Trump’s speech could have been an email, but it served its purpose

Washington: There was almost nothing new in Donald Trump’s live address to the nation (and the world) about the war against Iran. Whatever questions you had at 11.59am on Thursday AEDT, you would have still had at 12.20pm, too.

Like the speeches delivered by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Britain’s Keir Starmer in the past 24 hours, it could have been an email. That doesn’t mean it was a failure.

For the average person who isn’t hooked on Trump’s every word, the address offered great reassurance. America is winning, it will be over soon, and it will be worth any short-term pain.

“This is a true investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future,” Trump said in his most viewer-friendly line. “They were the bully of the Middle East, but they’re the bully no longer.”

For those intent on more detail, the pickings were slim. Trump repeated his estimate that the war would last another two to three weeks, during which he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. The core objectives, he said, were “nearing completion”. Meanwhile, negotiations would apparently continue.

But then came the big obfuscation at the heart of this mission.

“Regime change was not our goal,” Trump said. “We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ deaths.”

Unfortunately for Trump, we have the receipts. While it’s true that he never listed regime change in Tehran as an explicit goal of Operation Epic Fury, he did say that by the time it was over, the regime would be so weakened that the Iranian people would be able to “take over” with ease.

Right now, that’s not the case. Indeed, Trump is pursuing a deal with people from within the very regime that he said the Iranian people would be able to topple. Their names may be different, but their sentiment is the same.

More broadly, Trump promised that after Operation Epic Fury, Iran would never again pose a grave danger to Americans and the world. Can that really be true if the regime clings on with the same script, different cast?

Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst and Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the fundamental disposition of the regime is not well understood in American politics.

“You have a regime whose entire identity is premised on resistance against America,” he says. “They believe if you abandon that identity, that’s not going to actually prolong your life, that’s going to hasten your collapse. That’s the glue that holds them together as a regime.”

We do not even know who is really in charge of Iran right now, or who is running the talks with the United States. Trump claimed on Wednesday (Washington time) that the “new regime president” wanted a ceasefire, but the president of Iran is Masoud Pezeshkian, who has been in power since 2024, and the new supreme leader has not been seen since he ostensibly took the job.

Before the speech, some thought Trump would declare victory and end the campaign, while others thought he might announce that ground troops would attempt to seize Iran’s uranium stockpiles and secure the Strait of Hormuz. Neither scenario proved right.

Trump had nothing to say about the nuclear material – some 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium – still believed to be in Iran, albeit buried deep underground.

He also insisted the Strait of Hormuz would open “naturally” when the war ended. And if not, allies who are complaining about fuel shortages should simply toughen up, dispatch their ships, and “grab and cherish” the crucial waterway.

To the casual American viewer, this would all sound positive. But the more sceptical observer was left wanting more.

Trump should not be expected to announce military plans on primetime television – nor is he obliged to detail his strategic thinking. One certainly wouldn’t want to lecture on such matters from the cheap seats.

What one can note from this address, however, is what was missing, compared with his declaration of war 33 days ago. There was no direct appeal to members of the Iranian regime and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to surrender. There was no direct appeal to the Iranian people to stand by for a signal to rise up.

There was no recognition, as Albanese has called for, of the economic hardship this war is foisting upon the wider world, nor any fresh incentives for Iran to make a deal.

And there was nothing substantive to reassure markets that Trump had a clear end point in mind. Futures fell and oil jumped as Trump spoke – Brent crude shot up 5 per cent.

None of that really matters, though. This was a speech aimed at reassuring mum and dad in Ohio and Arizona and Michigan, who are wary of “forever wars” and just want to know that the end is in sight.

Mission accomplished. For anything else, the world will have to wait.

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