Just 25% of Americans Say the Iran War Has Been a “Strategic Success”

For those of you keeping track at home, it was March 9, 2026 when President Donald Trump described the Iran War as “very complete,” just one of oh-so-many pronouncements of total U.S. victory that are typically immediately followed with demands that our defeated Middle Eastern enemy please stop fighting. That was five weeks ago, and here we now find ourselves with still nothing passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. officials still begging an recalcitrant Iran to “make a deal.” Meanwhile, the U.S. military has blown through tens of billions of dollars in lost equipment and spent munitions, the global price of oil and gasoline continues to vacillate wildly, and Iran’s supreme leader remains the son of the previous supreme leader … who we blew up. Israel is still lobbying bombs at Lebanon, including attacking ambulance crews, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is threatening to restart overt hostilities any moment now. Perhaps all of this is why a mere 25% of Americans surveyed now say that the Iran War has been a “strategic success” for the United States?

That’s a rather stunning figure for any poll to find in a country as deeply and irretrievably polarized as ours has now become. Seriously, there is almost nothing you could poll people on that has any political connotations of any kind, and expect to find 75% of the U.S. population in agreement. A polling result like this demonstrates that even among the Republican base, the Iran War is deeply, wildly unpopular–that even hardened partisan hacks find themselves detesting it, unable to summon the rah-rah patriotism they’re expected to wheel out in these situations to blindly and fervently agree with whatever the President does. Who would have thought that the one thing that could unify America is everyone deciding to hate Donald Trump’s impulsive choice to launch another war in the Middle East?

Operation Epic Fail update:

25% of Americans say the war is a strategic success — 42% deem it a failure. 51% of Americans saying the benefits of the war are not worth the costs. 26% say it will improve US security, while 41% say it actually makes it worse.

www.cnn.com/2026/03/20/p…

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— Chris Rivers (@chrisrivers50.bsky.social) Apr 16, 2026 at 10:19 AM

The key poll here is one from CBS News-YouGov conducted over the weekend, which contains a laundry list of brutal figures for the Trump administration. As previously mentioned, a mere 25% of Americans said they would describe the Iran War as a “strategic success,” and only 36% even believed that purely American military operations had been successful so far. But those results almost qualify as optimistic compared to some of the specific questions about American objectives in the war, which might be the most stunningly negative survey responses I have ever seen in this context. Of the people surveyed, only 7% of them said that the current Iranian leadership is “more pro-US now” than it was before the war, despite Trump claiming that “regime change” had happened, and that the supposed new regime was “pretty reasonable.” As a reminder, the leader of said regime is someone whose father we recently killed, so yeah–I would expect that person to be extremely reasonable. Additionally, only 11% of the people surveyed said that the U.S. military action to date has permanently ended Iran’s nuclear program–this, despite Trump having repeatedly claimed to have “obliterated” said program both last June and in the wake of these most recent attacks.

The clear takeaway is that when it comes to Iran, the American people simply don’t believe a word coming out of Trump’s mouth. They overwhelmingly don’t believe our President, in fact, and this is a sentiment reflected in not just one poll but across scores of them. Recent polling from Pew Research Center found that merely 27% of Americans surveyed said that the Iran War to date would deter Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon or make their creation of a nuclear bomb “less likely.” In the same vein, a recent Ipsos poll found that only 24% of Americans said the benefits of the war would be “worth the cost” of it, and only 26% believed that the war would “improve national security.” Meanwhile, 41% of respondents in that poll actually said they believed the Iran War would make U.S. national security worse than it was before.

Remarkable finding in new Quinnipiac poll – only 30% of voters think the Iran War has left us in a stronger position in the world. 45% say it has left us in a weaker position.
poll.qu.edu/poll-release…

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— Simon Rosenberg (@simonwdc.bsky.social) Apr 15, 2026 at 5:40 PM

Faced with such dire, apocalyptic opinion polling of the American people and his electorate, just months out from the midterm elections in November, one would think that Trump would be absolutely desperate at this point to back out of the war as soon as possible as his own approval polling continues to unearth new floors. And yet even with such clear, flashing warning klaxons, Trump seems pathologically unable to cut bait from this without personally feeling like he has emerged as the victor, something he clearly doesn’t actually believe yet despite all the pronouncements of our victory–if Trump actually, genuinely believed he had won, the war would already have been over long ago. Instead, the President finds himself calling in to Fox News shows over the weekend, chatting with the likes of Maria Bartiromo and attempting to convince the remaining shreds of MAGA who might be watching that high gas prices are good, actually, and that they shouldn’t expect to see them come down in the next six months. No really, he actually said that, saying that gas prices “could be the same or maybe a little higher” than they are now by the time of the crucial November midterm elections. Just how stupid is he, exactly?

For now, Trump and members of his inner circle and cabinet continue their odd–I hesitate to call it “strategy”–tendency toward saying profoundly contrasting things about the Iran War in the immediate wake of each other’s comments. Trump continues to promise both that the war has already ended, and that it’s going to end very soon, while Stephen Miller appears on Fox News moments later and proclaims that it will continue “indefinitely.” They seem to be lost in the ditch that they’ve dug for themselves, floundering at a time when only 31% of Americans approve of the job the President is doing on the economy, the actual most important issue to the vast majority of respondents.

Can these numbers truly go any lower? Perhaps if they do, we’ll inadvertently end up healing the national partisan divide by giving all Americans, regardless of race, creed or socioeconomic status, a villain we can all hate equally.