Trump Could End the War Tomorrow. I Don’t Think He Will.

Energy markets breathed a sigh of relief on Monday after President Donald Trump suggested he could declare victory over Iran at any time. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he told CBS News. In a press conference later in the day he suggested several times that the war had achieved its basic objectives of rolling back Iran’s weapons programs and that it would be over “very soon.”

As I listened closely, however, I could hear Trump circling back to a rationale for staying in the fight long enough to ensure the United States doesn’t find itself back where we started in a few short years. Let me explain why I believe Trump is more likely than not to listen to his instinct to “finish the job,” as family members of recently fallen U.S. service personnel beseeched him this weekend, even if it means weeks (not days) of war still lay ahead.

In the four years I worked for him during his first term, I learned that Trump sees the threat posed by the Iranian regime—to U.S. national security, regional stability, and even to Trump personally—as being categorically different from that posed by other U.S. adversaries. “Look, they’re just evil,” was how he put it last Tuesday while hosting German chancellor Friedrich Merz. “It’s not the politics; it’s their whole philosophy.”

The only other nation Trump regarded in remotely similar terms was North Korea. But then he tested his assessment of the threat by meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in person three times in 2018 and 2019. I accompanied Trump for the first two encounters and believe he came away with a sense that Kim could be deterred. Trump, with good reason, concluded long ago that the Iranian regime cannot.

Trump gave Tehran plenty of opportunities to prove this instinct wrong. This administration has made good-faith efforts to reach a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. During his first term, Trump signaled his willingness to meet with Iranian leaders directly. French president Emmanuel Macron tried to broker an encounter and the U.S. president came within moments of getting on a phone call with then–Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in late 2019. But Rouhani—who, in any case, had nothing close to the authority of now-deceased Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—chickened out.

Weeks later, Iranian proxy forces in Iraq killed a U.S. defense contractor, an act that Trump answered with air strikes on those same proxies. Tehran saw this as an opportunity to try to drive the United States out of the Middle East for good; Washington soon learned that the IRGC Quds Force leader, Major General Qasem Soleimani, was planning to attack U.S. outposts throughout the Middle East. Trump made the decision to strike Soleimani first.

It was one of the decisions by Trump that impressed me most. He wasn’t facing pressure from his team to do it. In fact, some of his closest advisers issued sober warnings of what could go wrong. The president heard these views out and then he made his decision, with a sense of gravity and conviction. (When I first heard about the president’s decision, I thought it was a recipe for disaster. I soon came to believe it was a masterstroke.)

Soleimani was killed soon after, on January 3, 2020. Since that day, the Iranian regime has tried repeatedly to assassinate Trump (along with others who worked for him).

Trump knows that newly named Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the same leader who tried to kill Trump and who Israeli forces killed 10 days ago—won’t be the kind of guy to let bygones be bygones.

“I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei,” Trump said in an interview last week. In his press conference tonight, he said he was “disappointed” the regime had selected Mojtaba “because we think it’s going to lead to just more of the same problem for the country.”

Therein lies the dilemma Trump seemed to be contending with in his public statements on Monday: He can wage a short, indecisive war—one in which both Trump and the Iranians claim victory (regime survival is all it will take for the regime to make such a claim). Or he can wage a longer war that has a higher chance of preventing the regime from repeating its congenital cycle of bad-faith negotiations, pursuit of nuclear weapons, and proxy warfare all over again.

That is why I suspect Trump was speaking from his gut when he said tonight: “I want a system that’s not going to be attacking us. We want a system that can lead to many years of peace. And if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.”

Matt Pottinger was deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. He chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is CEO of research and advisory firm Garnaut Global LLC.