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There are plenty of people who were not surprised when President Trump released a video early Saturday morning announcing that the United States and Israel had launched “major combat operations” in Iran. But I have to admit, I was not one of them. Saturday morning, I was woken up by a text that read, simply, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

The Atlantic’s Shane Harris was among the unsurprised. He told me, “When I went to bed on Friday night, a lot of us were anticipating that there might be military action perhaps the next evening. So it happened a little bit earlier than we expected.”

Shane and his colleagues had been seeing signs of this incoming attack for months. Describing the military buildup in the Gulf, Shane said, “They put more forces in the region than we’ve seen any time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.” Describing the attack as the “maximalist option,” Shane also told me he and his colleagues couldn’t anticipate the scale of the United States’ and Israel’s attack on Iran over the weekend.

On What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to national security reporter Shane Harris about the president’s reasons for kicking off yet another war in the Middle East, the dissolution of talks between Iran and the U.S. in Geneva, and the opaque nature of what might constitute “success” in Iran now. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Let’s talk about the lead-up to what’s happening now, because as you said in your reporting, this didn’t come out of the blue. How long has Trump been toying with the idea of striking Iran?

Shane Harris: I mean, I think he’s been toying with it since his first term, really.

In his first term, notably, he killed Qassem Soleimani, this high-ranking official, and that was, I think, the first time I asked, Are we going to war with Iran? We’ve been asking this question repeatedly. 

Exactly. There was another period in which he was prepared to strike Iranian targets and notably called the planes back when they were in the air, because he was worried about casualties—U.S. casualties as well. On the way out the door, in his first term, administration officials were contemplating a possible strike on Iran. In the more recent events........

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