A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute has laid out the case that President Donald Trump's Iran campaign has a clear strategic rationale, despite critics' claims that the administration lacks any plan for what comes next.

Douglas J. Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, outlined his analysis in The Washington Post, as reported by "Hvylya".

Feith argues that the Trump logic runs as follows: the U.S.-Israeli air campaign creates only two broad outcomes. The first is that the Iranian people "oust the current regime and create a new one." The second is that they don't - but even then, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's navy, air force, air defenses, missile capabilities, and nuclear weapons program destroyed, "new leaders arise out of the old Islamic regime" with "far less power to harm their neighbors or the United States."

In either scenario, Trump can claim a strategic win. If a popular revolution occurs, the president will "praise himself as a strategic genius, and his political opponents will have a hard time contradicting him." If no revolution comes but Iran's military infrastructure lies in ruins, Washington still holds the upper hand - any new leaders would either seek American cooperation to rejoin the world economy or remain hostile but drastically weakened.

The key insight, according to Feith, is that Trump's approach deliberately avoids the pitfalls of post-9/11 nation-building. The president's goal, he writes, is simply "to deprive Iran of the power to hurt the U.S. and its interests." Whatever dangers develop later, Trump expects to deal with them "far more easily than if he had left in place the Islamic regime that was pursuing nuclear weapons and developing ever-longer-range missiles."

Still, Feith acknowledges the risks. Iran could disintegrate into civil war, sending millions fleeing toward Europe and America, as happened in Syria. But he contends that a major U.S. ground role would carry its own dangers - and that "a president's main national security job is choosing which he prefers to face."

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