WASHINGTON—The length of America’s military commitment to its confrontation with Iran depends on what the goals are. And they keep changing.
On Sunday alone, President Trump and his allies offered at least two separate objectives for the assault on Iran, muddying Washington’s intentions for ending a conflict that has engulfed the Middle East and killed three American service members.
Early Sunday morning, close Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said reducing the nuclear and missile threat from Iran was the intention, not regime change. The White House later reiterated that point in a statement.
Elaborating in an interview with the Atlantic, Trump said he was open to discussions with Iran’s current leadership that could end the war if U.S. demands were met.
But hours later, Trump swung back to one of his original goals from the beginning of the air assault on Saturday. In a video, he urged Iranians to “take back your country” from the regime, vowing the U.S. will “be there to help.”
The timeframe for military action has also changed. On Saturday, he posted on social media that the assault will last a week or more. A day later, he told the Daily Mail the fighting has “always been a four-week process.”
The whiplash-inducing statements over the past two days come as the U.S. and Israel hit more than 1,000 targets, prompting Tehran to retaliate against regional bases where American and European troops are present, as well as Gulf countries.
And as Trump pointed out in his Sunday video, the longer U.S. forces are there, the greater the chance for more casualties. “That’s the way it is,” he said, “but we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.”
Some analysts say that if the policy is confusing, it is because the White House appears to be improvising.
“The administration—and the president—have hardly been the model of clarity on this war. It looks like they are making it up as they go along,” said Justin Logan, defense and foreign-policy director of the Cato Institute think tank in Washington. “The present policy looks more like incoherence.”
Asked for comment about the mixed messaging, the White House said in a statement that Trump had sought to end Tehran’s nuclear work and ballistic-missile capabilities diplomatically, and ordered attacks to eliminate a national-security threat only after Iran failed to yield to his demands.
The statement didn’t mention the goal of regime change or the prospect of empowering the country’s long-suffering opposition.
Depending on the goal, the U.S. military could be committed to the region for just a few days, or a whole lot longer.
If destroying Iran’s missile factories and surviving nuclear facilities is the principal objective, the U.S. military might be able to reduce its force levels more quickly, even if the future of Iran’s political establishment and the freedom of its population remain in doubt.
But if facilitating a transfer of power to opponents of the regime is one of the priorities, that would likely be a longer and far more challenging undertaking.
The most politically expedient path for Trump is to declare victory without relying on the Iranian opposition to come to power, a variation of the strategy he employed in Venezuela in which much of the regime remained intact.
Under this scenario, Trump could try to claim success in a couple of days, saying that he has weakened Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities and hobbled its navy, and that the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has paid the price, said Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator. “Then he could say I have given the Iranian people a chance, but they will determine the future,” Ross added.
If Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia remained intact, as currently appears still to be the case, the Iranian public’s realistic prospects for wresting control from their authoritarian government might not be very great—unless, Ross added, the U.S. used military force and other forms of pressure to weaken the regime’s mechanisms of repression.
From the start, Trump’s priorities have never been entirely consistent.
In January, Trump threatened to attack Iran in support of antiregime protesters after Tehran’s brutal crackdown killed an estimated 32,000 people, but he didn’t follow through. As a carrier strike group and warplanes amassed off Iran’s coast, Trump turned his demands to dismantling Iran’s nuclear work, missile program and support for proxies via diplomatic negotiations.
Then during last week’s State of the Union address, he cited Iran’s five decades of aggression in the Middle East and toward the U.S.—including lethal support for Iraqi militias to kill Americans—as a reason to remove the threat emanating from Tehran.
A looming question is what might happen should the regime crumble under U.S.-led pressure.
The Central Intelligence Agency in recent weeks assessed that Khamenei’s death could lead to hardliners from the IRGC or another faction in Iran taking power, according to people familiar with the matter.
In an interview with ABC News on Saturday, Trump refused to say who could assume power in Iran, but added, “We have a very good idea.”
A former Trump administration official who focused on Iran said that when he departed a few months ago, he hadn’t seen a plan for what would follow regime collapse in Iran. If a plan was put together recently, the former official said, it was likely compiled quickly and without much vetting from multiple parts of the government.
The former official also said that a senior Iranian leader, Ali Larijani, had traveled to Oman and Russia in recent weeks. The broad suspicion was Larijani sought to build support for Tehran’s defense or was crafting the true nuclear deal to offer the U.S. But the former official said it was also possible Larijani was selling himself as a successor to Khamenei should the cleric be deposed or killed.
Larijani has sent messages via Oman to rekindle diplomatic negotiations, U.S. and Arab officials said. “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” Trump told the Atlantic magazine Sunday. “I have to look at the situation at the time it happens.”
It is possible that Trump’s military campaign doesn’t overthrow the regime and that his attempts at a deal similarly fail. In such a scenario, according to former U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller, “Trump could find himself with no regime change, no deal and no capacity to honor the promises he’s made to the Iranian people.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com