An explosion on Beirut's southern suburbs after an Israeli strike, following an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran on Friday.Khalil Ashawi/Reuters
Two things are clear about the war Donald Trump triggered late last week: There is no clear goal, and the President can’t give a clear answer about it.
Is it about nuclear weapons? Well, yes − but it’s about other things, too. What other things? Regime change and nation building? Well, yes − but don’t use those terms, they’re anathema to MAGA. How long will it last? Not long − but maybe pretty long. Are there possible successors to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who are acceptable to Mr. Trump, not that he is engaged in nation building? Perhaps, but they may be dead, and the second stringers (and maybe the third stringers, too) may be dead, too. Mr. Trump is not certain.
Then there is the question of whether the United States initiated this war as a pre-emptive strike because Iran was about to strike Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that was the case, or at least that is what listeners who tried to parse one of the least clear statements of the entire war surmise. Others in the administration, including Mr. Trump, said it was not.
Wars are sometimes bred of uncertainty or calculation. Germany went to war against France and Russia in 1914 because Kaiser Wilhelm’s government thought that if it waited, swiftly industrializing Russia would be stronger and aggressive later. A group of allies, including Canada, mobilized to oppose Germany. “Every war when it comes, or before it comes,” George Orwell wrote, “is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
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Wars sometimes breed uncertainty or calculation. The Soviet Union and Germany each suspected the other would turn on their one-time ally in the Second World War. It was Germany that struck the Soviet Union in 1941.
And wars sometimes prompt leaders to change their aims for the conflict.
Abraham Lincoln began fighting the 1861-1865 American Civil War to preserve the Union. By 1863, the 16th president had transformed it into a moral crusade to end slavery, a process sealed in his famous Gettysburg Address when he spoke of “a new birth of freedom.”
Woodrow Wilson took the U.S. into the First Word War in 1917 largely over the freedom of the seas. By 1918, he saw it as a struggle to win self-determination for nations, the end of secret treaties, the removal of trade barriers and the creation of the League of Nations − all elements of the Fourteen Points he laid out as aims for the postwar period.
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In his most comprehensive explanation of the aims of this new war, Mr. Trump said in a letter to Congress a few days after the initial attack that the war was begun to “neutralize Iran’s malign activities” and “advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz.” The letter did not make a reference to changing the leadership of Iran, though Mr. Trump has indicated that the U.S. had in hand a list of potential successors to the ayatollah.
The diverse war aims Mr. Trump has set out amount to a multiple-choice proposition for opponents of his war effort.
That allows some to base their objections on their opposition to regime change and nation building (the rationale for MAGA critics), others for expressing skepticism that Iran was hurtling toward the production of nuclear weapons (many Democrats choose that option), still more (some of both parties) who believe that the President hasn’t followed constitutional imperatives to consult with Congress or win congressional approbation for these hostilities.
Israeli military vehicles sit on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon.Ammar Awad/Reuters
The result is an unusual coalition of war opponents, the members of which otherwise do not agree with much of anything − tax provisions, abortion access, climate policy, tariffs. It involves lawmakers and commentators on the right (who increasingly lean toward a new American isolationism) and those on the left (who often are skeptical, if not opposed, to the projection of American force). Then there are the figures on both left and right who oppose presidential unilateralism in matters of war and peace, the very impulse that led to the passage, and approval over the veto of Richard Nixon, of the 1974 War Powers Resolution.
All this is contributing to what Thomas Jefferson called the “boisterous ocean of political passions,” in this case more boisterous than usual in the early days of a military operation. The political posturing is all the greater because this operation seems so much at variance with Mr. Trump’s campaign vows.
As long ago as 2016, Mr. Trump said in his first nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, “We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.” This January, after toppling Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, he said, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
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Presidents both at the beginning of their presidencies and facing the end of their time in the White House are especially conscious of what legacies they may leave behind. They examine their campaign promises, their records and their priorities and consider the blank pages on which history will be written. They come to realize the truth in the statement John F. Kennedy made in a speech at the University of North Dakota two months before he was assassinated in 1963: “Things don’t happen, they are made to happen.”
In that regard, presidents often speak of peace. Mr. Nixon, who would preside over four years of American combat in Vietnam, declared in his 1969 inaugural address, “The greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” Ronald Reagan called the 10-warhead MX intercontinental ballistic missile he developed the “Peacekeeper.” In his 2024 inaugural address, Mr. Trump said he hoped his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.”
Presidents often hang an 1868 George Peter Alexander Healy oil painting in the White House, sometimes in the Treaty Room, sometimes in the Oval Office. It portrays Civil War generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, Admiral David Porter and President Lincoln in a cabin of the Union steamer River Queen. The scene captures a conference of the four just before the fall of besieged Petersburg, Va., considered a signal moment in the process that led to the surrender of the Confederacy. The painting is called The Peacemakers.
Mr. Trump is not a contemplative man. But perhaps he captured a glimpse of the painting in the Cabinet Room, where it now hangs over the mantelpiece, and determined that wartime presidents can be peacemakers. If so, that is an argument he has yet to make in a convincing way to his large group of critics.