Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that this year’s military campaign against Iran went beyond striking nuclear sites and became an effort to collapse the regime without a realistic plan for what would follow.
He spoke Saturday at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government, and his official account posted a broadcast.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Delivers Remarks at Notre Dame Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government https://t.co/2OIoItmXFt via @epochtimes
— Robert Szyka (@RSzyka) November 7, 2026
DeSantis said he still supports Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Going past the removal of “problematic sites,” he argued, expanded the mission in a way the country has not closed.
“I think what happened this year was an attempt to cause the regime to collapse. Israel went and they took out the Ayatollah. They took out clerics. There were U.S. strikes, obviously. And I think the goal was that the regime’s got to collapse and then something new would take its place,” he said, according to Florida Politics. He called that “a decapitation strike” and said the January protesters were “all dead by the time they did it in late February.”
What he says went wrong
“This time, I think the goal — certainly from Israel — was that you’d have a regime change in Iran. Now, that’s not something that we’re going to be able to impose,” DeSantis said. “That would require massive amounts of boots on the ground, massive amounts of treasure, that the American people are not interested in providing.”
He said the government in Tehran did not fall, and that the people who remain “probably are more powerful than they were prior to this.” “They view us as the Great Satan. So my fear is that it’s going to kind of drag on and continue to be a sore spot, given the trajectory it’s gone.”
DeSantis said Americans deserved a concrete objective. “There was never really a concrete (plan). Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said one thing. The Secretary of State (said) something else. The Vice President… they all said a little bit different when this was launched. And that’s been part of the problem,” he said.
He also said the campaign “just kind of happened” without “much of a real debate,” and that higher energy prices brought “pain at the pump.” Before the election, he called the war a “big, big drag” on Republicans because Trump “ran saying he wasn’t going to do a Middle East war, where he did.”
The administration’s case
The President has said Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. On Friday, Rapid Response 47 circulated his remarks that America had not lost a soldier in six or seven months and that Tehran wants a deal “very badly.” CENTCOM said Saturday the naval blockade has blocked more than $25 billion in Iranian oil exports.
I take DeSantis seriously. He supported the nuclear strikes and is asking whether the wider campaign has a finish line. Some will read it as 2028 positioning.
The bottom line
DeSantis is right that the country deserves a clear statement of what this campaign is trying to finish. A strike that does not topple a government leaves a hard problem, and mixed messages from the Cabinet help no one.
He is also right that Americans feel the price of energy. That does not erase what Iran was building. The President has said he acted to stop a nuclear weapon.
The White House should state the endgame in plain language, keep the blockade in place, and refuse any deal that lets Tehran restart a bomb program. Stopping a nuclear Iran was the right mission. The administration now has to show how it will complete it.