One month in, President Trump's Iran war has fractured into three competing realities, Axios' Zachary Basu writes:

1. A military campaign that has largely delivered.
2. A strategic vision that hasn't.
3. A political and economic problem getting worse by the day.

Why it matters: The Trump administration has declared Operation Epic Fury an overwhelming success. But the trajectory of the war — from shifting goalposts to mounting costs — points to a potential stalemate.

🔎 Zoom in: By conventional military measures, the U.S. and Israel are dominating Iran at sea, in the air and on land.

• In its first 29 days, Operation Epic Fury struck 11,000+ targets, flew 11,000+ combat sorties, and damaged or destroyed 150+ Iranian vessels, according to a Pentagon tally.
• The opening phase of the war decapitated much of Iran's senior military leadership and damaged its ballistic missile program.

But sustaining the military campaign has come at a cost — including at least 13 U.S. deaths, hundreds of injuries, billions of dollars in damaged or destroyed equipment, and about $1 billion a day in estimated costs.

• Iran's missiles continue to pummel the region — and U.S. forces haven't been spared.
• One day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Iran's military "neutralized," Iranian missiles struck a base in Saudi Arabia, injuring 29 American soldiers and damaging U.S. refueling and surveillance aircraft.
• The New York Times reports that many of the 13 U.S. military bases in the region are "all but uninhabitable" due to Iranian strikes. The Pentagon declined to comment on the report, citing operational security.

Zoom out: The strategic picture is hard to square with the administration's triumphalism.

• The decapitation of Iran's senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, hasn't destabilized the regime, softened its anti-American posture or brought freedom to the Iranian people.
• The war's central justification — eliminating Iran's nuclear threat — remains unresolved: Trump is now weighing a high-risk ground operation to seize Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
• Iran's stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz has become the war's most damaging unintended consequence — triggering a historic energy shock, straining relations with allies and threatening to metastasize into a long-term strategic crisis.

A White House official pushed back on the strategic assessment, saying Trump outlined four distinct goals for Operation Epic Fury — destroying Iran's ballistic missile capacity, annihilating its navy, eliminating terrorist proxies, and guaranteeing Iran never possesses a nuclear weapon — and that "the United States Military is meeting or surpassing all of its benchmarks on these defined objectives."

• Share this story ... Marc Caputo contributed reporting.

President Trump isn't just befuddling foreign leaders and financial markets with his mixed signals on Iran. Advisers who speak regularly with the president tell Axios they're just as uncertain, Axios' Marc Caputo and Barak Ravid write.

• Why it matters: Trump's off-the-cuff musings and Truth Social postings can have life-or-death consequences for the war and massive implications for the market. Then the cycle restarts without any lasting clarity.

Some Trump aides and allies say he's mostly improvising rather than following a clear plan.

• He likes to keep his options open, spitball with different audiences, then capitalize if he thinks he sees an opportunity, they say.
• Aides have been convinced at various points that Trump was leaning toward a major escalation, and at others that he was eager for a swift resolution. "Nobody knows in the end what he's really thinking," a senior adviser said.
• "They had a plan for the first week and since then, they are making the plan up as they go along," a former U.S. official said.

🔬 Zoom in: It's becoming clearer, at least for now, that Trump intends to withdraw and declare victory soon — in the next "two–three weeks," as he put it yesterday.

• He's mused repeatedly in recent days about how the U.S. has won and what an exit would look like.

In private, though, Trump is talking more to hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Fox News personality Mark Levin than longtime confidants who oppose escalation.

• Leaders in Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also worried about the idea of Trump wrapping up and leaving the regime in Tehran, battered but emboldened.
• "The Saudis sound like Mark Levin," one Trump adviser said. "They want the U.S. to finish the job by wiping Iran off the globe now. We don't want to."

👀 What to watch: With it becoming clear Iran's missile and drone capacity won't be entirely destroyed, one option that has emerged is "mowing the grass" — or conducting strikes as needed after heavy combat dies down.

• "The president said early on we might have to come back," another administration official said. "And we might have to."

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Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, says on a new episode of "The Axios Show" that while the Iran war involves some "short-term risks" for the economy, the country's regime has been a bad actor since its inception.

• "Having those folks, their [grip] on the Strait of Hormuz and funding all these proxy wars — why the Western world put up with these proxy wars for 45 years is kind of beyond me," Dimon told Axios CEO Jim VandeHei.

Why it matters: Those are strikingly hawkish comments from the leader of America's largest bank, making him one of the corporate world's most prominent defenders of a war that currently appears politically unpopular and economically damaging.

Dimon said critics who argue there was "no imminent threat" from Iran are simply saying "the bad thing hasn't happened" yet.

• "They've killed a lot of Americans. They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis … they have terrorist cells here," Dimon told Axios at his bank's new global headquarters in Manhattan.
• "They were bad," Dimon said of the Iranian regime.

The flip side: "Does it create all this uncertainty? Absolutely," he continued. "Does it create more short-term risk for oil prices? Absolutely. I'm praying it ends well."

• Watch the clip.

This chart shows global spending on data centers is surging to levels that rival energy investments, Axios' Amy Harder writes from a report by Norway-based Rystad Energy.

• The U.S. accounted for 42% of installed capacity of data centers in 2025 — double that of mainland China, the second-place market, Rystad found.

The intrigue: It also shows that renewable energy, despite criticism from President Trump, continues to tick up globally.

• Get Axios Future of Energy.

Women are less likely to use AI at work — and even when they do, they get less recognition for the effort, Axios' Emily Peck writes from a Lean In survey.

• Why it matters: Suddenly, AI ability is the skill many employers say they value most. Down the line, this recognition gap could exacerbate existing gender pay and promotion inequalities, Lean In founder Sheryl Sandberg tells Axios.

🧮 By the numbers: 78% of men said they have used AI for work, compared with 73% of women, according to a survey the group conducted in early March among 1,000 U.S. adults.

• Among those using AI, 18% of women said they've been praised for doing so, compared with 27% of men.

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If you're an immigrant worker in the U.S., you've got a better shot at landing a visa as a farmer than a tech worker, researcher, doctor or nurse, Axios' Brittany Gibson writes.

• Why it matters: The Trump administration's crackdown on H-1B visas is crushing sectors that rely on high-skilled immigrant workers, while seasonal programs for farm workers have gotten a pass.

Huge new fees ($100,000 a pop for H-1B visas) are combining with higher salary requirements to make importing high-skilled workers less attractive for American employers.

• At the same time, the administration is lowering wage requirements for farm workers and helping streamline their visas.

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Source material powering Anthropic's Claude Code leaked for the second time in just over a year, exposing the AI coding tool's full architecture, unreleased features and internal model performance data, Axios' Madison Mills writes.

The leaked code contained references to capabilities that appear fully built but haven't shipped, according to an Anthropic spokesperson, including:

• A "persistent assistant" running in background mode that lets Claude Code keep working even when a user is idle.
• Claude's ability to review what was done in its latest session to improve in the future and remember what it's learned.

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Just posted: A TED Talk by Axios CEO Jim VandeHei on "5 practical ways to take control of your life."

• "I tried to become a student of what it takes to be successful and what makes great people great," Jim says. "There's a commonality to all of them: You control you! That became my mantra. … When sh*t happens, shine!"

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