Ben Rhodes

But putting that aside for the moment, I think the headline here is that this is the regime change war.

And we've walked up to this precipice with Trump like several times.

And each time he took a more limited action, whether it was assassinating Qasem Soleimani or whether it was the 12-day war when he bombed nuclear sites principally.

But this is clearly based on rhetoric and targets, like an effort to change the Iranian regime.

Now, the problem with that, though, is that even though that's clear,

Nothing is clear about what the end game is, right?

Even if the Supreme Leader is killed, the Iranian regime is a very deep regime.

He mentioned the IRGC, the police, and the military.

That's millions of people who are under arms in the Iranian regime.

And so whether this devolves into civil conflict and chaos, or whether some IRGC-led regime emerges, we have no greater clarity today than we did before this began about how the US sees this thing ending.

And we do see already some of the consequences that could come from this war.

We're only one day in, but we've already seen Iran, unlike last time where they showed some pretty calibrated restraint.

It seems like they're firing missiles in all directions.

They're trying to exact a cost on the Gulf countries for hosting U.S.

bases or just to kind of create a sense that if we burn, you burn too.

They're launching missiles at not just bases, at Israel as well.

And so we're seeing the beginning of what could be a kind of regionalization of this conflict.

And so this is a very dangerous moment.

And I have no reassurance from Trump or anybody around him that there's a plan for how to land this plane beyond we're going to go in there and destroy as much of this regime as we can before it becomes kind of almost politically unsustainable for us to be bombing this country.

Then we'll stop.