US has ‘no plan’ for Iran war and Strait of Hormuz, senators say after briefing
Democratic senators said on Tuesday night that the US has “no plan” for the war on Iran, after President Donald Trump’s administration conducted a two-hour behind-closed-doors briefing for the Senate Armed Services Committee.
This absence of any coordinated strategic thinking extends to the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy chokepoint, regime change in Iran and the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme.
Following the Trump administration’s briefing on Tuesday, a procession of opposition senators came out to condemn what they described as the illegality, incoherence and lies surrounding the war, with Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland saying Trump was simply doing what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted to do for 40 years.
“What you hear behind closed doors is essentially what we’re hearing in the public domain, which is complete incoherence,” Van Hollen said after the briefing.
“But we do know, from Secretary Rubio, that Netanyahu decided to strike Iran, and so here we are doing what Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to do for 40 years, which was to attack Iran,” Van Hollen said, referring to remarks made by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, on 2 March.
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“It is so much worse than you thought,” said Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator.
“The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation. Trump has not given a single clear reason for the war and has no plan to end it.”
No regime change, no Strait of Hormuz plan
The senators who spoke out after the US briefing all condemned the apparent lack of any plan or any real objectives when it came to every area of the war on Iran.
Both Van Hollen and Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, said that they’d been told in the briefing that the US administration’s goals for the war did not involve destroying Iran’s nuclear programme or bringing about regime change.
'And on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN... they don’t know how to get it safely back open'
- Senator Chris Murphy
“So, they are going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime – probably a more anti-American hardline regime – will still be in charge,” Murphy said.
Van Hollen echoed this, referring to public reporting on the CIA’s assessment of what would happen if the Iranian leadership was taken out, which is that “you’re likely to get an even more radical group”.
The goals of the war, Murphy said, seemed to be “destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories”.
Asked what would happen when Iran restarted production on these things, Murphy said that US officials “hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, endless war”.
“And on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN,” Murphy posted on X. “I can’t go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait, but suffice to say, right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open.”
This, Murphy said, “is unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100 percent foreseeable”.
Trump follows Netanyahu
Earlier this week, Trump said that he believed Iran was going to attack the US based not on intelligence briefings, but on what he had been told by his advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who is also his son-in-law.
In his remarks following the behind-closed-doors briefing, Van Hollen said that before the arrival of Trump in the White House, "Netanyahu had not found a president stupid enough to drag the US" into war with Iran.
"And now Donald Trump has done it, and they don’t have a clue as to what the endgame is,” Van Hollen said.
'Netanyahu has been trying to co-opt and manipulate Trump into a major war for the last year'
- Alon Pinkas, former Israeli diplomat
These comments chime with those of Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and adviser to four foreign ministers, who told MEE that Israel had led the US into the war on Iran.
“This has been Netanyahu’s fantasy for a long time,” Pinkas said. “He has political reasons and pretexts: changing the narrative of the 7 October catastrophe and deflecting attention from his trial and the upcoming election.
“Netanyahu has been trying to co-opt and manipulate Trump into a major war for the last year,” Pinkas said. “And Trump has his own wag-the-dog issues here: Epstein, his own polls, the Supreme Court.”
Van Hollen also said there had been “no explanation for why Donald Trump broke his promise to the country when he said he wasn’t going to drag us into additional wars, and constantly shifting narratives about what this is all about.”
Trump’s decision to go to war has caused a rift in his Maga base, with some – including influential media personality Tucker Carlson – seeing the US willingness to wage Israel’s war as a betrayal of the “America First” doctrine.
Inside the administration, Kushner, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Senator Lindsey Graham have taken a gung-ho approach to the war, while Rubio is seen as being more focused on Cuba and Latin America.
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