President Trump delivered his first prime-time address to the nation on the Iran war on Wednesday night, speaking for less than 20 minutes from the White House in a speech the administration billed as containing “an important update.” What followed was largely a recitation of positions and claims the president has made repeatedly over the past several weeks, leaving analysts and opposition figures questioning what the address was actually intended to achieve.
Trump told Americans that the war is “nearing completion” and that the US is “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly.” He reiterated a two-to-three week timeframe, saying that “we’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” He also threatened to strike each of Iran’s electric power generating plants if a deal is not reached, and suggested the US “could hit” Iran’s oil infrastructure as well. “We are gonna finish the job. We are getting very close,” Trump said.
Multiple analysts reached by Al Jazeera said the speech contained essentially nothing new. Sina Azodi, assistant professor of Middle East Politics at George Washington University, said he “failed to grasp what he was trying to do and convey. It was really a repetition of everything that he had said in the past.” Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute described it as “essentially a summary of all of the tweets he has issued over the last 30 days, almost in chronological order,” adding that the absence of anything new “reveals that he really does not have a plan.”
Trump also claimed during the speech that regime change has effectively occurred in Iran as a result of US and Israeli strikes killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials. “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead,” he said.
Analysts pushed back on that characterisation. Khamenei was replaced by his son Mojtaba, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has vowed to continue the fight and “punish” the US and Israel. Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council said bluntly that “Trump hasn’t changed the regime; if anything, he’s honed it to its hardest core.”
The political context surrounding the speech is difficult. A majority of Americans now disapprove of the war, according to multiple polls, and Trump’s approval rating has slid to second-term lows in both the New York Times and RealClearPolitics averages.
The conflict has exposed tensions within Trump’s own political base, with some supporters struggling to reconcile the war with his longstanding pledges to avoid foreign military interventions. Oil prices surging above $100 a barrel have pushed gas prices above $4 a gallon, a politically toxic combination that echoes the energy shock that contributed to the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the late 1970s.
Rather than calming those concerns, Thursday’s market reaction to the speech suggested investors interpreted it as evidence that a quick resolution is not coming. Oil prices jumped back above $100 per barrel immediately following the address.
Asian markets fell sharply overnight, with South Korea’s Kospi dropping more than 3 percent and Japan’s Nikkei declining 2.1 percent. The gap between Trump’s language about completing objectives “very shortly” and the market’s reading of the same speech reflects a credibility problem that is likely to grow the longer the conflict continues without a visible path to resolution.
