According to the Anadolu agency, the question hanging over Washington right now is no longer how far the United States is willing to go in its confrontation with Iran, but how quickly it wants to step back.
John Bolton, who once helped shape U.S. national security policy from inside the White House, now suggests the answer may already be clear. Speaking Monday, the former national security adviser said President Donald Trump “wants to get out of this war,” a striking assessment at a moment when the costs and risks of escalation are becoming harder to ignore.
Bolton, never known for understatement, cast doubt on the assumptions that may have guided the early phase of the conflict. It is impossible to know exactly what Trump expected, he said, but if the president believed the operation would unfold as a swift and decisive mission, something akin to a hypothetical attempt to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, “then this assessment was wrong.”
His reasoning points to a deeper misreading. Iran, Bolton argued, is not a target that yields quick results. Any serious evaluation would have made clear that confronting Tehran is inherently complex, “whether the objective is limited or related to its nuclear program.”
That complexity carries consequences. Short-term military actions, he warned, offer little lasting resolution. Even strategies sometimes described by Israel as “mowing the grass” may only delay, not eliminate, the underlying threat, “because it necessitates repeating operations later.”
In Bolton’s view, the core challenge has not changed. Neutralizing Iran’s capabilities, even if narrowly focused on its nuclear ambitions, “has always been a difficult task.”
Behind the scenes, there are signs Washington may be recalibrating. A report by Politico, citing a senior Gulf official, suggests Trump could be considering new concessions toward Iran, driven by a desire to bring the conflict to a close.
For now, the battlefield may be active, but the political calculation appears to be shifting, away from decisive victory, and toward an exit that was perhaps harder than anticipated from the start…..See More
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