There are at least two Iran wars taking place right now.

There's the war being waged by the US military and the Israelis.

And in this war, Iranian targets are being methodically destroyed according to carefully designed plans.

The other war is playing out inside the brain of Donald Trump.

We don't know the goals of this war, the metrics of success, or even whether Trump is assimilating information the way his military commanders are.

Trump has been notably inconsistent in telling us what he believes the purpose and the goals of this war are.

On any given day, he'll threaten to destroy all of Iran's energy infrastructure.

And then the next day, he'll tell us that negotiations are taking place to bring about the war's quick end.

He'll tell us that the goal is the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

And then he'll say the goal is the opening of the Straight of Hormuz, which was open before the war.

And then he'll let us know that opening the straight of Hormuz doesn't actually matter.

All wars are covered in a fog of misinterpretation and misinformation and uncertainty.

This one even more.

I'm going to try to riddle all of this out with my guests tonight.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker.

David Ignatius is a foreign affairs columnist at the Washington Post.

And Missy Ryan is a staff writer and Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me this week's edition of what is happening in the Middle East.

Apparently, that's the new theme of this show.

Uh David, is the US winning the war?

Donald Trump just said it a little while ago today.

He said he said it in the past tense.

He said, "We beat the hell out of Iran."

As if he's moving on to Cuba.

When you asked the question the I could hear the the quotation marks around the word winning.

Yes.

Because what does what does winning mean?

Day by day as you said in the introduction the US and Israel are are destroying targets.

They they must be running out of some targets to to hit.

So in a tactical sense there's no question that overwhelming military power is being brought to bear and Iran is being degraded.

But today um we had a day when the US financial markets you know plunged dramatically.

Uh we had a day when 10 US uh service people were were injured in Saudi Arabia as Iran struck back.

So this war continues and the more more I I watch this process of a weak enemy being pounded and pounded, I'm reminded of the Gaza war.

Israel for two years hit Gaza.

It invaded.

It did what we haven't done in Iran.

And yet today, with the war over, Hamas still controls most of the Palestinians uh in Gaza.

Even with all that power, Israel wasn't able to win.

And I think that's what we're all worrying about.

As as Donald Trump says, we won.

It's over.

It's over.

It's over.

we we think about how far we are from a kind of decisive victory that would really end this in a way that everybody can be confident it's over.

Is the only decisive victory the overthrow of the regime by the people of Iran, most of whom hate the regime.

So the decisive change that I I think many people want um certainly people in the region uh is for Iran to be a different kind of country to no longer threaten its neighbors for the regime no longer to threaten its people for for Iran to be as Henry Kissinger famously said a nation not a cause and that will will require a different regime and I think you know pe part about this horse so many of us would like to see that change but you can't do it through military power.

That's what we're learning.

Right.

Susan, what's your definition of winning?

Well, you know, to the point of we've been told so many different things.

I think it was the former Trump's first term defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who famously broke with him over Trump's uh treatment of American allies.

He made the point this week, first of all, that the US is unfortunately fighting without its allies for now and further alienating them.

But I think most importantly you can strike 10,000 15,000 targets but if you don't know towards what end then you can't really define winning.

It was the uh Pakistani foreign minister who was asked the same question the other day and he said right now the only strategic goal I can identify for the conflict as reopening the straight of Hormuz that was closed as a result of the war.

And it's hard to imagine the US leaving the war unfinished in that way.

And I think that's where so many people I I've started to hear the qword uh thrown around and that's not a good word uh quagmire when it comes to how is the US going to even plausibly extricate.

Trump may have moved on but I don't see any realistic way where things stand as they do right now that it actually can be ended.

I thought the Q word was Quidditch, but that was that was just me.

Peter, um, to be fair to the Trump administration, they have degraded Iran's ability to fire missiles at its neighbors.

They're still firing missiles, but they destroyed some.

So, we'll talk to Missy, the Pentagon expert, about just how far they've gone down this road.

They they've degraded Iran's ability to be a threat across the region.

That's it's that's more than just the straight of mood.

Yeah.

No, look at the sum total of the last couple years is that Iran is a far different country than it was before October 7th, 2023, right?

Its ability to project force through proxies in the region has been degraded by the Israelis, particularly in Lebanon and and Gaza.

Uh Syria regime is regime is gone, right?

regime.

The last war in June took out a lot of their air defenses, which is why we're having so much more success this time because we don't feel the threat uh in going in to take out these uh nuclear sites and other things.

So yes, it's not the same country it once was.

It is absolutely certainly uh degraded in that sense.

The ballistic missile stockpile has been uh if not wiped out is certainly down significantly.

But the question then becomes if you don't have a new regime, if you don't have a change in the country as Dave was talking about, does this mean then we have to do it again in 5 years or 10 years or one year?

Who knows?

Because at they have made clear that they're not giving up.

They're not going to simply roll over and say, "Okay, Donald, you're right.

We're going to be your vassal state now and we're going to do everything you want us to do."

But if you're saying that to Marco Rubio, he might say in return, "Okay, so we'll do it in five years."

But we have five years where Iran is not a threat.

And if you're living in the region and you've been threatened by Iran all this time, that might not feel like the worst bargain in the world, but it's not a permanent solution.

Right.

Right.

And I think uh um one thing we've seen is that uh they continue to be a menace in the straight of Hormuz to the world economy in a way they had not been prior to this war starting out as Susan made the point.

Uh, and in that sense, they have a vote on when this war ends, too.

Right.

Right.

Trump can say tomorrow, I'm done.

I've gotten everything I wanted to do.

But if the straight of horn moves is closed or still in their control in a long-term sense, then they've won something as well.

Right, Missy?

From the Pentagon perspective, from the actual war that's going on.

How far along the pathway laid out by Pentagon military planners is the US so at the beginning of the conflict we were told that they had about three or four weeks um expected campaign in terms of the target set that they had developed with the Israeli military.

We're now almost at four weeks.

The combined US and Israeli strikes have hit more than 15,000 targets.

As Peter said, they've significantly degraded their ballistic missile, their defense industrial and their naval capability.

Um, and now what is happening is the US is getting in position the forces that it could required to try to clear the state of Hormuz militarily.

That's at this time we know and that's the insertion of Marines.

Marines and they have it's about 8,000 Marines and paratroopers.

They've got two two Marine expeditionary units heading to the Middle East, right?

you know that the most likely scenario is that they are holding those in reserve potentially to clear the straight of Hormuz, but they could be used in other ways as well.

Um, but the issue here is that there's an asymmetry even though Iran is is weakened.

Its military capability has been degraded.

There's an asymmetry in its ability to shut down the straight of Hormuse uh keep it closed with, you know, a small number of mines, a small number of missile strikes on commercial tankers.

And there's also an asymmetry in its ability to threaten Gulf countries with the kind of drones that even though, you know, the US military has been hitting some of its manufacturing sites, it's easy for them to, you know, hide them in a garage, you know, put them in the back of a pickup truck and launch those and really continue to wreak havoc.

The kind of havoc that's going to have an impact on oil markets, on on financial markets here in the United States as well.

If one drone out of every hundred, I mean, a drone packed with explosives gets through, that's a 1% victory.

I mean, exactly.

And that, you know, I mean, I don't think we should underestimate Trump's uh ability to at least try to declare victory uh just out of the blue because he thinks that that suits his interests.

But, you know, there really is the reality of continued um strife that could, you know, bring down the kind of economic reality that I think um is is more uh resonant for him.