In his 1 hour, 47-minute State of the Union address, President Donald Trump spent three minutes on Iran. This is alarming because the United States seems on the verge of a war with that country, with little public discussion about it. The Trump administration has assembled the largest U.S. military force in the region since the Iraq War, deploying two carrier strike groups and at least 150 aircraft nearby. There are up to 40,000 American troops in the region. And yet the core of any successful military operation remains unclear and undefined — what is the objective?

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