Several top figures at Fox News have argued that the Trump administration should resume bombing Iran and could win a decisive military victory in as little as “two weeks.”

Fox News supported the war against Iran even before the United States and Israel launched it on February 28, and the network’s position has remained largely unchanged in the following months as the conflict has dragged on. Fox has repeatedly urged President Donald Trump to restart the war since April 8, when the three countries agreed to a ceasefire that’s proven shaky at best.

There’s no public evidence to support the claim that the United States is on the cusp of victory. To the contrary, a U.S. intelligence assessment from early May determined that Iran still retained significant missile capacity.  

Regardless, Fox News has spent months selling the fantasy that victory is a mere “two weeks” away, if only Trump would unleash the U.S. and Israeli militaries.

On the day the ceasefire was announced, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg said Trump’s negotiating team should tell Iran’s leaders: “If you want to play games with us, in two weeks you’re going to be lucky to survive as a regime at all.” 

“History has proven that we are the dominant power,” Kellogg explained. “We’re going to make sure you understand that.” 

On April 13, Fox News senior security analyst Jack Keane, another retired general, offered the same timeline.

“Once the ceasefire ends, I think we need to go back to combat operations anyway,” Keane said. “I mean, [U.S. Adm. Brad] Cooper running Central Command and [Israeli Lt. Gen. Eyal] Zamir running the IDF, they both had close to two weeks left of targets to take down. That tells us there is still something out there, and I think we should go out and finish it.”

Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen, who has reportedly advised Trump “to take some kind of military action to try to break the deadlock,” said on April 23 he agreed with Keane that “the time has come … to start the military campaign again.” 

“When we stopped the war, the fighting, paused it, Adm. Cooper had about 14 days left in order to finish all the targets on his list.” He added: “He can finish this in two weeks."  

Keane repeated his analysis on May 11, pushing Trump to “return to full combat operations and finish what we started.”

“We got somewhere between a week to two weeks,” Keane said. “The president knows better than I. He just mentioned two weeks. That's Israeli full throttle, United States full throttle.”

As Iran and Israel traded strikes on June 7, Fox News’ Mark Levin offered a version of the same talking point.   

“Here’s an idea — we spend the next two or three weeks hammering the hell out of every target that matters, including the so-called enriched uranium, 20% or more, I don’t really care,” Levin said. “Whatever it is, and just hit them with everything we have got with those fabulous bombers and bombs.”

Levin added that the U.S., Israel, and Arab countries should inflict “as much military damage as we possibly can, dual-use damage as we possibly can, and then leave.” At that point, he said, it would be up to Israel and Persian Gulf countries to determine what happens next.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade stuck to the same script. “It takes about two weeks,” he said on June 8. “I think the president has got to finish the job.”

Kellogg, Keane, Thiessen, Kilmeade, and Levin are all major Iran hawks, and their rosy assessment that total victory is a mere two weeks away seems designed to coax Trump back into open conflict and likely a much longer war. At least some of these figures are losing their patience with Trump, as illustrated by recent criticism Levin leveled at the president for “bashing” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

On June 8, a U.S. helicopter went down near the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump blamed on Iran, promising that “the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.” The Iran hawks at Fox News may yet get their escalation of this war, but there’s no reason to think a U.S. victory is two weeks away.