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President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have launched the first massive wave of a full-scale war on Iran—yet the reason for attacking now and the vision of what happens the day after are murky, to say the least.

An eight-minute video that Trump posted on social media early Saturday morning, announcing that he had begun “major combat operations,” raised more questions than it answered. He made very clear that the intent of the attack—called “Operation Epic Fury”—was not only to wipe out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure (which Trump already claimed to have “obliterated” in last June’s attack) but also to raze its ballistic missile force and, above all, to topple the Islamic regime.

“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump proclaimed. He warned the people to stay inside while bombs fall, but implored them, afterward, to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

This is a bit of fantasy. There is no civic or protest group with the arms or organization to grab the reins of power in Tehran, nor are U.S. or Israeli troops going to occupy Iranian territory to help them to do so. Even if they did, the results wouldn’t be certain. It is worth recalling that, in 2003, President George W. Bush sent 150,000 troops to depose Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, yet even they were unable to impose order but instead incited an insurgency and a civil war that lasted nearly a decade and destabilized the entire region.

It is not clear how Trump’s stab at regime change without any ground support—in a country three times the size of Iraq—will be any smoother. Even if the air strikes succeed in ousting the regime, either by killing its leaders or forcing them to flee, it is doubtful the successors will be any friendlier to the West.

The most likely faction to succeed the Supreme Leader and his mullahs are the officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the country’s elite military unit, which holds about 190,000 members, well-armed, brutal, and thoroughly enmeshed with Iran’s social structure and in control of much of its economy. They would resist any attempt by civilians to undermine their control.

In his eight-minute address, Trump urged the IRGC, as well as Iran’s armed forces and police, to roll over. “Lay down your arms,” he said. “You will be treated fairly with total immunity.” If you don’t lay down your arms, “you will face certain death.”

This mix of promise and threat is a puzzler. Just who will reward surrendering officers with immunity, and who will kill those who don’t succumb? Who will have the power, authority, and armed strength themselves to enforce this ultimatum? If Trump were to send several armed divisions to Iran, they could try to do that—but it’s extremely doubtful, if just for domestic-political reasons, that he would do that.

It’s possible, one might imagine, that the CIA or Mossad has secretly contacted key Iranian officers, promising support if they take the reins after the mullahs fall and steer their country to more peaceful policies. But if so, it is not at all certain that these collaborators would be able to sway or dominate their fellow officers—or whether rival factions will rise in opposition.

In other words, assuming the war succeeds in its strategic aim of regime change, the likeliest outcome will be a new dictatorship, a civil war among various armed factions, or utter anarchy and chaos, reminiscent of Libya after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi.

Whatever happens, it seems that Trump has not thought through the political consequences of his war—a crucial failing in a war of choice; this certainly was not a war forced upon him.

Trump is right, and hardly alone in noting, that the Iranian regime is led by “terrible people.” They sponsor terrorism, murder domestic dissenters, and have a record of killing American troops in the region. Yet he did not muster even the pretense of evidence that they pose an “imminent threat.” They are not on the brink of building nuclear weapons. (Trump exaggerated when he claimed last summer that Midnight Hammer, his bombing raid on three enriched-uranium sites, “obliterated” their nuclear capability, but the attack probably did set the program back a few years.) And their network of armed militias in the region—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—is as weak as it has been for decades, thanks to a series of Israeli attacks. In negotiations over the past few weeks, Iran had offered to reduce its nuclear potential to below even the levels agreed in the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and six other leaders in 2014—a deal that Trump ripped up in his first term. But it seems Trump didn’t want a deal at all.

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Meanwhile, the Iranians are doing what they said they would do if the U.S. or Israel unleashed an attack—they are firing their own missiles and drones at Israel and at Arab countries where the U.S. has military bases, including Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

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Many of these missiles were shot down, but video footage shows some of the missiles flew through unscathed and exploded. It is not yet known how much damage these strikes did—or, for that matter, the full effects of the U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran.

Still, this war is very different from Trump’s previous air strikes on Iran or Venezuela, which were one-off raids with limited goals. This is a war, aimed not just at destroying some military targets or abducting a single leader but bringing down a well-entrenched government. Even under optimistic assumptions, this is going to take a while. Trump himself admitted, in his video, that some Americans will die.

In other words, Trump has crossed a red line that he has never crossed before, and that he once promised he never would. The consequences are as murky as everything else about this conflict—for Trump’s political party in this year’s elections, for his own image in history books, as well as the fate of Iran, the stability of the Middle East, and the course of war and peace, possibly worldwide, in our times.

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