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Commentary

Trump Says “War Will Continue as Long as Necessary” to Achieve Peace

Date: March 2, 2026

Trump spent years denouncing U.S. intervention. MAGA cheered then and now.

War Will Continue as Long as Necessary

The Wall Street Journal reports Trump Spent Years Denouncing U.S. Intervention. Now He’s Toppling Foreign Leaders.

In front of a packed chamber of Arab leaders last May, President Trump declared that the era of American-led regime change was over.

“In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in Riyadh, deriding the “Western interventionalists giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”

Nine months later, he launched the largest U.S. military operation the region had seen in two decades and urged Iranians to “take over” their government, backed by U.S. force. The military said Sunday that three American troops were killed in the operation, and five others seriously wounded.

It marked a jarring reversal for a man whose political rise was fueled in part by American fatigue with large-scale military interventions. For years, Trump denounced Washington’s “forever wars” and warned against toppling foreign regimes by force, a message that formed the foundation of the “America First” movement that won him the presidency twice.

It’s a risky gambit. In Venezuela, the U.S. captured Maduro but didn’t call on the country to take over the government, instead working with government insiders and promising an eventual transition. In Iran, the killing of Khamenei and many in his inner circle risks triggering a wider regional conflict that could destabilize the country and mire the U.S. in another war in the Middle East.

It’s also one constrained by hard logistics. The U.S. military is burning through scarce air-defense interceptors faster than it can replace them, raising concerns about how long it can sustain this tempo while continuing to protect U.S. forces and partners from retaliation.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, spent years trying to push the president toward regime change in Iran. But Trump ousted Bolton amid disagreements over foreign policy, and later dismissed him as a war hawk. “[I]f I listened to him,” Trump wrote on social media in 2020, “we would be in World War Six by now.”

Bolton said Saturday’s strikes left him stunned. “I’m as surprised as anybody,” he said.

The operation to decapitate the government of a country of roughly 92 million people is unlikely to give Trump the “one and done kind of approach” he prefers, Bolton said. Trump wants to say “it’s been a success, total victory, and now I leave it up to the opposition to finish the overthrow of the government,” he said.

Trump’s most dramatic foreign intervention yet also comes as polls show that voters are souring on his focus on foreign policy months before the 2026 midterm elections. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters disapprove of Trump’s priorities by an 11-point margin, with 53% saying that he is choosing to engage in unnecessary foreign affairs instead of the economy, compared with 42% who say he is dealing with urgent national security threats.

After the operation that took out Maduro, he basked in the praise of conservative media and prominent allies who hailed him as a “liberator,” according to people involved in White House discussions. He took it as proof that force, used decisively, could succeed where decades of diplomacy had failed.

Upon announcing the death of Khamenei, Trump left an open time frame on “heavy and pinpoint bombing” that he said will continue “as long as necessary” to achieve peace in the Middle East.

The military operation in Iran could take several weeks, U.S. officials said.

Freed from the constraints of a re-election campaign and more familiar with the levers of military power, Trump has been more willing to deploy force in his second term, counting on his base to stand by him as long as he avoids committing U.S. boots to a ground war, according to current and former officials.

In his second term, Trump has cast himself as the “president of peace”—a new identity that aides say he has come to see as central to his legacy. He has framed the Iran operation as the culmination of that mission, saying it would eradicate a murderous regime that has “soaked the earth with blood and guts” across the region and threatened Americans for decades.

Some of Trump’s own top advisers have previously said they had no clear answer for what would come next.

“No one knows who would take over,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in January when asked who would fill the void, describing power in Iran as fractured among Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and quasi-elected officials who are ultimately subordinate to the supreme leader.

Rubio said at the time that if Khamenei were to fall, the best Washington could hope for was that someone within the existing system would work with the U.S. toward a transition—a process he warned would be “far more complex” than Venezuela.

Trump has warned that Americans will be killed as a result of this operation. “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends,” he said on Sunday, after U.S. Central Command announced that three servicemembers had died. “That’s the way it is.”

“The current strategy of toppling regimes with no plan for what to do the day after only produces power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists,” he said at a rally in Philadelphia two months before the 2016 election. “We will abandon the policy of reckless regime change favored by my opponent.”

So, what’s the plan?

Sorry, he announced it. Continue war long enough to achieve peace.

Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told me. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”