On Feb. 28, in a late-night speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. and Israel had launched a war against Iran. He described six goals for the conflict to the American public.
Six months later, Trump has failed to fully achieve any of the six goals he briefly outlined that night.
As midterms approach and Trump’s approval ratings slump, he is trying to cast his war in the Middle East as a victory and mock those of his predecessors.
On Tuesday night, Trump posted what appeared to be an A.I.-generated image of himself looming in the foreground of a war zone between two signs. One sign — beside an image of former President George W. Bush — said, “MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED 2001-2021.”
The other sign, next to an image of Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, read: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026.”
Testimony from Trump administration officials and interviews with experts underscore Trump’s failure to fully achieve any of his original six goals — and his struggle to complete his more recently added objective of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open for shipping traffic prior to the war.
A heated exchange between Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last month illustrated how the Trump administration’s early declaration of victory two weeks into the war backed it into a corner.
Citing a spate of recent American casualties in the region, Ossoff pressed Hegseth repeatedly about the accuracy of his May 13 assertion that Iran’s military had been “destroyed and made combat ineffective.” Hegseth backtracked.
“As far as a military assessment of Iran’s capabilities, it didn’t mean ‘by any stretch of the imagination absolute zero,’” Hegseth said. Then he conceded Iran “can lob missiles, but it’s not a combat effective military.”
As on-again, off-again negotiations drag on and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to shipping, some experts argue that the war is, at best, a stalemate.
“The regime is not weaker. If anything its position has been strengthened by the war, which has emboldened the military and security leadership and produced an ‘Islamic Republic 3.0,’” said Gregory Brew, a senior Iran and oil analyst at the Eurasia Group.
Iran’s new government is “more securitized and more willing to use force, both against foreign foes and against its own people,” Brew said.
‘Annihilate their Navy’
Status: Partially Achieved
Publicly released U.S. intelligence assessments say that U.S. and Israeli air strikes have destroyed most of Iran’s traditional navy. Most of Iran’s large surface ships have been sunk, with more than 160 Iranian vessels struck and 90% of its regular fleet destroyed, according to U.S. Central Command.
CENTCOM Commander Adm. Bradley Cooper told Congress on May 14 that the U.S. conducted more than 700 airstrikes on Iranian naval mine targets, eliminating more than 90% of its mine inventory. proposalMa 26, 2026 / 12:37
But experts say the reality is that Iran still retains hundreds of smaller boats that it uses to plant mines and threaten oil tankers that transit the Strait of Hormuz without its permission.
“Iran still has a navy,” Brew said. “The surface fleet the U.S. sank was mostly old ships and converted cargo vessels.”
‘Raze their missile industry to the ground’
Status: Partially Achieved
Experts and U.S. intelligence assessments generally agree this is a goal the U.S. has partially achieved.
According to CENTCOM’s latest statistics, the U.S. has struck 90% of Iran’s weapons factories and has destroyed 80% of its missile facilities.“Iran won’t be able to reconstitute for years,” Adm. Cooper told Congress.
Pressed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., how Iran was still able to attack bases in Jordan, killing three U.S. service members, Secretary Hegseth conceded, “The Iranian defense industrial base is effectively gone, but they do have underground facilities.”
Brew predicted that Iran “will rebuild its missile production.”
‘Destroy their missiles’
Status: Not Achieved
U.S. intelligence assessments have found that 70% of Iran’s stockpile and its mobile missile launchers have survived the war, The Washington Post reported. And Iran has restored access to 30 of the 33 missile sites built along the Strait of Hormuz, which could attack oil tankers and U.S. Navy ships, the Times reported.
Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies policy institute told MS NOW, “They still have more than a thousand missiles of one variety or another.”
During roughly two weeks of daily strikes in July, CENTCOM struck numerous Islamic Revolutionary Guard targets, including coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, missile and drone launch sites and maritime capabilities — indicating the IRGC still poses a formidable threat to U.S. forces in the region.
Ensure ‘terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region’
Status: Not Achieved
U.S.-brokered peace talks and early actions between Israel and Lebanon to address the threat of Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have made steady, albeit imperfect, progress.
But Iran has shown “it can still support its proxies with weapons and money,” says Brew, Eurasia Group’s Iran analyst. Brew pointed to recent attacks by Houthi militants against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
‘Ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon’
Status: Not Achieved
Iran’s nuclear program remains a critical and deeply contentious part of the negotiations, according to experts. U.S. officials have pushed for a commitment from Iran to hand over its roughly 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium.
Iranian officials have apparently declined to make any concession regarding their nuclear program and said they want a 60-day ceasefire and a second round of talks to focus on Iran’s nuclear program.
American bombing has setback Iran’s program. According to CENTCOM, U.S. attacks have struck 80% of its nuclear industrial base.
“Its nuclear program was heavily damaged in the June 2025 war,” Brew said. “But it still has its enriched uranium stockpile and the knowledge needed to rebuild, if it chose to do so.”
Montgomery agreed. “We’ve set that back further but I don’t think we’ve eliminated it,” he said, referring to Iran’s nuclear program.
‘People of Iran … take over your government’
Status: Not Achieved
Trump has rarely repeated his call for Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government since his Feb. 28 address. But this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revived the plea in his address announcing increased economic pressure on the regime.
“To the ordinary soldiers supporting this regime: as more and more of your paychecks stop or are supposedly just delayed, ask whether your commanders are leading your country to triumph or to ruin,” Bessent said. “And recall that the Berlin Wall fell when ordinary soldiers decided not to shoot at their own people.”
According to a senior Israeli official, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran was aimed at “creating conditions where the Iranian people could take fate into their own hands” but, ultimately, “several of these conditions did not materialize.”
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow with Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said cyclical periods of fighting have prevented a postwar reality from taking hold and prompting a new wave of civil unrest.
“The current way the kinetic conflict is configured impedes the fog of war from disappearing, which likely in the short term impedes the next round of protests from materializing,” Taleblu told MS NOW.
Reopen the Strait of Hormuz
Status: Not Achieved
In a setback for the U.S. that Trump did not mention in his Feb. 28th speech, Iran has been able to repeatedly close the Strait of Hormuz despite weeks of American air strikes on its forces.
Six months after the conflict began, a long-term agreement to reopen the strait has not yet been finalized as disagreements between Iran and both the U.S. and Oman persist.
This week, Oman and Iran announced what officials called a “temporary navigational corridor through the Strait of Hormuz and an agreement to implement a joint project to clear the Strait of mines.”
But traffic is still a fraction of what it was before the war.
U.S. officials have insisted the strait is, and has been, open. Since early May, CENTCOM forces helped facilitate the transit of approximately 1,500 vessels and 750 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
In that same period, 20 seafarers and port workers have been killed and nearly three dozen wounded in 70 incidents, according to the International Maritime Organization.
Despite Trump saying the Navy informed him that “all mines have been removed and/or detonated from within the International Waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” U.S. allies warn mines likely still remain in the waterway, according to reporting by Bloomberg.
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