Trump’s plan in Iran is not ‘regime change’ but ‘endless war,’ senior Democrat says after intelligence briefing

Donald Trump’s plans for Iran are “incoherent”, “incomplete”, and are on course to drag his administration into a state of “endless war”, a senior Democrat has warned.

The comments from Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy came after he attended a two-hour briefing on the White House’s current aims for the conflict.

In a thread on X, Murphy said that while he was unable to share classified information, the private briefings indicate that Trump is unable to “defend this war in public”, and revealed that the administration is not seeking to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, nor force regime change in the country.

“The war goals DO NOT involve destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” Murphy wrote, adding that this was surprising “since Trump says over and over this is a key goal”.

“But then of course we already know air strikes can’t wipe out their nuclear material.”

He said that in the briefing, the administration “confirmed” that “regime change is also NOT on the list”.

Murphy added that this meant spending “hundreds of billions” of taxpayers’ dollars on the war, which will leave “a whole bunch of Americans killed”, and it will leave “probably a more anti-American hardline regime” in charge of Iran.

He also claimed that Trump has “no plan” to safely open the Strait of Hormuz – the sea passage Iran has effectively closed – and which is currently halting the flow of oil out of the Gulf states, driving up prices of goods and services globally.

The continued aims, Murphy said, are “primarily, destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories”.

But he said the question which then “stumped them” was: “What happens when you stop bombing and they restart production?”

He concluded, “They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, endless war.”

The insights come amid reports that the U.S. is already moving to deploy troops on the ground in Iran.

Meanwhile, Murphy’s colleague Senator Richard Blumenthal said Tuesday he believes the Trump administration is now “on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran”.

Blumenthal’s remarks to reporters on Capitol Hill came after he exited a classified briefing for members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Trump has said he’s keeping his options open regarding putting U.S. boots on the ground.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground – like every president says, ‘there will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told The New York Post this week.

Analysts have said the administration’s approach to Iran resembles less a strategy than a campaign launched without clear objectives and defended with justifications that appear to wilt under mild scrutiny.

According to Trita Parsi, co‑founder of foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the White House is effectively pursuing “regime implosion,” propelled by what he described as the president’s “wishful thinking” that sustained military pressure will somehow create a power vacuum the Iranian public will obligingly fill.

Parsi noted that the mission aligns neatly with Israel’s long‑standing desire to take Iran “off the geopolitical chessboard,” but said the administration has struggled to articulate any legitimate rationale for such an undertaking.

“The difficulty the administration is having is not necessarily that they don’t have that goal – it’s that they can’t find a justification for it,” he told reporters Monday. “They’re grasping at straws.”

In a Monday interview, Trump told CBS News he thought the war was “very complete, pretty much.”

“They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force,” he said.

He described the U.S. war effort as “very far” ahead of the four to five week timeline he and his advisers had estimated when the air campaign began on 28 February.

Since then, over 1,200 people in Iran have been killed. Seven U.S. servicemembers have also lost their lives, and earlier this week, Trump indicated he was willing to accept that more Americans would die in order to “finish the job”.