The Washington defense and diplomatic communities are not exactly mourning the death of Qasem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian commander who was killed by a U.S. airstrike on Thursday night. “Soleimani was a murderer and the major source of violence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon for three decades,” said, former ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns, echoing a near-unanimous position. “He was an enemy of the U.S., responsible for hundreds of American deaths.”

But many in Washington believe that the killing of this dangerous man made the world a much more dangerous place, and now, in a moment of ominous quiet, a new landscape is being mapped. Among diplomats I spoke with familiar with the region, there was little doubt that Iran would respond forcefully to Soleimani’s killing. “A real retaliation is going to come months from now,” a former ambassador to a country in the region said. And Iranian leadership left little doubt that this would be the case. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, called for three days of national mourning and vowed revenge. “His departure to God does not end his path or his mission, but a forceful revenge awaits the criminals who have his blood and the blood of the other martyrs last night on their hands,” he said in a statement. Thus far, clarity is lacking as to how the decision to kill Soleimani was made, and the diplomatic corp, deeply skeptical of Trump to begin with, tends to see it as an impulsive act. “It was of course a serious escalation,” said a former diplomat who worked on Middle East issues, “and seemingly devoid of strategic rationale.”

The White House has provided little information about the decision to strike the top commander. But both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Pentagon have cast it as defensive. “General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement about the airstrike, which occurred at the airport in Baghdad just days after a series of attacks on U.S. troops and the U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”

If this is the case, a number of diplomats I spoke with say Trump was in the right to strike to Soleimani. “Some criticizing President Trump are missing a major point. If the U.S. had information that further attacks were imminent against our diplomats or military personnel in the region, Trump had a legitimate reason to strike Soleimani. He had an obligation to protect our people,” Burns told me. But the administration has lost a significant amount of credibility in the past three years. There has been such an erosion in confidence, domestically and abroad, in not only what the Trump administration says but in its ability to construct a lucid foreign policy. “There is so much distrust of Trump in the region and among our allies, however, that he must now reveal specific and credible information that substantiates what Pompeo said this morning—the U.S. had to act in self-defense,” Burns continued. “Otherwise, he will not gain the support we need.” The White House and Defense Department have yet to describe what the imminent threats were that led to the decision.

There is also an acute fear within the diplomatic community that the Trump administration has failed to plot its next moves on the chessboard. “The emphasis now should be on de-escalation. But we [have] every reason to assume that Trump has not thought through the full implications of this event and the repercussions it will unleash. In other words, there likely is no strategy in place to de-escalate,” Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and Iran expert, told me. “When Trump violated the Iran nuclear deal, official communications with Tehran were severed. There is no deconfliction channel. With a hollowed-out State Department, we do not have the capacity to carry out the intense diplomacy required to manage a spiraling crisis.”