The U.S.’s exit ramp from the ongoing war with Iran seemed much further away on Sunday as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. proclaimed that the war would continue in the wake of a new round of devastating attacks in Israel.
Israeli and U.S. forces launched strikes targeting Iranian installations and commanders on February 28, succeeding in the initial hours of the attack in killing the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Since then, progress has stalled. The Iranian government appears little closer to collapse under a barrage of munitions and threats from the West, the latest of which escalated on Saturday with the U.S. president’s threat to begin targeting civilian infrastructure in the country (which would be a war crime unless directly associated with military assets). The Strait of Hormuz, blocked by Iranian forces, has become a major strategic goal for the Trump administration as it struggles to show evidence of making progress towards victory in a war it claims to have already won.
On Sunday, Israel’s ambassador to Washington said that the end of the war could be much further away than Donald Trump and his allies in the administration have let on, telling CNN that his country would “continue with this campaign until we bring this regime to its knees”.
“We cannot live any more with a country that is malign, that is intent on destroying us,” Michael Leiter told CNN’s Dana Bash.
Leiter went on to accuse the Iranian regime of lying about its capabilities, including the size and range of its ballistic missile weaponry.
He spoke on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday after Iranian attacks across Israel’s southern region on Saturday left at least 180 people injured as Tehran targeted an Israeli nuclear site. The site, Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, is long rumored to be the location where Israel’s government stores its own cache of undeclared nuclear weapons.
Whether Iran was developing a similar program once more after the U.S. and Israel struck three nuclear weapon development sites in 2025 is a topic of fierce debate and comes as the Trump administration has struggled to prove the necessity of its war with Iran, as well as the president’s game plan for the future.
In the early days of the war, U.S. and Israeli officials begged Iranian civilians to take to the streets and overthrow the regime that has controlled the country through authoritarian means since 1969, when the U.S.-backed dictator known as the Shah of Iran was overthrown in an Islamic revolution. His successor, the Ayatollah Khomenei, instituted strict cultural laws and a government that tightly controls protests to this day.
When those protests failed to materialize en masse in March, the U.S. government veered away from talk of regime change. But Israel’s government, which various U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have pointed to as having forced the president’s hand, has shown no signs of committing to an exit strategy without first seeing the total collapse of the Iranian government.
“The war is not close to ending,” the head of Israel’s armed forces, Gen. Eyal Zamir, said on Saturday.
His words starkly contrasted those from Trump, posted on Truth Social, the same day: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the Terrorist Regime of Iran,” the U.S. president insisted.
In the U.S., meanwhile, Trump’s enemies and allies alike continue to urge him to find an “off-ramp”. At the same time, a handful of D.C. neoconservatives and older Republicans remain staunchly supportive of his efforts to dislodge a persistent foe of the United States that has thumbed its nose at successive American presidents.
Trump’s own first term was punctuated by efforts to deal with Iran, first by exiting the 2015 Obama-era JCPOA agreement, which provided the U.S. and the West oversight over Iran’s nuclear program, and afterwards with his “maximum pressure” campaign that by the end of his term had the two countries at their closest point to war in decades. That tension was supercharged by Trump’s ordered assassination of Qassem Soleimani, then head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
His latest military action in Iran has left gas prices surging in the U.S. and elsewhere as Iran has closed off oil shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, an important waterway.
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