There is a difference between using force and having a strategy. Israel and the United States may be very good at the first. Right now they are doing a miserable job of proving they have the second.

Let us get the obvious out of the way. Iran is a dangerous regime. It has menaced Israel for decades, built proxy networks across the region, pursued nuclear capabilities, and treated diplomacy less as a path to peace than as a way to buy time. Nobody serious denies that. Nobody serious thinks Israel should shrug and hope for the best. The hawkish case begins there, and on that narrow point, it has reality on its side.

But that is also where the hawkish case begins to fall apart. Because identifying a real threat is not the same thing as having a coherent response to it. And what the Trump administration and the Israeli government are offering right now looks less like a strategy than a rolling improv act with missiles.

The White House has framed the war in sweeping language, saying Operation Epic Fury will destroy Iran’s missile threat, annihilate its navy, cripple its proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon. That is a maximalist list, not a focused war aim. It sounds tough. It also sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing governments say when they want credit for resolve without having to define what success actually looks like.

And that problem is not just rhetorical. Reuters has reported that inside the administration there has been active debate over how to define victory, how soon Trump can claim it, and whether this is truly a limited campaign or something broader and far more open-ended. In other words, the confusion is not a hostile-media invention. It is embedded in the policy itself.

Israel’s........

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