President Trump's goals for the war with Iran included putting an end to the country's nuclear program, destroying its military capabilities and creating regime change.
Yet after more than five weeks of fighting, and with a two-week ceasefire now in place, the president has fallen well short of those aims.
In addition, Iran's control over the economically crucial Strait of Hormuz has created a crisis that didn't exist before the war began.
The Trump administration stresses that U.S. and Israeli military successes have inflicted severe damage to Iran's military. Still, Iran's military and government survived the onslaught, are still functioning, and are now making their own demands in negotiations that lie ahead.
In an early morning post on Truth Social, Trump hailed the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire as "a big day for World Peace!"
"Iran wants it to happen, they've had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else," he wrote.
The ceasefire mostly appears to be holding. However, Gulf states reported attacks on oil infrastructure and Iranian state media said the Strait of Hormuz was being closed again in response to Israel's continued attacks on Lebanon, the base of Iran's proxy militia, Hezbollah. The White House said the reports are false and that there was an uptick in traffic in the strait on Wednesday.
If the current deal endures, Trump's justifications for the more than five-week conflict look largely unmet. Meaningful regime change, halting Iran's nuclear ambitions, and dismantling its ballistic missile program are all very much an open question, with some analysts saying the war has led to an even more hardline government in Tehran that may be more determined to pursue nuclear weapons.
Iran's military is degraded but still retains capability
At a Pentagon news briefing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth repeated his and the president's previous boasts that Iran's navy is "at the bottom of the sea" and its air force has been "wiped out." The defense secretary also said that Tehran's drone and missile program had been "functionally destroyed."
"Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield," Hegseth said.
"Iran's ability to build and stockpile ballistic missiles and long-range drones has also been set back by years compared to where it was six months ago before Operation Epic Fury," White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said at an afternoon news conference, referring to the U.S. operational name for the war.
Speaking to NPR's Morning Edition, retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, which covers the Middle East and Gulf region, said he has "no doubt" that U.S. forces "have done a lot of destruction and we've been successful in certainly dismantling a lot of the regime's military capabilities."
However, Iran's military has continued to function, striking daily in Israel, in multiple Arab Gulf countries, and occasionally at U.S. military bases in the region.
The Strait of Hormuz remains under Iran's control
Despite suggestions that the U.S. would seize the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire agreement as outlined by the administration leaves Tehran in control of the strategic waterway.
Media reports suggested a small number of ships were moving through the strait on Wednesday, though that appeared to be largely in line with what's been taking place for the past several weeks. Iran has allowed some "friendly" tankers to pass, charged tolls of up to $2 million on others, and refused permission to the vast majority.
Iran's shutdown of the vital oil chokepoint has led to increased gas prices across the world.
At Wednesday's briefing, Hegseth offered no specifics on how a reopening of the strait would work or how soon the estimated 2,000 ships that have been waiting for transit would begin steaming.
Trump, in another social media post, said the U.S. "will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz" and that U.S. forces would be "just 'hangin' around' in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will."
In a statement on X, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the country is prepared to halt military operations and guarantee safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz on the condition that the U.S. ends its attacks.
But Ian Ralby, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center, says a ceasefire that leaves Iran in control of the strait is a worse outcome than the status quo before the war. It puts Tehran in "a pretty powerful position," he says. "In some ways, it legitimizes Iran's control" of the strait.
"So now they're in a position to use that to their advantage much more proactively," he adds. Before the war, Iran allowed ships to pass unimpeded.
Daniel Benaim, a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute and former senior State Department official for the Gulf, says closing the strait "created a new deterrence and new economic weapon" for Iran.
There is also no indication whether the deal includes an end to passage fees that Iran began charging some tankers after the start of the war to ensure safe passage through the strait. If the steep tolls continue, it could mean that oil prices remain higher than before the conflict started. "For the Iranians to negotiate something new … that we've not seen before, where they're actually able to charge legitimately for safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz — that is an incredible boon for them," Ralby says.
Iran's nuclear program still exists, and Iran is likely more motivated to develop weapons
At the onset of the war, Trump insisted that Iran was only weeks away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But many nuclear experts dispute that claim, saying Tehran still had a way to go. In fact, then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had issued a fatwa, or religious decree, against nuclear weapons, according to Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland. "That was definitely a constraining factor for them," he says. "He's now gone and with him, the fatwa dies."
Instead, he says the war has taught Iran's leadership a lesson about nuclear weapons: States that have them, such as North Korea, are safe, while Iran has been attacked multiple times. Now, he says, Iran has "every incentive" to develop a nuclear capability "in short order."
Benaim agrees, saying that the assasination of the elder Khamenei and other top leaders might cause the others "to conclude that a nuclear weapon is the main path to Iran's kind of durable deterrence."
He says the glass half-full version is that "maybe having demonstrated overwhelming military force, the United States will now be open to the diplomatic solution" on the nuclear program in exchange for Iran getting some sanctions relief.
The Iranian leadership may have changed, but there's no sign of changed policies
Ahead of the war, widespread anti-government protests in Iran had triggered a brutal crackdown that killed more than 7,000 people, according to human rights groups.
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Khamenei, Trump famously called on Iranians to rise up and depose their leaders. "Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach," he said in televised address on Feb. 28. "This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass."
But the moment did pass.
Regime change was also a goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Instead, Khamenei's son, Mojtaba Khamenei, assumed the top post in Iran. Though relatively little is known about the younger Khamenei, Benaim and other experts describe him as a younger, more hardline version of his father.
Referring to the elite, hardline paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he says: "We've replaced a resolute, heavily ideological, and IRGC-dominated regime with another resolute, ideological and obdurate IRGC-dominated regime under a man 30 years younger."
The conflict may have shattered trust with U.S. allies
The U.S. did not warn its Gulf allies — countries such as Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — that it was planning an imminent attack on Iran in conjunction with Israel, according to an Associated Press report. And in the opening days of the war, Iran hit several of those countries with missiles and drones, primarily targeting their oil infrastructure.
Trump acknowledged that his administration was caught off guard by the move. "They weren't supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East," Trump said last month. "Nobody expected that. We were shocked," he added.
Benaim says it is difficult to understand how an attack on Gulf states — or the Strait of Hormuz closure — could have been a surprise to the Trump White House. "I think that [the attack on Iran] was probably lobbied for with a bunch of people who presented a lot of best-case scenarios" to Trump, he says. "I think that some of the worst-case scenarios weren't adequately thought through and some of the worst-case scenarios were more likely than we realized."
For U.S. allies in the Gulf and elsewhere, a failure to properly account for those worst-case scenarios, which includes a global spike in petroleum prices that has hit hard in Europe, Japan and South Korea. There are outright shortages elsewhere in the world, such as Thailand.
These consequences have rattled allies' confidence in the Trump administration, Benaim says. "It's caused significant tensions with European allies. It's caused major economic disruptions from the price of fertilizer and food in Africa and South Asia to the price of microchips," he says.
Speaking to NPR's Morning Edition last week, Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration, said it makes the U.S. "look like we're the cowboys, like the Russians, like we don't care about the rules-based international order."
To some in the world, "China, in contrast, looks like the status quo power. Looks like they're the ones that play by the U.N. rules," he said.
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