It is difficult, in this strange season of American life, to know how one ought to feel about the war in Iran. Instinctively, we do not root against the United States; patriotism is not a switch one flips off because a president behaves recklessly. And yet the moment is so tangled, so freighted with contradiction, that even the simplest sentiment feels compromised — as though one were being asked to cheer for a team whose playbook remains locked in the coach’s desk.
Donald Trump campaigned on avoiding foreign wars. He castigated Democrats for the entanglements of the past. Then he created the so-called Board of Peace, publicly campaigned for the Nobel Prize, and simultaneously escalated confrontations abroad while issuing threats toward Cuba, Greenland, and even Canada. In Venezuela, the United States carried out what was, in effect, a regime-decapitation operation without an international mandate, forcibly removing Nicolás Maduro from power. Meanwhile, the administration has done comparatively little to restrain Russia in Ukraine — a conflict where American influence might actually matter.
The contradictions are difficult to ignore, even for those inclined to squint charitably.
But the concern runs deeper. A “victory” in Iran — whatever that word might mean in this context — risks emboldening the administration to search for new adversaries, real or imagined. Cuba and Greenland have already been rhetorically cast in that role. And many Americans, watching the administration’s governance grow increasingly self-serving, wonder whether any expansion of presidential authority is something to celebrate.
Yet even this anxiety is complicated. The friendly media ecosystem surrounding the administration, combined with a remarkable indifference to cost — financial, human, or geopolitical — means the outcome in Iran may not matter politically at all. If the war becomes expensive, if it drags on, if it ends inconclusively, would that alter the administration’s narrative? Perhaps not. The story, after all, is written before the facts arrive.
Meanwhile, the war is costing Americans dearly: billions of dollars, higher gas prices, and rising prices across the broader economy. One hesitates to wish for a disastrous outcome simply to deny the president a political triumph. But one also hesitates to cheer for a “victory” that may deepen the very conditions that produced the conflict — a cycle in which strategic miscalculation becomes its own justification.
And beneath all of this, real people — Iranian civilians, American service members, regional allies — are paying the price for a conflict whose purpose remains undefined. That fact alone should give us pause, even if official Washington increasingly seems incapable of it.
The deeper challenge is that it is not clear what “winning” would even look like. From the public vantage point, the conflict appears to lack a coherent and executable political objective. Perhaps the administration and its allies hoped the Iranian public would rise up after key leaders were eliminated. That has not happened. Whether out of fear, nationalism, or genuine support for the regime, the hoped-for internal revolt never materialized.
Instead, Iran responded in ways it had previously avoided even after October 7, after the Gaza war, after the Lebanon escalation, and even after the 2025 strike on its nuclear facility. It closed the Strait of Hormuz and struck U.S.-aligned Arab states across the region. Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping lanes and threaten regional infrastructure altered the strategic equation. Perhaps Tehran felt cornered. Perhaps it underestimated its own leverage. Either way, the result increasingly resembles stalemate — with rumors that any eventual negotiated settlement may prove more favorable to Iran than the framework once negotiated under President Obama.
And here is the structural truth that cannot be ignored:
Wars without clear objectives tend to serve the machinery that wages them, not the people who pay for them.
The incentives — political, economic, institutional — run ahead of the strategy.
Which brings us back to the central dilemma:
How does one root for the home team when one cannot discern the rules of the game, the objective, or even the scoreboard?
A ground invasion? Iran has done nothing that would justify such an escalation under any recognizable standard of international law. A campaign to destroy its conventional military? A push for regime change? The administration has not articulated a clear end state, and it is difficult to support — or oppose — a strategy that remains undefined.
This has been the administration’s central problem from the beginning: not merely the morality of its actions, but the absence of any coherent purpose behind them. And it leaves the public in an impossible position. We do not know what we are rooting for. We do not know what we are rooting against.
And in a republic, that confusion is not a minor inconvenience.
It is a warning sign.