When President Trump announced Operation Epic Fury at 2 a.m. on February 28 in an eight-minute Truth Social video, the scope was vast. The United States and Israel would not just hit Iranian nuclear sites. They would destroy Iran’s missile arsenal, dismantle its proxy networks, “annihilate” its navy, and see the Islamic Republic itself replaced. “It will be yours to take,” Trump told Iranians watching the address. “This will probably be your only chance for generations.”

Three months later, the war’s stated aims have shrunk almost beyond recognition. The framework now circulating in Washington and Tehran is narrow, transactional and limited to two questions: when ships start moving again through the Strait of Hormuz, and what happens to roughly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that Iran is being asked to dispose of “in principle.” Regime change, regional containment, dismantling proxies, ending the missile threat — none of those appear in the memorandum of understanding now being negotiated.

The collapse of ambition has come in stages.

Phase One: A War About Everything

The administration laid out four military objectives at the opening of Operation Epic Fury — preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, destroying the missile arsenal, degrading proxy networks, eliminating the navy — along with a fifth, political objective of regime change. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jointly called on Iranian civilians to seize control of the country once its leadership had been decapitated. Mossad chief David Barnea had designed the underlying plan, presented to senior Trump officials in mid-January. By February 13, Trump was publicly endorsing regime change as “the best thing that could happen” and telling reporters “there are people” he wanted to take over.

The opening salvo killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of the senior Iranian command. It also triggered the most extensive missile and drone barrage of the war, with more than 600 attacks against U.S. facilities in Iraq alone, according to a senior State Department official.

Phase Two: The Rationale Begins to Wobble

Within days, the administration’s case for war began contradicting itself. Trump had spent months insisting that Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 strikes, had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Now his envoy Steve Witkoff was warning that Iran was “a week away” from bomb-grade material.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the strikes as a counterproliferation operation with a “very specific mission.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth assured reporters the mission was “very, very clear.” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after a classified briefing that the goals of the operation had changed “four or five times” in a matter of weeks.

By mid-March, an Axios report indicated that Trump now viewed regime change as merely “an additional victory” — not a requirement — and intended to end the war once his stated military objectives were met.

Phase Three: The Timeline Starts to Slip

Trump initially said the war would run four to six weeks. On Day 26, the administration submitted a 15-point ceasefire proposal to Iran through Pakistani intermediaries, covering sanctions relief, nuclear rollback, IAEA monitoring, missile limits and reopening the Strait. On the same day, it ordered up to 4,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to the region. Iran responded by mocking the proposal — its military spokesman said the United States was “negotiating with itself” — and posted five counter-conditions designed to be unacceptable, including Iranian sovereignty over the Strait and war reparations. Trump extended his deadline for strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure by ten days. Then he extended it again.

Phase Four: Declare Victory, Keep Fighting

On April 8, the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire that the White House framed as a vindication. “Peace Through Strength: Operation Epic Fury Crushes Iranian Threat,” read the official press release. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the war had always been “a four-to-six-week military operation to dismantle the military threat posed by the radical Islamic Iranian regime.” The administration informed Congress that hostilities had ended, a move that conveniently kept the operation under the 60-day War Powers Act threshold.

The fighting did not actually stop. U.S. and Iranian forces continued exchanging fire around the Strait of Hormuz. Iran kept hitting commercial shipping. The Pentagon kept describing the conflict as ongoing under the Epic Fury name even as Rubio publicly declared on May 5 that the operation was “over.”

NBC News reported that the Pentagon was considering re-naming the conflict “Operation Sledgehammer” if the ceasefire collapsed entirely, a tacit admission that one war ended on paper and another may already be underway.

Phase Five: A Transactional Endgame

The deal Trump described Saturday as “largely negotiated” is, in substance, a sliver of what the war was launched to accomplish. The 12,000-mile missile threat that Trump warned could “soon reach the American homeland” goes unaddressed. Iran’s regional proxies, which Hegseth had vowed to defang, are not on the table. The Iranian government — which Trump told its citizens they had a generational chance to overthrow — is not only intact but party to the deal, with Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the man killed in the opening strike, having reportedly signed off on the “broad template.”

What remains is two items. Iran agrees in principle to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, with the method to be worked out. The Strait of Hormuz reopens without tolls. Everything else — sanctions, missiles, proxies, future enrichment — is pushed into a second round of talks scheduled for sometime in the next 30 to 60 days.

A senior administration official summarized the U.S. position to reporters this weekend with a three-word doctrine: “No dust, no dollars.” The phrase fits comfortably onto a press release. It would not have fit the war Trump announced in February.

The Political Math

The contraction tracks Trump’s domestic situation. His approval rating has fallen to 37 percent, the lowest of his two terms combined, in the most recent New York Times/Siena poll. Gas prices stand at $4.56 a gallon, a four-year high. Nearly 80 percent of voters blame his administration for the price spike, according to a Fox News poll. Republicans in Congress moved this past week toward a resolution forcing him to end the war without further authorization and stripped $1 billion in security spending from his reconciliation package.

Iran has its own pressures. Its missile salvos had fallen by 70 to 85 percent within days of the opening strikes, according to the Hudson Institute. The Strait blockade has redirected more than 100 commercial ships and choked off the economic recovery Tehran needs to consolidate the new leadership. A senior administration official told reporters this weekend that most people in the Iranian system “don’t love the deal, but they also don’t like the idea of going back to war.”

Both sides, in other words, have arrived at the same place by different routes — needing an exit more than they need a victory.

What’s Left

The war was launched on the premise that Iran was an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, that its missiles could soon reach American territory, and that its regime was a destabilizing force that needed to be replaced. The deal now under negotiation accepts the regime, defers the missile question, leaves the proxies in place, and addresses the nuclear issue through a process that, as Rubio acknowledged, must still figure out “what happens to this material that’s very deep somewhere.”

The administration has framed the trajectory as success — a war fought, objectives met, peace through strength. Critics, including some Republicans, see something closer to a retreat dressed up in a press release. The deal, if it holds, will end a three-month war that killed thousands and displaced millions across Iran, Lebanon, Israel and the Gulf. It will not deliver most of what Trump said the war was for.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)