U.S. President Trump has a long standing and dangerous political habit: trusting not the system, not professional analysis, not intelligence, and not subject matter specialists, but his own instinct, his personal sympathies, and those foreign leaders who know how to tell him exactly what he wants to hear. That trait became one of the main reasons behind Washington’s failure on Iran.
A Fragile Pause, Not Peace
The news of a 14 day ceasefire in the Middle East has, of course, given the world a brief respite. But it would be naive to mistake this pause for lasting peace. Any ceasefire in a conflict like this is fragile by definition. A real settlement will require far more than two weeks, and negotiations, if they happen at all in any meaningful form, will unfold in an atmosphere of accumulated distrust, mutual suspicion, and strategic hatred. All the more so because over the past year the United States has already struck Iran twice at moments when the diplomatic process had not yet been formally exhausted. And Pakistan, now acting as the main mediator, remains a state with an extremely complicated regional position and does not recognize Israel.
The Illusion of Victory and the Reality of Defeat
Against that backdrop, the usual struggle over interpretation has begun. Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran are already trying to sell the world their own version of victory. But if we strip away the propaganda noise and look soberly at the outcome, the picture for Trump looks much more like a strategic defeat than a success. Even if the current status quo holds, the reality is this: the regime in Iran did not collapse, did not crack, and did not capitulate. On the contrary, it endured, regrouped, and apparently became even more hardened, more militarized, more vindictive, and more confident in its ability to impose its own will on the region.
Tehran has retained the ability to launch drone strikes across the region, and its missile potential, even if partially degraded, remains recoverable. But the main problem for the United States and its allies is not even that.
The Strait of Hormuz as a Weapon
The most dangerous consequence of the war is that Iran has acquired a new strategic instrument of pressure that it did not previously possess to this extent: de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of global blackmail. This is not simply a narrow stretch of water on a map. It is a vital artery of the global energy system, one of the most important routes for supplies of raw materials, fertilizers, and helium, the latter being critically necessary for high tech manufacturing, including semiconductors. In other words, Iran has now learned in practice that it can use not only missiles but the very architecture of the global economy as a weapon. After that experience, the incentive to build nuclear weapons is no longer the only pillar of its deterrence strategy, although Tehran still retains a significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Trump’s Biggest Mistake: He Listened to the Wrong People
This leads to the central question: why did Trump get involved in a war that left the global economy more vulnerable than it was at the start of the year? The answer probably lies in the character of the U.S. president himself. For years he has shown that he is more willing to believe outside actors than his own state apparatus. Perhaps because outside actors, especially skilled political manipulators such as Netanyahu or Putin, know how to package their arguments in a form that suits his instincts. Perhaps because Trump fundamentally has little respect for those who work inside the system and are obliged to tell him uncomfortable truths. In the case of Iran, that trait played a fatal role. Unlike the catastrophic Iraq war, which Trump long criticized, and fairly so, as a self destructive adventure, in this case specialists were warning him in advance. They were not wrong. Trump was wrong to ignore them.
Instinct Versus Expertise
That is precisely the fundamental difference between political instinct and professional expertise. Instinct may appeal to voters. Expertise may irritate a president. But expertise is what makes it possible to see the consequences before they become a catastrophe.
Helsinki as a Political Prelude
The roots of this problem go back to Trump’s first term. It is enough to recall July 2018 and his appearance in Helsinki after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Standing beside the Russian leader, Trump effectively cast public doubt on the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies regarding Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Even then, it was clear that if he had to choose between an unpleasant assessment from American intelligence and a version of events more convenient for him, he would easily choose the latter.
How Netanyahu Sold Trump a Beautiful Illusion
The same thing happened with the Iran crisis. On the eve of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented Trump with a dramatic and politically seductive chain of consequences for a strike on Iran: the elimination of the supreme leader, the destruction of Iran’s missile potential, a popular uprising, then regime change and the arrival of secular power. It was less a plan than a collection of wishful fantasies packaged as a strategic scenario. Inside the American system, that scenario was met with deep skepticism. According to press reports, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called talk of regime change a farce. Marco Rubio was even harsher. General Dan Caine directly warned Trump that the Israeli side was selling the operation in packaging that was far too attractive and was once again presenting wishful thinking as a guaranteed outcome.
But that kind of packaging was exactly what made the idea politically appealing to the White House. Trump, it seems, never fully believed in the scenario of a popular uprising and regime change, but he did expect at least a military effect: the suppression of Iran’s missile infrastructure and a sharp reduction in the threat to Israel. Yet even that calculation failed. Even after the ceasefire was announced, Iran demonstrated an ability to strike and to create danger, which means the war’s key objective was not achieved. That matters especially because any costly military campaign that fails to meet its stated goals turns from a demonstration of strength into a demonstration of miscalculation.
Experts Warned About the Energy Shock Too
Even more revealing is how quickly the conflict shifted from a question of Israeli security to a question of global energy. As soon as Iran began using the strait and attacks on the region’s energy infrastructure as leverage, it became obvious that the war had entered the phase experts had warned about in advance. The U.S. intelligence community had long assumed that in the event of an attack Tehran would try to use the Strait of Hormuz as an instrument of strategic pressure. Moreover, years of war games showed that Iran’s response would almost certainly affect the region’s largest energy exporters, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Yet Trump behaved as though he were facing something completely unexpected. In reality, it could only have been unexpected to someone who consciously refused to listen to the very people whose job is to forecast such scenarios.
Why the Regime in Iran Could Not Collapse Quickly
Another aspect is no less important. Iran’s political system was designed from the start to survive even the loss of the supreme leader. It is not a classic personalist autocracy that collapses with the figure at the top. It is an ideological, institutionally cemented structure with a deep and resilient system of self preservation. Any serious Iran specialist knows this. Anyone except those who preferred to sell the U.S. president a fairy tale about the regime’s rapid collapse.
Personnel Degradation as a Source of Strategic Error
To understand the scale of the mistake, one also has to look at the personnel policy of Trump’s second term. The conditions for this failure were created not at the moment of the strike but long before it. The national security team was assembled not according to competence but according to personal loyalty. Loyalty became more important than professionalism. People were screened out not for analytical mistakes but for the slightest disloyalty, for past criticism of Trump, or simply for the ability to think independently. The State Department suffered heavy personnel losses. The National Security Council was effectively weakened. Key portfolios increasingly fell not to experienced diplomats and systemic specialists, but to politically convenient figures, relatives, friends, media personalities, and people skilled at adapting themselves to the president’s mood.
An Atmosphere of Submission Instead of Debate
This created an atmosphere inside the administration in which critical opinion became almost a form of disloyalty. Where a hard analytical debate should have taken place, flattery took over. Where the president should have been told no, he was told what he wanted to hear. In matters of war and peace, that is a near guaranteed path to miscalculation.
A Dangerous Faith in His Own Infallibility
There is another reason Trump fell into this trap. He was spoiled by earlier episodes of success. Several previous operations, presented by the White House as victories, created in him a dangerous sense of personal infallibility. When a leader begins to believe that any use of force, even one questionable in legal and strategic terms, will automatically produce the desired result, he becomes especially vulnerable to self deception. That is apparently what happened here. Military good fortune ceased to be seen as the product of multiple factors and began to look like proof of personal exceptionalism.
But politics does not forgive that kind of arrogance, especially in the Middle East, where the stakes are almost always higher than they appear in a television studio.
Television Talent Does Not Replace Strategy
Yes, Trump knows how to work the media space. He truly understands the rhythm of the 24 hour news cycle, knows how to seize the airwaves, disrupt the agenda, calm markets with words, and at the same time accelerate fear with loud threats. In the short run, that works. But television charisma does not replace strategy. Markets can be calmed for a day. Allies for a week. Voters for a month. But reality cannot be held hostage to a political show forever once the consequences of war begin hitting the economy, regional stability, and the reputation of the United States itself.
When Public Relations Ends and Facts Begin
At some point, the power of public relations runs out and the power of facts begins. And the facts are uncomfortable for Trump today. Iran was not broken. The region did not become safer. The world’s energy vulnerability increased. America’s ability to control escalation came into question. And U.S. adversaries received yet another confirmation that Washington can be drawn into a dangerous game if one knows how to play on the ambitions and instincts of its leader.
The Main Conclusion
The main conclusion from this story is simple, though unpleasant for the current White House. Competence matters. Specialists can make mistakes, but a system in which specialists are pushed out of the room is almost doomed to make even more frequent and even more destructive mistakes. When a president surrounds himself not with people capable of arguing with him, but with those who know how to applaud, he stops seeing reality. And a leader who has lost the ability to hear unpleasant truths will sooner or later begin to lose even where he possesses enormous power.
Conclusion
That is exactly what happened to Trump in the Iran crisis. He did not simply underestimate his opponent. He overestimated his own intuition, believed in other people’s political fantasies, and ignored those who could see the outlines of the coming failure in advance. If this lesson is not learned, Iran and other U.S. adversaries will force Washington more than once to pay the price for its president’s overconfidence.