Trump's blurry vision of victory in Iran

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/01/trump-iran-war-unpopular-winning

Trump's blurry vision of victory in Iran

Zachary Basu

One month in, President Trump's Iran war has fractured into three competing realities:

A military campaign that has largely delivered.
A strategic vision that hasn't.
A political and economic problem getting worse by the day.

Why it matters: The Trump administration has declared Operation Epic Fury an overwhelming success. But the trajectory of the war — from shifting goalposts to mounting costs — points to a potential stalemate.

Zoom in: By conventional military measures, the U.S. and Israel are dominating Iran at sea, in the air and on land.

In its first 29 days, Operation Epic Fury struck 11,000+ targets, flew 11,000+ combat sorties, and damaged or destroyed 150+ Iranian vessels, according to the Pentagon.
The opening phase of the war decapitated much of Iran's senior military leadership and inflicted significant damage on its ballistic missile program.

Yes, but: Sustaining the military campaign has come at a cost — including at least 13 U.S. deaths, hundreds of injuries, billions of dollars in damaged or destroyed equipment, and about $1 billion a day in estimated operational expenditures.

The U.S. has burned through more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks, according to The Washington Post, at a time when stockpiles were already well below target levels.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: "The Department of War has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President's choosing and on any timeline."
But the Pentagon is seeking a roughly $200 billion cash infusion for the war, largely to replenish munitions. Its passage is no guarantee in a closely divided Congress.

In the meantime, Iran's missiles continue to pummel the region — and U.S. forces have not been spared.

One day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Iran's military "neutralized," Iranian missiles struck a base in Saudi Arabia, injuring 29 American soldiers and damaging U.S. refueling and surveillance aircraft.
The New York Times reports that many of the 13 U.S. military bases in the region are "all but uninhabitable" due to Iranian strikes. The Pentagon declined to comment on the report, citing operational security.

Data: Axios research. Graphic: Sara Wise/Axios. Photos: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service

Zoom out: The strategic picture is hard to square with the administration's triumphalism.

The decapitation of Iran's senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has not destabilized the regime, softened its anti-American posture or brought freedom to the Iranian people.
The war's central justification — eliminating Iran's nuclear threat — remains unresolved: Trump is now weighing a high-risk ground operation to seize Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Iran's stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz has become the war's most damaging unintended consequence — triggering a historic energy shock, straining relations with allies and threatening to metastasize into a long-term strategic crisis.

What they're saying: A White House official pushed back on the strategic assessment, saying Trump outlined four distinct goals for Operation Epic Fury — destroying Iran's ballistic missile capacity, annihilating its navy, eliminating terrorist proxies, and guaranteeing Iran never possesses a nuclear weapon — and that "the United States Military is meeting or surpassing all of its benchmarks on these defined objectives."

The official added that Iran's "navy is combat ineffective, their drone attacks have dropped 90%, and two-thirds of their production facilities are damaged or destroyed."

State of play: Back home, the war is exacting a steep political toll by nearly every available measure.

For the first time in his second term, Trump's average approval rating has sunk below 40% — with $4 a gallon gas further damaging his economic standing.
The Iran war is the most unpopular major military action in modern American history: More than 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the conflict, according to Pew Research.
The erosion is reaching into the president's own coalition — his approval among 2024 Trump voters has fallen from 93% at the start of his term to 76%, according to a YouGov/Economist poll conducted March 27-30.

On the economic toll, White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump "has always been clear about short-term disruptions" from the war, and pointed to executive orders on housing affordability, prescription drug pricing, and tax cuts as evidence the administration "has had a plan in place to mitigate these disruptions."

Asked about high gasoline prices Tuesday, Trump told reporters: "All I have to do is leave Iran, and we'll be doing that very soon, and they'll come tumbling down."

The bottom line: The U.S. military has done what it was asked to do. The harder question — what winning convincingly looks like — is one the administration has yet to answer.

Axios' Marc Caputo contributed reporting.