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In his efforts to make his war on Iran seem thought through and sensible, President Donald Trump is only bolstering the case that it was spun from pipe dreams all along.

The most head-spinning confirmation came on Tuesday, when a reporter asked what would be the war’s worst-case scenario. “I guess,” Trump replied, “the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person—right? That could happen.”

The president may have thought he was coming off as a hardheaded realist, but in fact he looked more irresponsible than ever. Of course, it is always a risk of war that it spawns a world more treacherous than before—and if war is forced upon us, if we have to wage it in self-defense or some other urgent interest, that might be a risk worth taking. But this war is a war of choice. Military officers and intelligence officials have said that Iran posed no “imminent threat”—contrary to Trump’s initial claims. Indeed, in a letter to Congress on Monday justifying the war, Trump himself makes no such assertion. Therefore, if it seemed a fair possibility that war would displace the current Iranian regime with leaders who are worse (more hostile to the West, more oppressive of its people, more destabilizing to the region), then going to war anyway was a bad move.

Trump either didn’t listen to the warnings or discounted the risks. The New York Times reported, in a detailed account of the run-up to the war, that Trump and his top advisers discussed who might rise to power if the current regime were toppled. Analysts presented a few possibilities: the Revolutionary Guard, the elite military unit that is at least as thuggish and anti-Western as the current leaders; a more moderate, pragmatic faction of the Guard; or perhaps no one in particular, just chaos and civil war.

According to the Times’ account, Trump and his team decided that they’d go with the middle option: an Iranian military corps that Washington could deal with. They didn’t stop to think that the Iranians had a vote in the matter—as we have learned over and over, the U.S. is quite skilled at hitting targets, but that doesn’t mean that it can shape what happens after the smoke clears.

At the same Tuesday press session in which he mused on the “worst case,” Trump said that he’d been told about a few possible successors to the ayatollah who might be friendlier to Western interests, but they were killed in U.S.-Israeli bombing raids too. “Now we have another group” of potential replacements, he went on, but “they may be dead also, based on reports. … Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.”

This was another hair-raising remark, all the more so because Trump didn’t seem to realize he’d made a staggering admission of his failure to plan ahead. On a larger level, this is why killing enemy heads of state—a practice known in the trade as a “decapitation strategy”—is widely seen as not only risky but possibly counterproductive. Quite aside from the legal issues (a U.S. law passed in the 1970s bans the assassination of foreign leaders), it’s hard, if not impossible, for our generals and diplomats to negotiate an end to the war if there isn’t anyone on the other side to negotiate with—at least not anyone who is known to be the legitimate leader and whose terms of surrender thus have a chance of being observed by military leaders and the population at large.

In any case, if Trump and his ally-encourager in this war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had intended from the outset to kill Iran’s leader, they should have identified and, if possible, protected a promising successor. They failed to do so, diminishing the chance that this war will end in a way that remotely serves our interests.

It may be that Trump didn’t realize he would have to think through any of this ahead of time. He seems to believe that making deals in global politics is not much different from making deals with, say, the New York City Buildings Department. His own experiences in the White House may have reinforced this view. He has said he would like Iran to be a replay of Venezuela, where he got rid of the top leader and the underlings agreed to do business. He may also have had in mind the many times when his glowering threats forced members of the American elite—legislators, media executives, and university presidents, among others—to bend the knee.

Thus, he’s surprised when others don’t bow down so swiftly. Last month, after two U.S. aircraft carriers, more than a dozen other warships, and hundreds of fighter jets surrounded Iran from all sides, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s old friend and now his unlikely global emissary, said the president was “curious” as to why Iran hadn’t “capitulated” to the looming threat of an American attack. “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”

Recall also that Trump boasted he would end Russia’s war with Ukraine on his first day in office, owing to his presumed friendship with Vladimir Putin and general talent for making deals. That didn’t happen either. He didn’t, and still doesn’t, understand Putin’s interests, just as he doesn’t understand the Islamic regime’s entrenched grip on Iran.

And now, as his intelligence agencies and top military advisers warned, the war is unreeling. The entire Middle East is getting sucked into the conflict—not just Israel but every country where the U.S. has military bases. On Wednesday, NATO air defenses shot down an Iranian missile aimed at southern Turkey. Meanwhile, as part of what they called “defensive” measures, England, France, and Germany agreed to help attack Iranian missile launchers. In short, Europe might get drawn in too.

The question thus becomes all the more vital: Why did this war have to start at all? Secretary of State Marco Rubio blurted out on Tuesday that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway, meaning that we would be pulled in eventually, so we might as well join from the get-go. Rubio walked back these words, and, at least in one sense, properly so. Certainly, Netanyahu prodded Trump into action—he’s been lobbying American politicians to help him oust Iran’s regime for decades—but Trump didn’t have to go along.

This Is Different From Trump’s Past Strikes on Iran and Venezuela

It’s all on Trump. Once he had flanked Iran with the mightiest array of U.S. firepower that the region has seen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he felt he had to do something with it. He could either exploit the armada as leverage to wrangle a diplomatic deal or pull the trigger. The Iranians offered a pretty favorable deal, in some ways more restrictive than the one President Barack Obama signed in 2014 (and which Trump tore up in 2018), but it didn’t satisfy Trump’s demand to ban all uranium enrichment, so he pulled the trigger. The Saudis reportedly told Trump that doing nothing after mobilizing all that firepower would make him look weak—and in the president’s mind, as the Saudis well knew, that would be unacceptable.

To a degree that is truly shocking, this may be all about Trump. In an ABC interview on Sunday, Trump said his decision to go to war was colored by two Iranian plots to kill him back in 2024—plots that are believed to have been ordered by the ayatollah. “I got him before he got me,” Trump said. “I got him first.”

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Is this why the war, now in its fifth day, got underway? Is this why four members of the U.S. armed forces have died, along with 10 Israelis, dozens of Arabs, and more than 550 Iranians, with many more casualties to come? Is this why we’re seeing the revitalization of Hezbollah as its militias strike Israel from Lebanon and Israel resumes its occupation of that country, which had only started to breathe in relief from decades of war? Is it why markets are rocking, why oil shipments are cut back from the Strait of Hormuz, why the world hangs on tenterhooks of suspense over what happens next? Is all this an extension of Donald Trump’s compulsion for control?

One gulp-worthy indication. In an interview on Monday, asked about criticism from some in his MAGA base who thought “America First” meant no more foreign wars, Trump proclaimed, “MAGA is Trump.”

His entourage and fans should take note of this remark. In Trump’s mind, there is no MAGA movement, there is only Trump, and those who wear the red MAGA hats must nod ferociously to everything he says and does, even if it goes against what he has said or done in the past. The phrase should sit alongside the French King Louis XIV’s pronouncement, in the 17th century, “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state). The way Trump is acting, the powers that he has granted himself, especially in starting this war, heedless of its risks and consequences, he might as well have uttered Louis’ phrase too.

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