Operation Epic Fuck-up is the quintessence of this Trump administration

Hemingway said never mistake motion for action. There’s been an awful lot of, at times bewildering, motion from America, but – beyond the killing of the Ayatollah himself – it’s not remotely obvious what the effective action is.

The nuclear programme that was “completely obliterated” in 2025 remains to be completely obliterated once more.

The calls for regime change from within Iran – broadcast on a hacked TV transmission to Iranians in their homes on Saturday – is fast receding just 48 hours later. Is Trump bored of the possibility of liberating them from their tyrannical oppressors? What? Already? 

And American efforts to annihilate Iran’s capabilities to return fire have, conspicuously, fallen short. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth clicked those brown shoes and promised a “clear, devastating, decisive mission”. If anything, it’s all been a bit Keystone Cops so far.

Multiple F-15 fighter jets pirouetting from the sky, shot down by friendly fire. The wild scramble to evacuate hundreds of thousands of expats, suddenly newly appreciative of the home country, and stranded tourists from the region. Shipping lanes shut. International flights grounded. Global oil prices through the roof. It’s almost as though the Americans hadn’t quite thought this thing through.

Meanwhile, Iran is busy slapping out at anyone within proximity. Embassies, hotels, airports, apartment blocks, military bases. Service personnel have been killed; more will surely follow. To date, the decapitated Iranian regime seems remarkably impervious to Hegseth’s magical military thinking.

Trump says the biggest hits are yet to come. Perhaps that’s true of the Iranians, too? The American armada, replete with its $13bn aircraft carriers, wallows in the open sea, banking on defensive technologies that even Hegseth admits are vulnerable to enemy missiles “squirting” through and finding their target. The sinking of an American warship would surely prove a moment of grave historic consequence for the planet.

And in major cities throughout Europe and North America, quite rational people’s Amazon baskets fill with wind-up radios, power banks and food-grade water canisters. 

As is true with all wars of this nature, the Iranian regime doesn’t need to win. It  just needs to hang on. Given Trump’s minuscule boredom threshold, that may not be the existential challenge it seems. Whatever all this is, it is already, very clearly not any sort of short, sharp shock.

The only identifiable winner in this is Benjamin Netanyahu – proclaimed by Charles Moore in this morning’s Daily Telegraph (before the headline was hastily rewritten) as “The Greatest War Leader of Our Age” which is good PR for a man hot off war-leading the IDF to the deaths of 75,000 or so Gazans.

Netanyahu faces a general election this year. Yesterday, JD Vance confirmed that the Pentagon knew Israel was going to pre-emptively strike Iran come what may. So did Netanyahu effectively bounce Trump into triggering an actual war to bolster his domestic polling? That is currently the most plausible explanation for the timing of any of this.

At the same time, Trump’s own domestic polling is plummeting faster than one of those F-15s. He has blundered into an action confirming the very worst suspicions of much of his MAGA base: that he doesn’t really mean all this America First stuff. 

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He’ll pay a price for that, one can only imagine, in November at the midterms, potentially losing both Congress and the Senate and either consigning him to two years of lame-duckery, or propelling him towards some third-term enabling constitutional outrage. Something to look forward to.

It’s not impossible that something good – good on a genuinely epic level – may emerge from this chaos, not least for the long-suppressed Iranian people. But right now, that outcome looks unlikely. If it does, it will be entirely accidental.