Finishing the Job

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

Last week our friend David French summarized the state of play with Iran this way: “At the moment, the United States is negotiating with a regime that President Trump claimed we had already changed, to open a strait that was supposed to be open last month, and to end a nuclear program that we said we had obliterated.”

 

Geez. When you put it that way, it’s amazing that support for the war is still as high as 35.7 percent.

 

David’s piece was published before yesterday’s resumption of hostilities, when Iran launched air attacks against U.S. allies Kuwait and Bahrain and American forces responded with strikes on Qeshm Island. That was the second time in eight days that the two sides had skirmished. Which means we can update his formulation to add that the United States is also currently observing a “ceasefire” in which fire hasn’t ceased.

 

The president was asked about all of this on Monday and claimed that he’s grown bored with negotiations. “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly,” he told CNBC. “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” Which wasn’t true: Given the tenor of his phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that same day, he cares a lot.

 

But let’s assume that he meant it. He’s given up on talks. Is it time at last to finish the job?

 

Byron York addressed that subject last week in a piece for the Washington Examiner. “It’s a question heard everywhere from casual cookouts to the halls of Congress: Why doesn’t President Donald Trump just finish the job in Iran?” he wrote. “Bomb the hell out of it, send in the troops, double down, and get it over with?”

 

I’ve had the same question put to me, verbatim, by a Trump supporter I know while chatting about the stalemate. The president tried jaw-jaw, he told me, so now it’s time for war-war—as if war-war wasn’t what we spent the first seven weeks of the conflict doing.

 

All of which makes this one of those rare and horrifying moments when a senescent megalomaniac who wants to put his face on the money seems more sober than many members of his own party. To insist that Trump should “finish the job” in Iran is to invite two exasperated replies on his behalf, one obvious and one less so. The obvious one: Do you realize what “finishing” it could entail?

 

Less obvious: What is “the job” at this point?

 

The job.

 

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

 

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

 

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

 

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

 

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

 

So when dreams of regime change went up in smoke during the first weeks of the war, the two partners were destined to disagree about what “the job” going forward entailed. Netanyahu would logically want to fight on, eager to seize this opportunity to further weaken an already battered enemy and knowing that Israelis would support a sustained campaign against an existential threat. But Trump would look for an exit, believing that key U.S. goals on Iranian nuclear enrichment (and ICBMs) could be achieved in negotiations—as had happened once before—and fearing that Americans wouldn’t tolerate another Middle Eastern “forever war.”

 

The Iranians cleverly exploited that asymmetry. By tantalizing the White House with concessions on nukes while drawing red lines around Hezbollah, the Khomeinists functionally enlisted Trump as a partner against Israel in protecting their conventional capabilities.

 

That explains how we ended up with the president screaming at Israel’s leader through the phone on Monday. Trump was angry at Netanyahu for escalating his reprisals against Hezbollah in Lebanon, as doing so threatened to spoil negotiations with Iran. (The same negotiations he supposedly “couldn’t care less” about, mind you.) That was a rational reaction from a president who believes he can get what America needs from Tehran at the bargaining table and spare himself the political and economic costs of further warfare.

 

But the escalation in Lebanon was also a rational reaction by Netanyahu. He understands that Iran’s power in the region will grow once America retreats, so he’s making hay of the present conflict to weaken the proxy on his doorstep. Telling him that he’s imperiling the ceasefire by retaliating against Hezbollah must sound absurd to him. Hezbollah is Iran, for all intents and purposes. They already broke the ceasefire—ecstatically.

 

So when Trump fans declare that he should “finish the job,” which job do they mean? The job of regime change, which seven weeks of bombing failed to accomplish? The job of seizing Iran’s enriched uranium? The job of destroying more Iranian missiles? The job of getting a deal that’s slightly better than the one Barack Obama negotiated, simply to let Trump save face?

 

If even the president and Benjamin Netanyahu can’t agree on what “the job” is, I’m afraid hawks will need to be more specific.

 

To some, “the job” at this stage is simply to ease the global inflation crunch by reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with nuclear negotiations to follow later. That was obviously Trump’s goal in ordering a naval blockade of the strait, aiming to force Iran to release its chokehold on regional oil commerce by choking off its own oil exports. But if that’s “the job,” those demanding that Trump “finish” it are asking for nothing more exalted than returning energy shipments to what they were on February 27, the day before U.S. and Israeli bombs began falling.

 

What sort of heroic sacrifice should Americans be expected to bear to simply restore the status quo ante before the White House launched this dumb, unpopular, unauthorized misadventure?

 

Finishing.

 

Even if you manage to settle on a workable definition of “the job,” you’re stuck having to explain how Trump should finish it.

 

We could try to finish the job of degrading Iran’s missile arsenal. But how? Despite the Pentagon hitting no fewer than 13,000 targets during the hot phase of the war, Iran still had roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 70 percent of its mobile launchers intact as of a few weeks ago. Of the regime’s 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, 30 allegedly remain operational.

 

It is very hard to believe that our failure to do more damage to Iran’s arsenal was due to insufficient ruthlessness initially by Pete Hegseth and a president who likes to watch highlight reels of explosions. That sounds more like a capability problem. Hooting “finish the job” won’t fix it.

 

We could try to finish the job of crippling Iran’s enrichment program by sending in U.S. troops to seize the uranium that’s buried in the wreckage of nuclear facilities Trump bombed last year. But that would be very risky business for the men involved, as we’ve discussed before, with no assurance of success. Worse, it might be unnecessary: Iran willingly gave up most of its uranium after signing the Obama nuclear deal and allegedly sounds amenable to doing so again now.

 

If we can finish this particular job without getting any Americans killed, we should, no? Especially when the president has described confiscating the uranium as little more than “public relations” given that the U.S. is monitoring the sites where it’s buried 24/7.

 

We could try to finish the job in the Strait of Hormuz by deploying U.S. infantry to seek and destroy the drones, mines, missiles, and “mosquito fleet” that Iran has used to make the waterway impassable. But that would be a harrowing undertaking, according to former CIA analyst Ken Pollack. “You have to go almost door to door on the northern shore of the strait to do this,” he told the New York Times, estimating that “at least” one Army division would be needed for the task.

 

A division has more than 10,000 troops. My Trump-supporting acquaintance seems to think Americans will tolerate mass casualties in that endeavor even though they’ve never supported the war, are unclear on its goals, and were promised it would last no more than four to six weeks. (“Those soldiers signed up to fight!” he reminds me.) I do not.

 

But even if I’m wrong, seizing the coastline would be the easy part. How long would American soldiers need to occupy that territory to prevent Iran from regaining its positions and its chokehold on the strait? Could they ever leave?

 

We could try to finish the job of regime change, but I can’t imagine what that would look like in practice after the first go at it fell short. To attempt it with ground troops would involve an Iraq-scale invasion pitting Americans against a military much more formidable—and smartly organized—than Saddam Hussein’s. To attempt it with another massive bombing campaign (“a whole civilization will die tonight”) would likely create terrible hardship for the people of Iran and almost certainly fail to force the regime to surrender.

 

After all, the Khomeinists’ strategy is to show that they can take any punch the United States throws at them while maintaining their grip on the strait. It’s worked well enough that the president has been forced to come to the bargaining table and consider concessions that would send billions of dollars to the regime and potentially lift sanctions. Why would they abandon it now in response to a new round of intense bombing, especially if Trump is foolish enough to hand them a propaganda victory by committing war crimes?

 

There’s something else that the average barstool hawk isn’t considering: Every extra day of conflict with Iran will dig the United States deeper into a readiness hole. One recent analysis estimated that the conflict has already cost the Pentagon “at least 45 percent of its stockpile of Precision Strike Missiles; at least half of its inventory of THAAD missiles, which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles; and nearly 50 percent of its stockpile of Patriot air defense interceptor missiles.” It will take three years at least to restore those critical weapons systems to their prewar capacity.

 

“Finishing the job” in Iran potentially means not being able to finish it in a future war where there’s more at stake for the United States.

 

On top of all that, a new round of escalation with Iranians would mean a new surge in gas prices and a new spike in global inflation. More financial misery for average people will flow from that, and electoral misery for the president’s party will flow in turn. If you think continuing the war is so important that it’s worth inflicting further hardship on Americans and total destruction on the GOP at the polls, fair enough. But my guess is that much of the “finish the job” contingent hasn’t given a moment’s thought to it.

 

Mugged by reality.

 

I haven’t seen data that would prove it, but I’d bet that that contingent is dominated by older people. And not just because younger ones (especially draft-age men) logically have more reason to worry about a war widening than the elderly do.

 

“Finish the job” is the sort of glib reaction you might be prone to have if you were weaned on the idea of American military supremacy as a sort of Newtonian law of nature. If you came of age during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, you’ve already learned hard lessons about the limits of military power. But if you came of age after World War II, hearing of how the United States rolled back two sinister imperial juggernauts simultaneously, you’ll spend your life believing that there’s nothing our boys can’t do.

 

It’s not a coincidence that the president came of age after World War II, I think.

 

“Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable,” The Atlantic reported last month, explaining his thinking in choosing to attack Iran. The proximate cause of that hubris was the child’s-play ease with which Nicolás Maduro was removed in Venezuela, but it makes sense that a baby boomer would overestimate what the armed forces are capable of. Especially to an “American greatness” nostalgist like Trump, I’d imagine that our failures in Iraq and Vietnam were chiefly a product of having dumb nation-builders as leaders who insisted on overly restrictive rules of engagement.

 

Once we had someone like him in charge, we’d be back to our old unstoppable ways.

 

I suspect many people his age and a bit younger share that belief. Postliberals in particular should be inclined to believe it, as they tend to blame problems on failures of will by “soft” leaders who won’t act as ruthlessly as is necessary to solve them. Combine that with boomers’ faith that the U.S. military is invincible, and you have a perfect recipe among right-wing hawks for wanting to “finish the job” in Iran: The only obstacle to victory is our willingness to achieve it, so let’s achieve it!

 

We’re in a bad, strange place when Donald Trump, of all people, is a very belated voice of reason to the contrary.

 

I’m reluctant to say that a fantasist as stuporous as the president has been mugged by reality, but the fact that he’s straining to end the war without further hostilities suggests he’s now less deluded about the military’s capabilities than much of his boomer cohort is. It shouldn’t be surprising, really: Unlike them, he must have received many sobering briefings about the many potential costs that I’ve described of restarting the campaign.

 

Yet it is surprising. This is not a man known for responding rationally to bad news and adjusting his tactics accordingly.

 

My advice is to enjoy his skepticism of “finishing the job” while it lasts, as no one will blink if he ends up trying to destroy Iran anyway in the belief that one more hard punch to the nose will surely, surely cause the regime to capitulate. Someone who’s spent as many years believing in the military’s, and his own, invincibility as Trump has will not lightly be disabused of his illusions. But if that’s too pessimistic a note to end on, remember that Iran is unlikely to be the last war he fights—and that the next demonstration of how unstoppable he is should go more smoothly than this one.