Mar 1, 2026

Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics dispatch from Puck. We’re at war in Iran—maybe?—so it’s foreign policy Sunday, and I’m Julia Ioffe.

A little over a week ago ago, I told you the prevailing wisdom in D.C. was that bombing Iran was a question of when not if. In the past month, it’s become clear that such an attack was not only inevitable but imminent, and that its timing depended less on the progress of the nuclear talks than on getting the necessary military assets in place.

Perhaps the main reason Trump didn’t hit Iran in January, when the anti-regime protests were at their peak, was that the U.S.S. Gerald Ford was not in the Middle East, but off the coast of Venezuela, where he had just ordered an operation to capture Nicolás Maduro. The aircraft carrier arrived on the Israeli coast two days ago, on February 27, the same day Trump said he was “not happy” with the negotiations’ progress. Sure enough, by the time I woke up at 7 a.m. on February 28, the U.S. and Israeli militaries were bombing Iran. Naturally, the inside discourse on Iran forms the substance of tonight’s issue.

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Leigh Ann Caldwell

Congress during wartime: Another month, another foreign intervention, a second defenestration of a world leader, and yet another congressional debate over war powers. (And, inevitably, someone got rich on a Polymarket wager placed at precisely the right moment.) Most Democrats are criticizing the president for failing to seek congressional authorization before striking Iran on Saturday morning, arguing that the country posed no imminent threat sufficient to justify military action. The Senate is expected to vote on Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s Iran war powers resolution this week, though it is unlikely to pass. Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna—the bipartisan Epstein/war powers duo—intend to get a vote on their own resolution in the House this week, too.

Still, Democrats are divided. Some of Israel’s strongest supporters within the party back Trump’s Iran strikes, including representatives Jared Moskowitz of Florida and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. Gottheimer, in particular, contends that Trump complied with the law by notifying the Gang of Eight before the kinetic operation began. However, he acknowledged on CNN that if the conflict escalates into a ground war involving U.S. troops, engagement would require a “larger conversation” in Congress. Lawmakers are expected to receive a classified briefing on Tuesday.

Many House Republicans were together in Florida for a big fundraising weekend. One person who was there said that members were “pretty enthusiastic” about the attack. When I asked if they are worried that all of these foreign policy incursions are taking the president away from his messaging about affordability, the Republican told me, “Killing terrorists fires up our base, too.”
Lindsey and Ted’s excellent adventure: The two lawmakers perhaps most excited about the war in Iran are senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz—standard-bearers for a neoconservative, interventionist foreign policy that Trump and much of MAGA had long rejected, at least until Trump 2.0.

You might recall that Cruz got into a very public and embarrassing argument with Tucker Carlson on the latter’s podcast last year, a few days before Trump launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. After all, Trump had campaigned on a promise of “no foreign wars,” a position Carlson continued to support. This morning, Cruz hailed the latest Iran strikes, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that they represent “the most consequential decision of [Trump’s] presidency,” and that he’d told the president so himself before the bombing started. Graham, appearing on Meet the Press, echoed that notion, arguing that “America First is not isolationism,” but rather a mandate to “kill people who wish us ill with a record of trying to destroy us.”
Homeland insecurity: Republicans are also invoking the war in Iran to intensify pressure on Democrats to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, the main agency charged with protecting the country from terrorist threats. “Now would be a good time for angry @SenateDems to end their political blockade and fully fund @DHSgov,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma posted on X. This followed unconfirmed reports that a gunman who killed three people and injured more than a dozen at an Austin bar was motivated by anti-U.S. sentiment. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy scoffed in reply, saying on Face the Nation: “The Republicans are saying that because they launched an illegal, disastrous war in Iran, we should give them permission to continue using ICE to murder American citizens, to allow them to get the funding to tear gas schools? No.”
More Epstein aftershocks: Now that the House Oversight Committee has deposed former president Bill Clinton over his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, Rep. Khanna has proposed what he’s calling “The Clinton Rule”—meaning that Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should have to answer questions about their own appearances in the files. Khanna told Meet the Press that he was “working with a Republican”—presumably his pal Massie—to subpoena Lutnick. Meanwhile, Republican House Oversight chair James Comer is expected to release the video and transcript of the Clintons’ deposition this week.

Now on to the main event…

Is Trump Headed for an Iran Quagmire?

Trump is once again betting that overwhelming military force won’t trigger a prolonged war involving U.S. troops. But history offers cautionary tales after the euphoria of a dictator’s fall.

Julia Ioffe

Americans awoke yesterday morning to the news that the U.S. and Israel had launched massive, country-wide strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s military and political leadership. Congress had been notified, but not exactly consulted, and early polls find the U.S. public ambivalent about a military action that is, in some ways, similar to the one we saw two months ago in Venezuela. Both operations, everyone could agree, took out horrible dictators. But hadn’t everyone also agreed, after Iraq, that regime change wasn’t the way to go? Moreover, as with Venezuela, President Trump’s stated explanations for attacking Iran haven’t been exactly clear: Is this about nukes? Regime change? Oil? Freedom for an oppressed people? All of the above?

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Then again, it hasn’t even been 48 hours since the bombing started, and we still don’t know where any of this will lead. “I can go long and take over the whole thing,” Trump told Axios, “or end it in two or three days.” The president had warned on Saturday that American lives would be lost, and it didn’t take long for the prophecy to come true: Three U.S. servicemembers have been killed and five seriously wounded as of this writing. That could be just the beginning—or not.

Trump has learned from personal experience—in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, and Iran—that launching military strikes is not necessarily the same as starting a protracted war. None of those other campaigns resulted in the Iraq-style quagmires that experts had warned about. Nor did Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites last June, or the assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in his first term. The Iranian retaliation in those cases looked more like box-checking than anything else. But this operation is of an altogether different scale. By Sunday night, Trump was outright saying that “there will likely be more” American casualties.

Still, Trump’s previous military adventures have clearly taught him that he can plow forward, naysayers (and congressional authorization) be damned. If anything, this latest operation is teaching him that the naysayers would rather be on the winning team. Saudi Arabia, which had been privately counseling Trump against striking Iran, issued a statement on Saturday morning supporting the strikes, even as Iranian missiles hit Riyadh. Even Canada, whose premier, Mark Carney, excoriated Trump’s might-makes-right foreign policy in Davos a month ago, came out in support in the early hours of the attack. So did the governments of the U.K. and Australia. Russia and China, Iran’s big backers, have shown that they have no intention of getting into the fray beyond boilerplate statements condemning the U.S.-Israeli operations. That, too, is a lesson Trump learned long ago: If you win, critics eventually turn to cheerleaders.

What Now?

Yet, I’ve found it hard to answer the question of what the U.S. aims to accomplish in Iran. Behind the bravado and the patriotic chest-thumping, what, exactly, are we doing? What are America’s goals and how are we achieving them? It’s hard not to find joy in the footage of Iranians celebrating the ayatollah’s death, especially after he had shot so many of them in the streets just over a month ago—but we’ve seen such footage before.

We saw it a decade ago in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt; two decades ago in Iraq and Afghanistan; and three decades ago in Russia: the overwhelming relief that occurs when a people brutalized by a repressive dictator collectively realize that the dictator is gone. It’s a beautiful moment that, in recent history, has proved to be rather fleeting. Life is not a movie, and it keeps going after the villain is vanquished and the credits roll. Without real institutional alternatives—and even with American support—countries can easily descend into civil war or revert back to autocracy. Joy and relief are not antidotes to the darker sides of human nature and the laws of political gravity they create.

Trump has called on the Iranians to rise up. “Take over your government,” he said on Saturday morning. “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” He’s right in that sense, but how will Iranians take over their government? The Basij still have the weapons and the people still do not. It’s why many of those who did rise up just in the last few months—tens of thousands of them, by some estimates—now lie dead. Unless the Basij and the other government enforcers melt away and give up their privileged status in society, the constants in this equation are still the same.

Even as he’s calling for an uprising, meanwhile, the regime in Tehran is planning to replace the ayatollah, and Trump is offering them an off ramp. So it’s hardly clear whether Iran is destined for a new regime or simply a new leader, as in Venezuela. On the other hand, if Iranians themselves are expected to overthrow what remains of the Islamic Republic, what is the U.S. doing to help them beyond sneaking in Starlink terminals and offering verbal support? How long are we going to be bombing Iran, and what is our metric of success? When will we know it’s time to stop and go home?

Usually, it’s the job of a president to formulate and articulate his goals—and offer answers to these questions—before the bombs begin to fall. But those expectations are a relic of the Before Times, and this president’s trademark is brazen disregard for Washington’s standard operating practice. If anything, he revels in what this town might call “strategic ambiguity.” After all, if you don’t define your goals before you start, no one will know if you’ve failed to achieve them.

That’s all from me, friends. I’ll see you back here with updates throughout the week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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