Trump’s debate pitted his promise to avoid “endless wars” with the prospect of a legacy-making achivement.

The highest hope of President Donald Trump‘s bombing of Iran: A rogue nuclear program that had defied a half-dozen of his predecessors has finally been destroyed.

The deepest fear: Just four years after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan ended America’s longest war, the United States is now enmeshed in another war in a volatile region, with perilous and uncertain consequences.

“Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” Trump said in a late-night announcement in the East Room on June 21, interrupting Americans’ Saturday night plans with news that B-2 bombers had dropped the world’s most powerful conventional bombs on three sites considered crucial to Tehran’s nuclear program. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.”