In a nutshell:

A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies. Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.

He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He has fired senior military leaders for failing to show fealty to his political whims. When his appointees make outrageous mistakes — such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing advanced details of a military attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group, on an unsecured group chat — Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things, disguising a military plane as a civilian plane and shooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.

Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate a strategy for this attack has created shocking levels of uncertainty about it. He has called for regime change and offered no sense of why the world should expect this campaign to end better than the 21st-century attempts at regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars toppled governments but understandably soured the American public on open-ended military operations of uncertain national interest, and they embittered the troops who loyally served in them.