Does Trump have a strategy for the Iran war? Probably not—and that’s deadly

American Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, took to social media Tuesday night to share takeaways from a classified briefing the White House shared with him and other legislators about the Iran war.

“I obviously can’t disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are,” he noted, emphasizing that regime change in Iran is no longer in the cards. “They are going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime—probably a MORE anti-American hardline regime—will still be in charge.”

Murphy also said US President Donald Trump’s administration no longer intends to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. It favours eliminating missiles, boats and drone factories instead. “The question that stumped them: what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production,” Murphy shared. “They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, forever war.”

A final item from Murphy: He asserted that the White House had “NO PLAN” about how to secure the Strait of Hormuz for safe passage of tankers and other ships.

Some 20% of the world’s petroleum supply transits the strait. As my colleague Javier Blas observed recently, Trump has days, not weeks, to solve that problem. If not, oil prices, which were about $71 a barrel before the war began and have settled in the low $90 range, will spike, beckoning turmoil.

The potential human, economic and geopolitical costs of this demolition derby are harrowing and perilous, but none of it should be surprising. “NO PLAN” could be fashioned into a billboard fixed atop the 90,000-square-foot ballroom Trump wants to attach to the White House.

And his hasty, tumultuous and open-ended prosecution of the Iran war thus far is entirely in character.

The president—as heir to a sizable fortune, haphazard developer, dysfunctional casino impresario, reality TV curiosity, ubiquitous self-promoter and tectonic political force—has spent most of his nearly 80 years flying without maps.

The implications of Trump’s fecklessness had less gravity before he entered the Oval Office. His actions now frequently put people, civil society and livelihoods in play. Great power, as the saying goes, demands great responsibility. It also demands sophistication, rationality, insight—and great planning.

Planning can be boring and time-consuming, but it’s everything. A devotion to planning separates functioning adults from children and effective strategists from unhinged flamethrowers.

Republicans have supported the Iran war and the president’s guarantee that it will be “over pretty quickly.” They’ve voted down legislation that would have halted the strikes and seem to take the White House’s word that it “had a strong game plan” in place before the US partnered with Israel on bombing raids. Trump has fed the narrative. “I have a plan for everything, OK?” he told a reporter recently when asked about the implications of soaring oil prices. “I have a plan for everything. You'll be very happy.”

Many would be happy indeed, and the world would be a better place, if Iran’s nuclear and military capacities were fully and finally decimated. Fomenting lasting regime change there would also be welcome. Iran exports terrorism alongside oil, has routinely kept the Middle East at disconcerting tipping points and suppresses democracy at home. Should Trump pull success out of the hat in Iran, bravo.

Reality intrudes, however. Fully incapacitating Iran doesn’t seem to be in the offing, and a new hardliner, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his late father as the country’s supreme leader. The Strait of Hormuz remains a choke point. Trump, who rarely takes advice, is getting earfuls from a cast of amateurs, among them Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Trump and his supporters like to promote the president as a grand strategist. “As usual, the boss is playing three-dimensional chess” in Iran, a senior trade adviser and former jailbird, Peter Navarro, told Newsmax.

This is overtly and incurably untrue, alas.

While some political analysts and other observers have spent the last decade trying to reassure themselves and the world by discerning myriad ‘strategies’ in Trump’s tragicomic meanderings, he has never been a capable or dedicated strategist. He certainly has goals, and they usually take the form of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement.

In that context, a straightforward explanation for his self-described “excursion” into Iran is that it appealed to him as a power flex—and he was unconcerned about existential impacts or how the pieces would be reassembled after bombs stopped falling.

But having goals doesn’t equate to having a strategy.

Trump showcases himself as a great dealmaker, even though his business career was pockmarked with bankruptcies. He says he’s an astute steward of the economy, even though he has pursued self-defeating and damaging tariff policies. He promised to rightsize the federal government but instead birthed the clown rodeo known as DOGE. He vowed to seal America’s porous borders—and did—but then launched a lethal and grotesque deportation campaign that has scarred communities nationwide. He wants the US to be more affordable for struggling voters but is now waging a war that may savage their wallets.

None of that is the handiwork of a wily, committed strategist unfurling well-crafted plans. It is a hallmark, unfortunately, of someone eternally unbothered by the vast wreckage he leaves in his wake.

The New York Times asked Trump two months ago if he felt there were forces that might restrain his global powers.

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality,” responded the guy who isn’t known for being particularly moral or capable of self-regulation. “My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he also said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

Meanwhile, seven US soldiers are now dead, scores have been injured, many more are in harm’s way and hundreds of Iranians have died, including schoolchildren.

The consequences of this war will echo for years, and US national security may ultimately be weakened by it. But don’t expect Trump, who secured several draft deferments to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, to outline a credible plan for stemming the chaos and dangers he has unleashed in and around Iran. ©Bloomberg

The author is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.