SiriusXM host and former Fox News star Megyn Kelly at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 21, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
There’s a “chasm of uncertainty” in the U.S. war actions, one media pundit opines.
Sarah Baxter, director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting, peeled the onion of U.S. war schemes in an opinion piece for The iPaper. She indicated that despite the public bravado of the administration, there’s a lot that’s unknown and unplanned with regards to Iran.
President Donald Trump admitted as much in a CNN interview, Baxter cites.
“We don’t know who the leadership is. We don’t know who they’ll pick. Maybe they’ll get lucky and get someone who knows what they’re doing … We don’t know who is leading the country now. They don’t know who’s leading," Baxter writes.
Trump has attempted to frame the decision to launch the attacks as an end to the 47-year “forever war” started by Iran, Simon Henderson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, told Baxter.
“The killing of Ayatollah Khamenei led to a feeling of euphoria and ‘we’ve succeeded’. To a certain extent Washington thinks, ‘we’ve won. All we have to do is tidy up,’ but we’re not there yet,” said Henderson “Even if we succeed, there are bound to be clashes and ugliness.”
Not only is the current leadership publicly unknown, but what comes next is also guesswork.
“Bluntly, Iranian exile politics is a mess," Baxter writes. Few Washingtonians have faith in the abilities of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, to usher in democracy, as King Juan Carlos I did in post-fascist Spain in 1975. Competing groups vie for influence and accuse others of being spies and stooges.”
All of the uncertainty is likely bleeding over onto Middle East allies.
“Sunni Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, who are quietly supporting the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Shia Iran, are wondering whether Trump can be trusted to stand by them.”
According to Henderson, “they placed their bets on Trump many months ago and hope their bets are still good. But they must be thinking, is he going to succeed or are they going to be left to drift?”
One advantage to the seeming uncertainty is it leaves a wide path to declare victory and go home.
Trump still believes things are on the right track, despite some setbacks. But his optimism isn’t shared right now by those outside the staunch MAGA supporters.
Several important MAGA media figures, such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have criticized the attacks on Iran. The President isn’t concerned with the chatter
“I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” he said.
But the MAGA movement is "experiencing whiplash" after swallowing Trump’s campaign rhetoric about wanting to stop wars, Baxter claims. How long their support lasts remains to be seen.
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