The Trump Trap
The president who promised to end regime-change wars just started one.
In 2016, Donald Trump ran for president, saying what no Republican nominee had said before: the Iraq war was a disaster. He accused Hillary Clinton of pushing regime change in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Syria. He warned that toppling governments without a plan creates chaos. He promised to break the cycle.
Ten years later, he has launched the largest American military operation in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq.
Operation Epic Fury, which began on February 28, is not a limited strike. Trump himself has called it a “massive and ongoing” military campaign and acknowledged it could cost American lives. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, dozens of senior officials, and at least 555 Iranian civilians in the first 48 hours, including 115 people at a girls' elementary school in Minab, most of them children, killed when a strike hit a building adjacent to an IRGC naval base. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Trump estimated the campaign would last “four or five weeks.” The stated goal is regime change. The president told the Iranian people, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”
This is the trap. Not one set by Iran, though Tehran’s retaliation has been ferocious. The trap is built into the logic of the operation itself, and every piece of the president’s own record warns against it.
The Record
The contradictions are not subtle. They are on video, in print, and on social media, stretching back more than a decade.
In 2011, Trump predicted that Obama would start a war with Iran “because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate.” Obama negotiated a nuclear deal instead and never attacked. In 2013, Trump warned that Obama would “someday attack Iran in order to show how tough he is.” In 2019, as president, he declared that America’s era of never-ending war, regime change, and nation-building was over. That same year, he posted in all caps: “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY.”
His own officials said the same thing for years. Vance made the case for Trump’s 2024 candidacy in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” Gabbard sold “No War with Iran” shirts before joining the administration as Director of National Intelligence. And as recently as December 2025, Defense Secretary Hegseth promised his department would not be distracted by “democracy-building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change.” After the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, he went further: “This mission was not and has not been about regime change.”
Nine months later, it is about regime change. The people who warned against it are executing it.
War Without a Map
Foreign Affairs published an analysis this week arguing that Trump’s approach to war represents the inversion of the Powell Doctrine. Colin Powell held that force should be a last resort, employed with clear objectives, a defined exit strategy, public support, and overwhelming decisive force. Trump has violated every one of these conditions.
The strikes began while negotiations with Tehran were still underway. No congressional authorization was sought. Democrats have already moved to force a War Powers vote, and some Republicans have joined them, but the strikes will outlast any procedural challenge. Public support is thin: polls show roughly one in four Americans back the operation. The objectives shift by the hour. Trump has said the goal is regime change, nuclear disarmament, freedom for the Iranian people, and “PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” As Foreign Affairs observed, by claiming multiple, vague objectives, the president retains the ability to end the fighting without admitting defeat. Flexibility, not clarity, is the strategy. And the strategy assumes Washington is setting the tempo. It may not be. Israel’s intelligence apparatus shaped the target list and Israel’s war aims, the destruction of Hezbollah, regional military dominance, and a permanent end to the Iranian threat, extend well beyond anything Trump has articulated to the American public. The president is trapped by the logic of his operation and by a partner whose objectives he does not fully control.
But flexibility works only when you can walk away. That is the question the administration has not answered. Iran, with 90 million people and seven land borders, is three times the size of Iraq and possesses a far more powerful military. In the first 48 hours, Tehran fired 390 missiles and 830 drones at six Gulf states, killing three American soldiers at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. Ships are now avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, Hezbollah has broken its yearlong ceasefire, and the Houthis have resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping. The regional chain reaction is already underway.
The Pottery Barn Paradox
Before the invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell reportedly warned George W. Bush about what he called the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. Foreign Affairs notes that Trump has already signaled the opposite. If the regime collapses, the Iranian people are on their own. If it endures, Washington will wrap up and move on.
But history does not work that way. The last time the United States decapitated a state in this region, it stayed for twenty years. The power vacuum in Iraq produced ISIS, a Shia-Sunni civil war, and Iranian expansion across the Levant. The million-strong Basij militia remains functional. Kurdish and Balochi armed groups are already planning to restart operations inside the country. The IRGC has named successors at every level. Regime collapse would not produce a transfer of power. It would produce a contest among armed factions in a country with nuclear infrastructure.
The logic of the operation exceeds its timeline. Trump cannot bomb Iran for five weeks, declare victory, and leave without consequences. The regional dependencies created by the strikes, Hormuz security, Gulf state protection, and proxy containment will demand an ongoing American military presence, whether the administration wants one or not.
The Populist Breaking Point
The political dimension compounds the strategic one. Iran is the issue most likely to fracture the MAGA coalition. Trump’s base believed the anti-war promise more deeply than any other. Several MAGA influencers have already resurfaced a warning from the late Charlie Kirk, who called regime change in Iran “insane” and predicted it would result in “a bloody civil war.” Jack Posobiec warned that the conflict could damage Republican prospects in the midterms. The gap between the party’s interventionist establishment, which has rallied behind the strikes, and its populist base, which was promised no new wars, is now exposed.
Trump’s approval has slipped throughout his second term, and Republicans already face a difficult midterm cycle. Iran’s own foreign minister made the irony explicit on Saturday, screenshotting Trump’s 2012 prediction that Obama would attack Iran to distract from bad poll numbers.
What Cannot Be Undone
Killing a head of state cannot be walked back. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, even indirectly, cannot be walked back. Activating every dormant proxy conflict from Lebanon to Yemen simultaneously cannot be walked back.
Trump built his political identity on the promise that he was too smart to fall into the traps that captured his predecessors. He mocked the generals, ridiculed the nation-builders, and positioned himself as the man who understood that the Middle East swallows American power. He was right about the diagnosis. The trap is that a decade of saying so did not prevent him from doing the same thing, only with the assurance that it would be over in a month.
It will not be over in a month. The more likely outcome is worse than outright failure: a low-grade, indefinite military commitment that never ends and never succeeds, that costs enough to constrain American power elsewhere but not enough to force a reckoning, that becomes permanent by becoming invisible. That is the trap that swallowed Iraq. Iran is larger, and this time, nobody even pretended to have a plan for the day after.
Ramin Farahmandpur is a professor at Portland State University’s College of Education, where he teaches courses in educational policy, philosophy of education, and social foundations. He writes about higher education, political economy, and the intersections of institutional life and public crisis at Academic Gadfly.