There are short term and long term plans. The long term plans are:

- Remove Ghaddafi and have chaos in Libya (accomplished).

- Remove Saddam and have chaos in Iraq (accomplished).

- Install a puppet regime in Egypt and suppress the muslim brotherhood (accomplished).

- Remove Assad and install an ex al-Qaeda (note the irony) puppet (accomplished).

- Have regime change in Iran (ongoing).

Syria took nearly a decade. The US does not need outright military victory, it uses proxies and will at some point try to activate the Kurds or someone else.

If Iran is destabilized enough to undermine the Caspian Sea coalition and get the resources of Turkmenistan, that is also a victory. Unless the other theory is right and the US wants to export its resources first.

We don't know the exact plans, but the grand scheme is not Trump's idea. It goes back to the Bush era.

It can be true that Trump was the useful idiot who actually signed off the Iran plan, which another president may not have done. But the plans are there, including Caspian sea plans from decades ago.

Or there is no long term plan. Every leader is just larping as Leeroy Jenkins for short term political points which sometimes works (Crimea 2014) but unfortunately for Trump, Israel had wrong intel and whole assumption of regime change in Iran was build on invalid data.

Kind of like Russians storming into Ukraine in 2022 thinking that it is Prague 1968 but it turned out into Afghanistan 1979 and then slowly mutated into World War 1 1914