Outside the Beltway

Trump to Expand and/or End Iran War Soon

The Art of the Deal in action.

James Joyner · Saturday, March 21, 2026 · 6 comments

CBS News (“Trump is strategizing means to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpiles, sources say“):

The Trump administration has been strategizing methods and options to secure or extract Iran’s nuclear materials, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions, as a U.S.-Israel-led military campaign against Tehran enters a more uncertain phase.

The timing of any such an operation — if President Trump were to order it — remained unclear Friday night. One source said he has made no decision yet.

But planning has centered on the possible deployment of forces from the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the elite military unit often tasked with the most sensitive counter-proliferation missions, two of the sources told CBS News.

The private deliberations on the nuclear material come amid an evolving conflict that in its opening focused on degrading Iran’s conventional military capabilities — including air defenses, missile systems and key infrastructure tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

[…]

More recently, the administration turned its attention to a more enduring objective laid out by Mr. Trump at the start of the war: ensuring that Iran is no longer capable of producing a nuclear weapon.

As of last summer, Iran had amassed some 972 pounds of 60%-enriched uranium, which is a short step away from weapons-grade material, according to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. Much of that uranium remains buried underneath nuclear sites that were bombed by a U.S. operation last summer.

U.S. officials have said the Trump administration has not ruled out trying to retrieve Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium as part of the current military campaign. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this week that “it’s an option on the table for him.”

Any mission to seize the uranium would be arduous and potentially risky.

“We’re talking about cylinders containing gas of highly contaminated uranium hexafluoride at 60%, so it’s very difficult to handle,” Rafael Grossi, the IAEA’s director-general, told CBS News “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” this week. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. I know that there are incredible military capacities to do that, but it would be [a] very challenging operation for sure.”

The U.S. intelligence community assessed last spring that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear weapon, and Iran insists that its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes. But in recent years, Iran has enriched uranium to 60%, beyond the levels necessary for most non-military uses. The IAEA has said Iran is the only non-nuclear weapons state to enrich uranium to that level.

Since the war’s outset, Mr. Trump has listed ensuring that Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon as one of the war’s goals.

CBS News (“Trump administration making heavy preparations for potential use of ground troops in Iran“):

Pentagon officials have made detailed preparations for deploying U.S. ground forces into Iran, multiple sources briefed on the discussions told CBS News.

Senior military commanders have submitted specific requests aimed at preparing for such an option as President Trump weighs moves in the U.S.-Israel-led conflict with Iran, the sources said.

Mr. Trump has been deliberating whether to position ground forces in the region, sources said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. It was unclear under what circumstances he would authorize the use of troops on the ground.

“No, I’m not putting troops anywhere,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday when asked about ground troops, but quickly added: “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

[…]

The U.S. is preparing to deploy elements of the 82nd Airborne Division into the Middle East region.

The planning involves the Army’s Global Response Force and the Marine Corps’ Marine Expeditionary Unit.

Thousands of Marines are being moved now to the Middle East. Three warships and about 2,200 Marines from an expeditionary unit departed California earlier this week, according to two U.S. officials. It was the second such Marine unit sent since the war began, and it could be a few weeks before it’s in place. The first was sent from the Pacific and is still making its way into the region.

AP (“Iran threatens tourism sites and US sends more Marines to Middle East as Trump hints at wind-down“):

hree weeks into an escalating war in the Middle East, Iran threatened to expand its retaliatory attacks to include recreational and tourist sites worldwide, as the U.S. announced it was sending more warships and Marines to the region.

Following news of the deployments, President Donald Trump said later Friday on social media that his administration in fact was considering “winding down” military operations in the region. The mixed messages came after another climb in oil prices plunged the U.S. stock market, and was followed by a Trump administration announcement that it will lift sanctions on Iranian oil loaded on ships, a move aimed at wrangling soaring fuel prices.

The war, meanwhile, has shown no signs of abating.

[…]

The U.S. and Israel have offered shifting rationales for the war, from hoping to foment an uprising that topples Iran’s leadership to eliminating its nuclear and missile programs. There have been no public signs of any such uprising and no end to the war in sight.

In his social media post, the president said, “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East.”

That seemed at odds with his administration’s move to bolster its firepower in the region and request another $200 billion from Congress to fund the war.

The U.S. is deploying three more amphibious assault ships and roughly 2,500 additional Marines to the Middle East, an official told The Associated Press. Two other U.S. officials confirmed that ships were deploying, without saying where they were headed. All three spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.

Days earlier the U.S. redirected another group of amphibious assault ships carrying another 2,500 Marines from the Pacific to the Middle East. The Marines will join more than 50,000 U.S. troops already in the region.

Trump has said he has no plans to send ground forces into Iran but also has asserted that he retains all options.

WaPo (“Trump signals U.S. may leave allies to manage Iran fallout“):

President Donald Trump on Friday evening said the United States was considering “winding down” its military efforts in Iran even asthousands of Marines sailed toward the region, leaving unclear whether the White Houseplanned to walk away or escalate its three-week-old war.

Trump’s announcement on social media that he may step back from the war in Iran sought to escalate pressure on allies to assume a greater role in securing the region’s oil shipments — an increasingly urgent concern as energy prices spike. Trump has complained in increasingly bitter terms that U.S. allies are dragging their feet about joining a fight that he launched without consulting them.

“The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not!” he wrote Friday on Truth Social, addingthat he would be open to helping other countries “in their Hormuz efforts.”

“It will be an easy Military Operation for them,” he said.

[…]

Trump said Friday that the United States was close to eliminating Iran’s missile stockpile, destroying its defense industry, navy and air force, and “Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability.”

WaPo (“U.S.-Israeli rift widens over potential endgame in Iran“):

When the United States and Israel initiated the war against Iran last month, their messages were perfectly in sync on the sweeping goal of regime change.

President Donald Trump told Iranians to seize their “only chance” for generations to “take over your government,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored them to “cast off the yoke of this murderous regime.”

But nearly three weeks into the conflict, the war aims are diverging between a U.S. president who saw the historic opportunity of a quick military victory with only modest economic pain and an Israeli leader with grander visions of toppling a regime he’s sought to vanquish for 40 years, said multiple U.S., Israeli and Middle East officials and lawmakers familiar with the matter.

Trump’s latest outburst against Israel’s attacks on Iran’s huge South Pars gas field on Wednesday laid bare the tensions between the two allies and the inconsistency of the president’s approach to the conflict.

Trump said Israel had “violently lashed out” at Iran and distanced himself from the assault on the world’s largest natural gas deposit, which Iran shares with Qatar, a close U.S. ally and host of Washington’s biggest military base in the Gulf.

“The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it,” Trump said on Truth Social.

But multiple officials directly contradicted that claim in conversations with The Washington Post, saying that while the U.S. was not involved in the strike, the Israelis informed Washington about the attack in advance.

The incident, which drove energy prices higher and prompted retaliatory Iranian missile fire at Qatar’s main gas facility and Saudi Arabia’s capital, was indicative of Trump’s vacillation as he’s tried to manage an unpopular war that has killed 13 Americans to date.

[…]

The White House denied that Trump has allowed the war’s scope to become murky or open-ended.

“Unlike the years-long foreign entanglements of the past that lacked clear objectives, President Trump has outlined four distinct goals for Operation Epic Fury,” said a White House official.

The goals are destroying Iran’s ballistic missile program, sinking its navy, neutralizing its regional allies and guaranteeing it can’t obtain a nuclear weapon, the official said.

WSJ (“Iran Believes It’s Winning—and Wants a Steep Price to End the War“):

Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran’s dominance of Middle East energy resources for decades to come.

This attitude may prove to be a dangerous misreading of President Trump’s determination, or of Israel’s capacity to inflict strategic blows on the Islamic Republic’s surviving leadership and military capabilities.

[…]

Trump said this week the U.S. would wrap up the conflict in the “near future” even as the Pentagon dispatched thousands of additional Marines to the Middle East.

The problem is, Iran also has a say in when the guns fall silent—and, for now, it seems to think time works to its benefit.

Despite optimistic U.S. and Israeli pronouncements about destroying launchers and missile stocks, Iran has retained the ability to fire dozens of ballistic missiles, and many more drones, every day across the Middle East.

[…]

“The Iranians aren’t ready to end the war because they have learned an important lesson: They can, comparatively easily and cheaply, cause a lot of damage and disruption. They now want the whole world to learn that lesson, too,” said Dina Esfandiary, an analyst on Iran and author of a book on Iran’s foreign relations.

Seeing its leverage, Tehran has pledged that it will agree to a cease-fire only if Washington and the Gulf states pay a steep price. The spokesman of the Iranian Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, Ebrahim Rezaei, said after Friday’s meeting with military commanders that any talks with the U.S. are off the agenda as Tehran “focuses on punishing the aggressors.” Other Iranian leaders have been just as triumphalist, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi describing Iran as another Vietnam for the U.S.

That rhetoric may underestimate Washington’s resolve.

“This hubris is dangerous because they are not smart enough to understand that President Trump will never let them win. They don’t understand how far he’s willing to go,” said Jason Greenblatt, who served as the White House special envoy for the Middle East in the first Trump administration. “This can come at a huge cost, but the cost of not taking care of the problem will be many times more expensive over many, many years.”

Demands voiced by Iranian leaders in recent days as conditions for ending the war include massive reparations from the U.S. and its allies and the expulsion of American military forces from the region. They have also called for transforming the Strait of Hormuz—an international waterway where free navigation is guaranteed under international law—into an Iranian toll booth controlling one-third of the world’s shipborne crude oil.

NYT Editorial Board (“Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran“):

From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.

Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day. Many people are so accustomed to his lies that they hardly notice them anymore.

Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.

[…]

Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obliged to face reality. In retrospect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. The pattern is repeating. Before Mr. Trump began this war, he brushed aside warnings from his top military adviser that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz to traffic it does not approve. The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.

It’s only a lie if you believe it to be untrue. In this case, it’s far more likely that he believes what he’s saying, even though the things he says are mutually contradictory.

As Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwarz put it, “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

He believes he’s a man of peace—deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize—despite routinely resorting to military action. As with trade wars, he believes shooting wars are easy to win. Even though his hand-picked military advisor has told him otherwise, he thinks his maximalist goals are achievable quickly and with minimal cost.

In his mind, there’s no contradiction between preparing for sending in ground forces to seize Iran’s nuclear materials—and perhaps more?—and mulling over declaring victory and leaving it to regional partners and allies to pick up the pieces. His gut will tell him which course to take.

As laid out nearly four decades ago:

• “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
• “Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.”
• “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first. In addition, once I’ve made a deal, I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work, because anything can happen, even to the best-laid plans.”

Sure, it may seem like a reckless way to run a war. But it got him to where he is today.