The twists and turns of the Iran war, six months in, should come as no surprise.
President Donald Trump is just the latest commander in chief to see the vision of a decisive military campaign risk becoming a longer and more complicated conflict − one that could end up defining his legacy in the White House, like it or not.
Think Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq.
"This is a president who failed to learn the lessons from past presidents when it comes to a military deployment," Leon Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and Defense Secretary for President Barack Obama, told USA TODAY. "He had no clear objective, no clear strategy to achieve that objective, and no endgame, and that has been the fundamental mistake
that’s been made in the past Middle Eastern wars and is being made again in this war in Iran."
To be clear, the Iranian campaign hasn't yet approached the time and costs of those earlier conflicts. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan each stretched for more than 19 years, and the Iraq war lasted for more than eight.
"This is not Iraq. This is not endless," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth assured Pentagon reporters during the war's first week. "Our generation knows better, and so does this president."
But Iran already shares some traits with what became known as "forever wars," the sort of entanglement candidate Trump promised never to repeat. Victory hasn't been quick and doesn't seem certain.
The president's boasts about decimating the opponent's armed forces haven't prevented it from striking back with drones and missiles. Back home, voters are skeptical about why the war was launched and how it's going.
As "Epic Fury" approaches the half-year mark, here are four hard lessons for Trump − ones that his modern-day predecessors would recognize, some ruefully.
1. The exit can be hard to find
Three days after the war began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28, Trump was asked how long it would last.
"We're already substantially ahead of our time projections, but whatever the time is, it's OK," he told reporters at the White House. Four to five weeks, he projected, "but we have capability to go far longer than that."
The timetable has taken longer than he predicted because the goals have proven elusive. That is the same calculation that made it difficult for President Lyndon B Johnson and President Richard Nixon to negotiate an end to Vietnam, and for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama to justify leaving Afghanistan even after political support in the United States had eroded.
In his first term, Trump briefly increased troop levels in Afghanistan, then negotiated a timetable to withdraw.
In Iran, while many top leaders have been killed, the same Islamic theocracy remains in firm control. The status of its nuclear program, degraded by bombing strikes in 2025, hasn't changed. And this has gotten worse: Tehran has been able to significantly disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway that before the war offered safe and free passage for about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas shipments.
That has roiled global energy markets and driven up the cost of gas in the United States. As long as Iran continues to defy the president's military and economic reprisals − and despite Trump's declaration on social media that the strait was "NEW U.S. Territory" − it will be hard for the White House to credibly claim mission accomplished.
Americans are braced for that. More than 8 in 10 predicted in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in August that U.S. involvement in Iran "will go on for an extended period of time."
"Making sure Iran can't make a nuclear weapon is very important to this country and the world," veteran Republican pollster David Winston told USA TODAY. "But now at month six, there's a sense of − given what was said when it started, why has it taken so much longer and what's the plan?"
2. Military superiority doesn't guarantee victory
In an echo of those earlier wars, the United States has dominated the battle from the start.
But that didn't translate to a quick strategic victory, then or now. The adversaries' willingness to endure pain and the determination of their leaders to survive have sometimes enabled them to play a long game, outwaiting American patience.
Two years after Nixon withdrew troops from Vietnam in 1973, South Vietnamese allies would surrender to the Communist north. In Iraq, Obama's withdrawal of forces from Iraq in 2011 has been followed by insurgencies, sectarian conflict and violence. In Afghanistan, the Taliban government was quickly toppled after the 9/11 attacks, yet it still became America's longest war.
Even as President Joe Biden ordered the final U.S. forces out in 2021, a chaotic withdrawal that marked a stain on his presidency, the Taliban were emerging to take control again.
In Iran, too, the limits of military superiority are being tested.
"We've beaten and completely decimated Iran," Trump declared in an address to the nation on Day 33 of the war. "They are decimated, both militarily and economically and in every other way."
But five months later, Tehran continues to use missiles and drones to strike U.S. targets and its allies in the region.
In recent days, the White House has turned from threatening attacks to imposing sanctions. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Aug. 24 announced "the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary."
Will what he called "an economic D-Day" for Iran succeed where bombs have failed?
3. The kitchen table still rules: It's the economy
When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, they commanded broad public support. That rally-'round-the-flag sentiment at a time of peril would shatter as time passed.
On Iran, though, the military strikes were viewed skeptically from the start. The war has never commanded majority support, and it has fueled questions about Trump's leadership.
At the beginning, only 27% in a Reuters survey supported the attacks, while a 43% plurality opposed them and nearly a third of Americans were undecided. A 56% majority said Trump was too quick to use military force.
In the August poll, support was at 31%. Trump's approval rating, at 33%, matched the lowest level of his first or second terms.
Rising opposition to the Vietnam War during LBJ's tenure would spark huge demonstrations on college campuses and elsewhere and contribute to Nixon's election to the White House in 1968. Opposition to the Iraq War during Bush's tenure helped Democrats win back control of the House and Senate in 2006. He called it "a thumpin'."
Then, as now, a Republican president was waging an unpopular war at a time of economic unease.
In 2024 the GOP won the Washington trifecta − control of the White House, the House and the Senate − in large part with an economic appeal. "It was basically to fix the Biden economy," Winston said, amid concern about inflation outpacing wages. "Is there a sense that there's been enough progress made?"
Even during times of war, the pollster said, "the economic narrative generally always takes over."
Republicans are expressing concerns, and more often out loud, that Trump's focus is out of sync with voters' concerns.
"Not even a little bit," the president said when he was asked whether financial pressure on Americans was motivating him to reach a deal with Iran. "The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon," he said. "I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, that's all."
In contrast, in an Emerson College pollin August, the issue voters ranked as the top concern facing the nation was the economy; 37% cited jobs and inflation and taxes. "Threats to democracy" and health care were second and third, at 16% each.
Foreign policy was ninth, at less than 2%.
4. Wars can consume presidential legacies
LBJ enacted the most far-reaching domestic programs in modern history, landmark achievements that included Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
But his presidency is remembered, first and foremost, by the Vietnam War.
"That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved, the Great Society," he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin after he had left the White House.
President John F. Kennedy had sent military advisers to support the anti-communist government in South Vietnam, but it was Johnson who dramatically expanded the U.S. commitment into a full-scale war with bombing campaigns and a deployment of American troops that would reach more than 500,000.
He saw no good options, unable to withdraw for fear of the strategic consequences but facing an American public bitterly divided by the war.
Vietnam didn't erase his domestic achievements, but it did overshadow them.
Trump is clear about what he considers his biggest achievements: a soaring stock market, an historic tariffs regime, sweeping immigration enforcement, record tax cuts and the physical stamp he is making on official Washington with everything from a White House ballroom to, perhaps, a triumphal arch.
"A lot of people are saying that I'm one of the greatest presidents ever," he told Punchbowl News in August.
But the war in Iran, with its consequences still unfolding, may stand in the first line of assessments of his presidency.
"I think the reality is that Iran is going to join that list of failed wars in the Middle East," including Iraq and Afghanistan, Panetta said. "And just as it's impacted on the legacy of past presidents, it’ll impact on the legacy of Donald Trump."
Consider Bush, who was elected in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" and was proud of legislation he pushed to expand Medicare and combat AIDS in Africa. As he prepared to leave the White House, though, he acknowledged that his presidency would be defined by the wars he had launched and not finished.
"I will be long gone" before history makes a final judgment about them, he said.
Susan Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, has covered 12 presidential elections and interviewed 10 presidents. Her latest book, "The Queen and Her Presidents," was published by Harper in April.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hard lessons Trump has learned in Iran. Like, where's the exit?
