Who knows what he wants. I don't think
anyone wants a war other than arms dealers and probably any oil rich countries not based in the middle east. Trump wants lots of little victories and distractions, Iran wants to be seen to be getting justice and not being pushed around by the US. The rest of the region want to appear strong but as far as I have read have no real appetite for war.
I don't claim to have anything other than a shallow understanding of this whole situation, the more I research the less I know, it's just that fecking complex with the number of actors involved.
My one take from this over the last couple of days is that despite all the posturing, the middle east appears to be in as stable a condition as it's been for a long while in regards to the leaders of each country knowing where they stand in regards to other leaders and each country having no real appetite for actual conflict. All the conflict appears to only be happening between militia (state funded of course) or in cases like KSA vs Yemen which is a massacre rather than a war or Israel vs Palestine which is more like people throwing rocks occasionally being obliterated by people with rifles. Nobody really wants actual war because as much as anything it will upset the whole balance and put relations under huge strain. What do you do when your main ally's enemy is also your arch-rival's arch-enemy? It seems like there's a spiderweb of these relations centring from the middle east and actual war would put a lot of these relations to the test and would end up as a massive shit show.
EDIT - From 2014 so I'm sure a lot has changed but here's a great graphic showing the complexity of relations in the ME.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/da...ddle-east-who-is-connected-to-who-interactive
If an actual war kicks off, good luck predicting who will be on each side