No, the administration has not formally announced a Morgenthau Plan for Iran. But that is not the point. The point is that Caine’s rhetoric tracks the same underlying logic: if your war aim is not merely to punish or deter, but to keep a state from threatening others for “years to come,” then you are no longer talking about operational suppression. You are talking about systematically crippling the economic foundations of war-making. That is an extraordinary thing for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to say. Caine is supposed to be the sober professional in the room, the man who translates political impulse into disciplined military language. If he is now defining American aims in terms that imply the long-term disabling of an entire national military-industrial ecosystem, then one of two things is true. Either the administration has genuinely lost its strategic bearings. It has wandered from limited war into maximalist fantasy without admitting the scale, duration, and destruction such an aim would require. Or it has sacrificed strategic communication to pure bloviation. It is using inflated language to sound tough while pursuing something much narrower in practice. Neither possibility is reassuring. If the first is true, Washington is flirting rhetorically with an objective that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve absent a far wider campaign against Iranian infrastructure. If the second is true, American officials are carelessly overstating war aims in ways that make later restraint look like failure. In war, rhetoric matters. Maximalist definitions of success create their own escalatory trap. That matters especially now, because this is exactly the kind of war Washington may soon want to curtail. If so, Caine’s phrasing was not merely loose. It was damaging. A chairman should clarify ends, align means, and preserve room for termination. He should not borrow, even inadvertently, the logic of Morgenthau while the White House still pretends it is fighting a limited war.