobs.

“[Franklin D. Roosevelt] in World War II had less of a role than Woodrow Wilson did in the First World War. He stayed mostly behind the scenes and left it to his top commanders to make strategic decisions,” Lengel, also a military historian, said during a telephone interview. “But FDR and other presidents did a better job than the current president of explaining the war and what he was doing.

“Trump has made little attempts to explain or justify this,” he added. “It’s like he just wanted to do it.”