The president has a long history with Iran: pulling out of the nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor in 2018, killing a top military commander in 2020, dropping bunker-busters on Iranian nuclear sites last year. What he’s always lacked is a coherent strategy. Having launched the US on perhaps the riskiest gamble of his two terms in office, he owes the American people one.

The airstrikes now raining down on Iran, a joint US-Israeli effort that quickly eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking officials, have no doubt been well-planned. Yet it remains entirely unclear why they were necessary. The grievances cited by the president for authorizing the operation — Iran’s support for terrorist attacks, the killing of Americans in Iraq, the pursuit of nuclear weapons technology, the threat to US bases and allies in the region — are long-standing. In reality, after last year’s airstrikes, the regime is further from a nuclear bomb than it’s been in years, and the Pentagon estimates it couldn’t build an arsenal of missiles capable of reaching the US for a decade. No imminent threat required such force.

© Bloomberg