But unlike Mr. Obama or especially President George W. Bush, who gave long, comprehensive speeches explaining their approaches to the wars of the Middle East, Mr. Trump rarely takes the time to lay out his thinking in any depth. Instead, he offers Americans edgy tweets or clipped sound bites in short encounters with reporters, leaving it to others to outline his strategy, although he plans a statement of his own on Wednesday morning.

Until now, the main person doing any explaining since the strike on General Suleimani has been Mr. Pompeo. Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to give a speech on Monday describing the administration’s Iran policy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that has led opposition to the Tehran government.

Mr. Pompeo has been a forceful public advocate for both the president generally and the strike specifically, but he and others like Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper have been caught out trying to talk their way around things the president has already said. When Mr. Trump threatened to target Iranian cultural sites in violation of international law, Mr. Pompeo insisted that was not what he meant while Mr. Esper gently but unmistakably made clear the military would not do it.

Mr. Pompeo has been pressed to explain the reasons behind the attack at this time given that General Suleimani has been responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq going back many years. Asked on Tuesday to elaborate about the “imminent” attack he previously described, Mr. Pompeo instead shifted to General Suleimani’s past actions, citing a rocket attack by forces tied to Iran on an Iraqi base that killed a United States civilian contractor.

“So if you’re looking for imminence, you need look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Suleimani,” Mr. Pompeo said.

As for Mr. Esper, in his own appearance before reporters on Tuesday, he disputed the notion that the confrontation with Iran was detracting from operations against the Islamic State, even though military in the field announced the other day that it was halting such operations to protect themselves from anticipated Iranian reprisals.