Don’t Panic About Trump’s Iran Strategy Just Yet
Kurt Schlichter
No, what President Trump is doing now vis-à-vis Iran would not be my strategy if I had been elected by the American people to be the commander-in-chief. My take on strategy—I’m a graduate of the Army War College, and they gave me a master’s degree in strategy—is pretty simple. First, you figure out your strategy, and then you beat the living snot out of the enemy until they give up and you attain your objective. Now, I was in the Gulf War, which is the last time we arguably did that on a large scale, and we did it very successfully. Admittedly, I was far in the rear, leading a heavily armed car wash, but I had a good view of what was going on at the VII Corps main command post. Our forces found the enemy and killed them until they stopped fighting. It’s remarkably effective when you do that.
But that’s the operational level. That’s where you’re doing the fighting that enacts the strategy. The strategic level is higher, broader, and more all-encompassing. And one of the things that’s going on here is an overlap between operational and strategic thinking, at least in the public pronouncements. What Donald Trump is announcing as his objectives are arguably operational objectives—destroy their Navy, destroy their air defenses, destroy their nuclear capabilities. Maybe we can argue that those are strategic considerations, but they are at least hybrid ones. The real strategic objectives are the big-picture, long-term stuff. We want an Iranian government that’s not going to keep trying to kill us and to end the undeclared 50-year war they’ve been waging against us, and we only recently started waging back. We also want to stop them from supporting Islamic psychopaths around the globe—hello, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Finally, we would prefer the regime not murder vast numbers of its citizens. And these add up to one strategic goal, but speaking the phrase is like saying the word that the Knights Who Say “Ni!” cannot hear.
That phrase is “regime change.” The proper strategic objective about our enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is “regime change.”
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/06/11/dont-panic-about-trumps-iran-strategy-just-yet-n2677524
