Six months of Trump's Iran war: America won battles, but where is the victory?

When America's commander-in-chief President Donald Trump announced US strikes on Iran under the ambitious Operation Epic Fury in the early hours of February 28, there was little ambiguity about what Washington wanted from the campaign.This was not supposed to become another open-ended Middle Eastern war. The objective was to unleash overwhelming American military power, destroy Iran’s most dangerous capabilities, force Tehran to accept Washington’s terms and leave behind an Iran weakened enough that it could no longer pose the same strategic threat.Trump also appeared confident that the campaign would be relatively short. After his intervention in Venezuela earlier in 2026, he suggested that the war could last four or five weeks. Within days, he was already claiming that the military campaign was running ahead of schedule.“We're already substantially ahead of our time projections,” Trump said on March 2, just days after the campaign began, while adding that whatever time the operation ultimately required would be acceptable.Six months later, those words carry a very different weight.The war has stretched far beyond Trump's original timeline. Iran's nuclear infrastructure has suffer...