EXCLUSIVE: Trump has already lost control of his Iran war

By Qasim Ahmad 

WASHINGTON (MNTV) – The missiles had barely stopped falling when it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong for the architects of this war.

Within days of the United States and Israel launching what was billed as a swift, decisive military campaign against Iran — one designed to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s leadership and trigger the collapse of a ‘theocracy’ — the plan was already in ruins. The Supreme Leader was dead. But Iran was not.

Trita Parsi, one of the foremost experts on U.S.-Iran relations and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has been watching this unfold with the grim recognition of a man who spent years warning it would end this way. In an exclusive interview with MNTV, he is characteristically direct.

“The administration’s plan — based on an exaggerated view of Iran’s relative weakness — was that the ‘theocracy’ in Iran would implode shortly after the assassination of the Supreme Leader,” he says. 

“By Monday morning, before the markets opened, the war was supposed to be over, and Trump would be basking in yet another glorious victory, proving all his skeptics wrong.”

That glorious victory never came.

War of choice gone wrong

To understand how Washington arrived at this moment, one must understand the assumptions that drove it there. The Trump administration entered this conflict — widely described by critics as a war of choice — convinced that Iran was a hollow state, a regime teetering on the edge of collapse, needing only a sharp enough shock to bring it down. Kill the Supreme Leader, destroy key military assets, and watch the Islamic Republic implode from within.

It was a theory of victory as much as a theory of war. And it failed almost immediately.

Parsi, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and whose debut book Treacherous Alliance — a landmark study of the secret dealings between Israel, Iran, and the United States — won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, identifies a telling pattern in the administration’s conduct since the opening salvos.

“The hapless efforts to justify the war, the ever-shifting war objectives, the exaggerated gestures to signal control — all suggest that, only a few days into the war, Trump has already lost control,” he says.

“The 19th-century Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke famously observed that no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” he adds.

But Parsi argues this conflict has gone well beyond that cautionary maxim. 

“Trump’s Plan A came crashing down only 48 hours into this war. No such implosion has occurred. Nor are we seeing signs that it is likely to occur in the short term.”

Iran is setting terms

With Plan A in tatters, something remarkable and deeply consequential has begun to shift — the balance of initiative on the battlefield, and perhaps more importantly, in the war of perception and political endurance.

“It is increasingly Iran that is defining the geography of this war, its intensity, and most crucially, its length in time,” Parsi observes.

This is not, he is careful to note, the same as saying Iran is winning. There is no evidence of that. But Tehran understands something about Donald Trump that may prove to be a decisive strategic asset: he cannot afford a long war. 

His entire political brand — the dealmaker, the winner, the man who gets things done fast — is incompatible with an open-ended military quagmire in the Middle East.

“Iran’s prospects of getting Trump to lose the war, or cut it short, are increasing precisely because Trump is scrambling for a Plan B,” Parsi says.

It is the kind of analysis that comes from decades of close study. Parsi’s second book, A Single Roll of the Dice, chronicled Obama’s early and largely failed diplomatic outreach to Tehran. His third, Losing an Enemy, remains the definitive insider account of the negotiations that produced the 2015 nuclear deal — the very agreement that Trump tore up in his first term, helping set in motion the chain of events that has led here. The historical comparison he offers now is sobering: “George W. Bush’s Plan A in Iraq didn’t start falling apart until August 2005 — five months into the war.”

Trump’s has unraveled in days.

Messaging shifts reveals everything

Nothing signals a struggling wartime leader quite like sudden, unexplained changes in messaging. And that is precisely what observers have begun to notice from Washington.

“Knowing that the Iranians thought Trump could not sustain the war for long, Trump suddenly started saying that the war may go on for four weeks,” Parsi notes — a striking departure from the triumphalist tone of the opening days. The message was pointed directly at Tehran: don’t think time is on your side.

But in trying to project resolve, the administration inadvertently confirmed its anxiety. A leader confident in a quick victory does not need to warn his adversary about a long war.

Plan B: from air campaign to land invasion

What comes next may be the most alarming development of all.

Rather than acknowledging the failure of the initial campaign and seeking an exit, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down — and escalating in ways that few anticipated when this conflict began.

“Trump has decided to throw good money after bad,” Parsi says, “but now with an even more shocking plan: arming Kurdish separatists in Iran and, most likely, also sending U.S. troops into Iran through the Kurdish areas, together with Israeli special forces.”

The implications are staggering. What was conceived as a rapid 48-hour air campaign to shock Iran into submission is now fast deteriorating, in Parsi’s words, into “a land invasion with U.S. troops on the ground.”

Born in Iran and raised in Sweden before building his career in Washington, Parsi brings to this analysis a perspective that is at once personal, academic, and political. He has testified before Congress, advised policymakers, and for years argued at the Quincy Institute that the path being taken by successive American administrations toward Iran would end not in security, but in catastrophe. The echoes of past American misadventures — Afghanistan, Iraq — are, to him, not just historical footnotes. They are a pattern repeating itself in real time.

Collision course with no off-ramp

As of now, Parsi sees little prospect of either side stepping back from the brink in the near term. 

The logic of escalation has taken hold, and both sides believe they can outlast the other.

“Trump thinks he can turn the tables on Iran with his Kurdish plan,” Parsi explains, “and Tehran believes a land invasion will help unify the population against invaders and separatists.” 

Both sides believe they can absorb and sustain the casualties that a ground war will inevitably produce.

Those casualties, Parsi insists, will be massive.

And that is perhaps the most important thing to say about all of this — a point that risks being buried beneath the strategic analysis, the geopolitical chessboard, and the clash of political egos.

“Not a single death in this unnecessary war can be justified,” Parsi says.

It is a simple sentence. But in the fog of a war that is expanding by the hour, it deserves to be heard clearly.