Editor’s Note: This article was originally delivered as a speech at the West Suburban Peace Coalition Educational Forum on May 4, 2026.
Within a few days at the end of March, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made two claims. He revealed that Russia had given him two months to withdraw all forces from areas still under its control in Donbas, or Russia would take it by force and change the terms of the settlement. Russia said that was not true.
And he said that the United States had conditioned security guarantees on Ukraine withdrawing from Donbas. “That’s a lie,” U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio said. “I don’t know why he says these things; they’re just not true.”
That Zelensky was constructing a false narrative about the war does not bother him because he is not trying to reflect reality; he is trying to reshape reality. With Russia’s military acquisition of Donbas appearing increasingly inevitable, American peace plans conceding it, and Ukrainians increasingly accepting it, Zelensky’s survival depends on crafting a narrative in which he did not betray the nationalists or his promise but had no choice but to surrender Donbas because he was forced by both his enemy and his supporter.
In another war, in another part of the world, another president is doing the same thing. All Iran has to do to end the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump said last week is to “cry uncle, that’s all they have to do. Just say, ‘We give up.” It doesn’t matter if they really give up: they just have to say it.
Trump’s team is crafting a narrative that provides them with an off ramp to a war they have lost that tells the story of a war they have won.
The U.S. had no legal reason for its war on Iran, and what publicly stated reasons they had were forever shifting. But there seem to have been four key goals:
- Regime change.
- Removing Iran’s ballistic missile program.
- Severing Iran from its forward deterrent network, or proxies.
- Zero enrichment of uranium.
Trump has repeatedly identified regime change as a key goal of the war. He has called for it, and he has explicitly said it is “time to look for new leadership in Iran.” The promised change in regime did not occur. The narrative response to that reality has taken two forms. First, Trump simply rewrote history and said regime change was never the goal: “regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change.”
Second, Trump and his team simply continuously repeated that there had been regime change when there had not, as if saying it made it so. Aboard Air Force One on March 30, Trump told reporters that “We’ve had regime change.” One week later, he posted that “we have Complete and Total Regime Change.”
There has been no regime change. Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime underwent a seamless transition to his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, though he was specifically declared unacceptable by Trump. That is the opposite of regime change; that is regime continuity. Mojtaba Khamenei is a hardliner who was a close advisor to his father. He has been a core part of the regime, and his selection represents a preservation of, and not a change from, the regime.
Other new leaders who replaced the old, assassinated leaders, also represent regime continuity and survival. Ali Larijani’s replacement as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, is a former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who has served in government since the days of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is very close to Mojtaba Khamenei and has always been aligned with the hardliners in the political establishment.
When you spend $25-35 billion, destroy a country, kill thousands of people, devastate the environment, damage the United Nations, discredit international law and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and irreparably wound relations with your European and NATO allies to bring about a regime change that never materialized, just say it did. You might remember another U.S. administration in another U.S. war, saying “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
As part of his checklist of goals that have been accomplished by the war, Donald Trump has repeatedly included that Iran’s “missiles are just about used up or beaten.” Trump says Iran’s military has been “beaten and completely decimated.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says Iran’s ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.” That’s not true.
Many of Iran’s missile stockpiles were protected deep underground and were untouched by American strikes. Some that were struck were actually dummy decoys. Many of the ballistic missile launchers that were hit were repaired and reactivated within hours. Hegseth now concedes that Iran is “digging out” its struck missiles and launchers. U.S. intelligence and the military assess that Iran still has at least 60% of its missile launchers, nearly half of its missiles, and 40% of its attack drones.
And they are very capable of hitting their targets and doing damage. U.S. bases in the region suffered a degree of damage thought unthinkable before the war and have been rendered uninhabitable. Radar systems, air defense systems, and aircraft were damaged and destroyed. And recent reporting reveals that the actual damage they sustained far exceeds what has been reported.
The reality falls far short of the narrative and calls into question, not just the claim that the U.S. has won this war, but its ability to win a future war against a real power, like China.
The Trump team’s narrative has consistently told a tale of Iran’s forward deterrent network of proxies being “crushed,” amputating Iran’s ability to reach into the region. Contrary to the narrative, the surprising reality is that Iran’s proxies and partners have survived and are far more resilient, capable and integrated than the United States believed. Hezbollah has launched sophisticated missiles that the U.S. believed they no longer possessed at a rate greater than they have ever launched before. Iraqi militias are launching drone strikes on U.S. bases in the region. The Houthis entered the war and launched several barrages of missiles, some carried out in coordination with Iranian missile strikes.
The primary goal of the war on Iran was the final death of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “There will never be a deal unless they agree that there will never be nuclear weapons,” Trump said again last week.
That nuclear narrative is the central lie in the justification of the war. Iran has never pursued a nuclear weapon. Washington knows that. The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review concluded that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” That assessment was repeated in the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment that clearly states that U.S. intelligence “continue[s] to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” As recently as March 18, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee that since the June bombings, “there has been no efforts [sic]…to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.” All Iran has done is insist on their right—like so many other countries—as a signatory to the NPT to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. And that is all they have ever done.
Trump was handed a mechanism for ensuring Iran never build a nuclear bomb in the form of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, which Iran was honoring and which was working. Trump was the author of the current problem because he illegally pulled out of the agreement.
There has been zero progress in negotiations toward forcing Iran to terminate its civilian enrichment program. As at the start of the war, the right to enrich continues to be an absolute red line for Iran.
Trump’s vocabulary alters the narrative. The most concerning 970 pounds of 60% highly enriched uranium is rendered insignificant by renaming it “nuclear dust.”
Trump’s narrative not only renders the highly enriched uranium insignificant, it renders it irrelevant. He doesn’t really care about it because it is “so far underground,” the Americans can watch it, and the Iranians can’t get it. “I had one goal,” Trump said, “They will have no nuclear weapon, and that goal has been attained.”
At times, Iran’s enriched uranium is insignificant, at times it is irrelevant, and at other times it is resolved. According to Trump’s narrative, Iran has already agreed to hand over all of its enriched uranium. “They’ve agreed to give us back the nuclear dust,” he said. The reality, of course, is that, though Trump says it, Iran has agreed to no such thing.
Iran still possesses a quantity of its enriched uranium. More importantly, it still possesses advanced scientific knowledge of how to enrich uranium and the legal right to do so. Most importantly, despite starving sanctions and the most lethal bombing the U.S. can deliver, protecting its right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes remains a redline that the U.S. has been unable to erase.
That is the reality. The rest is fiction: a narrative fiction crafted by Trump’s team to give them a way to tell an angry and betrayed public that they won the war when none of the goals—and all of the nightmares—have been achieved.
Though it may have cost $40-50 billion and used up half of its critical munitions, it is not a war but an “excursion.” Aspects of operation “Epic Fury” are rebranded for a public that is no longer buying it as “Project Freedom.”
And in an act of outrageous sophistry, it turns out that none of this matters because there isn’t a war. Seeking to circumvent the demand of the War Powers Resolution to receive permission from Congress to wage war after sixty days of troops being deployed, On May 1, Trump notified Congress that “hostilities” against Iran “have terminated.” Erase Trump’s threats, and the ships, aircraft and tens of thousand of troops in the region. Erase the fact that the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is an act of war under international law and that the U.S. fired on an Iranian flagged ship only days ago. Erase that the day before, Trump was briefed by CENTCOM on new plans for potential military action against Iran and that, days later, U.S. forces sank seven Iranian boats.
This is reality. But the reality is erased by a narrative fiction crafted by the Trump team in which the war is over because they define it as over. So, none of this matters any longer because the war is over.
