Writing in The Guardian this weekend, Alan West, a retired admiral of Britain’s Royal Navy, put these concerns starkly: “Some powerful groups in Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States want war and think a precision strike against key parts of Iran’s military capability would lead to regime change,” he wrote. “They are wrong. It would lead to an open-ended war with catastrophic consequences across the region and the globe.”

The trick for the Trump administration might be to have enough sense to know when it’s winning.