Trump announces major strikes on Iran as regional conflict widens

President Donald Trump announced "major combat operations" against Iran on Feb. 28, and massive joint U.S.-Israeli strikes hit military, government and infrastructure sites across the country. The assault immediately widened beyond Iran's borders, triggering retaliatory attacks on targets in several countries and a regional crisis that disrupted one of the world's most important shipping lanes.

The strategic effect was not limited to the battlefield. The Congressional Research Service said the strikes and the violence that followed largely halted maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that carries a major share of Persian Gulf energy shipments. That made the conflict a test not just of military power, but of whether Washington and Tehran could keep any diplomatic channel open while the shooting intensified.

Trump later said he insisted to Benjamin Netanyahu that U.S. negotiations with Iran continue even as the campaign unfolded. After a two-week ceasefire was announced, initial U.S.-Iran talks began, a sign that the White House was trying to preserve a negotiating track while projecting military pressure. The dual message left open the question of whether Tehran's interest in talks was a real off-ramp or a public posture meant to manage the next phase of the confrontation.

The tension between escalation and diplomacy sharpened further when Trump later called off the latest threats to strike Iran hours after threatening to escalate the war. He then said the United States and Iran had reached a deal opening the Strait of Hormuz, turning the shipping crisis into a central measure of whether the conflict would spill further across the Gulf.

Tehran answered with fresh retaliatory attacks after the strikes and confirmed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the U.S.-Israeli assault. By then, the conflict had moved from a single round of strikes into a broader regional fight, with the security of Iran's leadership, the stability of the Persian Gulf and the future of U.S.-Iran talks all tied together.