The US and Israel’s attack on Iran on Feb. 28 shocked the world. Within hours, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was dead, along with a slew of high-ranking government and military officials.
Iran retaliated for the attacks by launching strikes at US interests and other high-profile targets in the region. The war quickly spread with Israel launching attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. The price of oil spiked and financial markets saw a surge in volatility. The prospect of a long war has raised fears of growing military and civilian casualties in the region.
US President Donald Trump was at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, when the bombing began and, unlike his predecessors, he did not return to Washington to formally address the nation on the reason for and goals of the war. Instead, he relied on social media posts, some of which contradicted each other, to explain the attacks. He cited the recent crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, the progress in developing nuclear weapons capability, the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the potential for attacks on US bases and interests in the region.
These reasons have shifted by the day and, nearly a week into the war, most Americans remain confused and unsettled. A Reuters/Ipsos survey shows that only 27 percent approve of Trump’s decision. He has come under criticism from the “America-first” wing of MAGA. The lack of clarity, particularly over the goals of the war, has exacerbated the public’s unease.
So why did Trump do it? And what are his goals? Donald Trump lives for the “thrill of the deal.” Before becoming a politician at the age of 68, he was a real estate developer who became a celebrity as a reality TV star. He inherited his father’s rental properties and expanded them into a global real estate empire.
From his years in real estate, Trump developed a worldview that informs many of his decisions today. He knows that a lot of real estate is “location, location, location” as much as it is value. He knows that real estate deals involve emotion and gut feeling as much as they do cool financial logic. The goal in Trump’s real estate world is to get the property and turn it into something of value through imagery and branding.
I realized this about Trump on visits to New York and Chicago in 2018. In New York, a walk along 5th Avenue took me past the heavily guarded Trump Tower. After a walk in Central Park, I walked over to Lincoln Center for a concert, which took me by the Trump International Hotel & Tower New York. In Chicago, my hotel at the northern end of the Loop had a window facing the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago, the second-tallest building in the city. Trump clearly likes towering buildings in iconic and therefore valuable places.
In looking at the world, Trump doesn’t see countries and their complex histories and connections with other countries; he sees plots of land, some of which offer political branding potential. These countries fall into two broad categories: places of size and places of tension. Places of size include Canada and Greenland, while places of tension are those that have historical tensions with the US.
Of the two categories, places of tension are more interesting to Trump because they represent, in the language of real estate, difficult deals that nobody else has been able to make. Iran tops the list because the regime derives much of its legitimacy from the revolution in 1979 that toppled the pro-US government. Venezuela was also on the list until US special forces captured former president Nicolas Maduro in January 2026. Cuba is on the list, which explains Trump’s recent comment about the impending collapse of the Cuban government. In his first term, Trump made a push for a denuclearization deal with North Korea, and the country remains on the list but has received little attention so far.
To date, events have fallen Trump’s way. Iran’s supreme leader has been killed and its nuclear weapons development program set back. Maduro is in a US jail, and Cuba’s economy is in a freefall. In each case, Trump can claim that he has, to varying degrees, weakened longstanding adversaries.
The problem for Trump is that the conflict has spread and now defies a quick solution. Yet low approval ratings and disapproval of the war at home make it difficult for him to sustain the effort for “as long as it takes.”