As the U.S.-led war in Iran enters its second week, the central question remains unanswered: What political condition would allow it to stop? The coalition prosecuting this war is not aligned on what “victory” would require. That misalignment makes the war harder to control and even harder to end.
Wars with unclear or competing objectives are difficult for any single government or military to manage. They become nearly impossible — and far more dangerous — when the coalition fighting them does not share a clear vision of what “done” looks like.
Israel’s definition of success extends beyond permanently reducing Iran as a strategic danger. It also wants the broader regional threat dismantled: Hezbollah degraded beyond recovery, proxy pipelines disrupted and the political-military environment reshaped so hostile forces cannot regenerate under Iranian sponsorship. That objective points toward a fundamentally different regime in Tehran.
The American objective is harder to pin down. U.S. leaders have articulated so many aims — from counterproliferation to missile destruction to regime transformation — that it remains unclear what condition would actually end American operations.
President Trump has moved from limited rationales to maximalist demands: “unconditional surrender,” a claim that he must be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leadership, and open-ended promises to keep striking until objectives are achieved. On Saturday morning he went further, declaring that Iran has “surrendered to its Middle East neighbors,” predicting “complete collapse” and suggesting that new “areas and groups of people” are now under consideration for targeting. The rhetoric keeps expanding; the stopping condition remains undefined.
Divergent endpoints imply different time horizons and tolerances for risk. This fault line was evident after the strikes on Iran last June. The U.S. moved quickly toward a ceasefire while Israel carried out additional strikes before pulling back after a call between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel now appears willing to sustain a long campaign if the payoff is a generational reduction of threat. The United States says it wants to avoid open-ended war, but its leaders cannot define a clear stopping condition. In those circumstances, American power has a way of continuing — more airstrikes, more targets, more American casualties — until the conflict becomes the new normal.
The United States has lived this pattern before. In Afghanistan, a U.S.-led coalition began with a narrow mission after 9/11 and expanded over time into counterinsurgency and state-building without a stable, shared definition of what “done” meant. It did not end when strategy said objectives were achieved; it ended when political will collapsed, and withdrawal became its own crisis.
The problem compounds as the war widens beyond the U.S. and Israel. Gulf states hosting U.S. forces want something narrower still: containment, stability and protection of economic security. They are not pursuing a regional remake. They want the spillover on infrastructure and internal security to stop. Their pressure on Washington will pull toward de-escalation and an offramp as Israel’s logic pulls toward greater pressure.
Iran does not have to defeat the United States militarily to claim success. It only has to survive and impose enough cost through drones, disruption and endurance that the coalition begins to fracture politically. The longer the war persists without a defined political destination, the more valuable that strategy becomes.
Without a clear, shared end state, the war is easiest to explain to the public in kinetic terms. Commanders can brief strike missions flown, launchers cratered, radar sites destroyed, senior leaders killed. While those metrics matter, they are no substitute for strategy. They do not answer the only question that ends wars: What political condition are these strikes meant to produce? When leaders can’t — or won’t — articulate that condition, what can be easily measured starts to stand in for what matters. The nation is left celebrating activity while the pathway from violence to political outcome remains undefined.
Coordinating more strikes is easier than coordinating the termination of war. This is the strategic trap of coalitions with incongruent end states: Military progress becomes easier to describe than political progress, and more strikes become easier to justify than settlement. Escalation produces measurable output; settlement requires agreement. Because the coalition cannot agree on what political outcome would allow it to stop, the war effort drifts from “achieve objectives” to “keep pressing.”
Ending this war will require agreement on what outcome counts as success. Right now, the coalition partners do not appear to share one. What would Israel accept if the regime survives? What would the gulf states accept if their citizens and infrastructure remain under threat? What would the United States accept if “unconditional surrender” proves unattainable without greater escalation? The coalition can agree on another round of strikes more readily than it can agree on what would make stopping acceptable. The risk is that by pushing the strategic decisions down the road, the ending is imposed by fatigue, fracture or crisis rather than chosen deliberately.
The nation is entitled to more than operational briefings and assurances that shifting objectives will be achieved. Somewhere in the American government, someone should be able to explain the political objective these operations are meant to serve, the conditions under which that objective will be judged achieved and the point at which combat operations end. Decades of forever wars should have made that non-negotiable.
If the United States and Israel do not share a common view of what “done” looks like — and if other partners are pulling toward stability while Israel presses for transformation — the danger is not only escalation. It is an open-ended war with no agreed-upon stopping condition. That is how a “limited” war becomes the next forever war.
Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. He writes about leadership and democracy.
