• The U.S. hopes Iran will fold after a bunker-busting bombing. But there’s no guarantee.
• Trump’s debate pitted his promise to avoid “endless wars” with the prospect of a legacy-making achivement.

The highest hope of President Donald Trump‘s bombing of Iran: A rogue nuclear program that had defied a half-dozen of his predecessors has finally been destroyed.

The deepest fear: Just four years after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan ended America’s longest war, the United States is now enmeshed in another war in a volatile region, with perilous and uncertain consequences.

“Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” Trump said in a late-night announcement in the East Room on June 21, interrupting Americans’ Saturday night plans with news that B-2 bombers had dropped the world’s most powerful conventional bombs on three sites considered crucial to Tehran’s nuclear program. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.”

That’s the calculation behind “Operation Midnight Hammer,” anyway − that despite its initial bluster, Tehran will be forced to abandon its nuclear program.

But Trump acknowledged there were other possibilities.

“Remember, there are many targets left,” he said, surrounded by a solemn-looking trio of advisers − Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “If peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speech and skill.”

A war between Trump’s fundamental impulses

The White House debate over whether to launch the bombers put at odds some of Trump’s most fundamental impulses.

One is his fervent opposition in all three of his presidential campaigns against “forever wars,” including the costly and controversial conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. His “America First” agenda reflects a determination to focus less on places like Ukraine and more on challenges close to home.

Though most Republican congressional leaders praised the president for the decision, some people prominent in the MAGA movement did not. “This is not our fight,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene complained on social media. “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war.”