The Experts Are Taking Their Revenge Again

At a political rally in Arizona in October, U.S. President Donald Trump joked that he “probably went a little too far” with the U.S.-Israeli military strikes against Iran that he initiated in February. The electoral catastrophe that unfolded for Republicans in the midterms a few weeks later made this abundantly clear. During a midnight interview with Fox News at the end of election night on Nov. 3, when asked about what had hurt the GOP most at the polls, Trump conceded that “I think a part of it was Iran.” Setting aside equivocation the following day, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X, “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. … And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” At a political rally in Arizona in October, U.S. President Donald Trump joked that he “probably went a little too far” with the U.S.-Israeli military strikes against Iran that he initiated in February. The electoral catastrophe that unfolded for Republicans in the midterms a few weeks later made this abundantly clear. During a midnight interview with Fox News at the end of election night on Nov. 3, when asked about what had hurt the GOP most at the polls, Trump conceded that “I think a part of it was Iran.” Setting aside equivocation the following day, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X, “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. … And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Energy prices had soared, and voters noticed that they weren’t being put first, punishing the incumbent party for this betrayal. The president’s most consequential foreign-policy mistake has turned out to be launching a war against a major regional power in the Middle East with a surfeit of misplaced optimism and scant consideration of what might go wrong. The irony does not need much teasing out. It is not as if the president was not warned. As the New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan detail in their book Regime Change, U.S. intelligence was skeptical of key elements of the case for war that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented to Trump at the White House Situation Room on Feb. 11. Seeing upsides everywhere he looked, the Israeli prime minister said that Iran’s ballistic missile program would be destroyed in a few weeks, that a weakened Iran would be unable to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that the risk to neighboring states was small. He also reported that Mossad intelligence suggested that an intense bombing campaign would destabilize the regime, allowing Iranian opposition forces to assume control. The CIA’s director, John Ratcliffe, reported back to the president and his principal advisors the next day. Agency analysts believed that military action could take out Iran’s leadership and destroy its ability to threaten its neighbors. But Ratcliffe said that the suggestion that airstrikes would spark regime change was “farcical,” according to the Times reporters. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stepped in to paraphrase: “In other words, it’s bullshit.” Vance strongly agreed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, told Trump, “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.” Warning lights were flashing everywhere. Trump ultimately decided to authorize Operation Epic Fury on the basis that decapitating Iran’s leadership and striking decisively against its offensive capabilities was sufficient cause. It was a remarkable leap of faith for a man whose opposition to reckless foreign wars—Iraq, first and foremost—had helped him secure the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He restated this view in defeating President Joe Biden eight years later, too. At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in October 2024, Trump said, “I will not send you to fight and die in a foolish, never-ending foreign war.” In launching war against Iran, Trump ignored private doubts expressed by his vice president, CIA director, secretary of state, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was the only person to unequivocally back war with Iran (which places him in a precarious position now.) The history of U.S. foreign policy is replete with examples of influential and well-placed advisors ignoring or marginalizing compelling intelligence that contradicted their plans for war or escalation. In the case of the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, they also happen to correspond with the worst foreign-policy mistakes in American history. And just like Trump’s war against Iran, these were conflicts of choice, not of necessity, to deploy Richard Haass’s helpful binary. The rationales undergirding each war were different, but a common theme is present across all—ill-advised certainty defeated counterevidence and caution. Determined to locate evidence that connected Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz repeatedly instructed the CIA to investigate the link and repeatedly got the same reply: No such relationship existed between this secular leader and the radical Islamist terrorist group. The undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, set up an alternative intelligence-gathering outfit, the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, in the Pentagon to locate what the CIA had supposedly missed. It found nothing, but this did not stop Vice President Dick Cheney from insisting repeatedly that Saddam’s Iraq was linked to the 9/11 attacks, bolstering public support for any invasion of Iraq. In late 2001 and through 2002, George Tenet’s CIA was browbeaten and ultimately marginalized as it failed to locate the smoking-gun evidence—both on weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links with al Qaeda—that Bush administration hawks insisted would be there if only the agency looked hard enough. The war was launched in March 2003. Though the initial military action was ruthlessly effective—as was the case with U.S.-Israeli action against Iran in February—what happened after Saddam’s fall was not. The August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson congressional authorization to wage war against North Vietnam, was predicated on a North Vietnamese attack on two U.S. destroyers that never actually happened. As LBJ later told Undersecretary of State George Ball, “Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.” The resolution gave the Johnson administration ample latitude to do as it saw fit in Vietnam—LBJ said it was like “grandmother’s nightshirt. It covers everything.” Just two senators—Democrat Ernest Gruening from Alaska and Republican Wayne Morse from Oregon—voted against, warning their colleagues that they were effectively signing an undated declaration of war. Both men lost their next elections, but history has treated them kindly. As the war escalated, Walt Rostow, one of the conflict’s key architects, was constantly at odds with intelligence analysts on how it was progressing. As Johnson’s national security advisor from April 1966, Rostow was in a powerful position to present his own spin on the intelligence reports that he received. He would cherry-pick small sections of good news in larger intelligence reports counselling caution and present his own optimistic summary to Johnson. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later remarked, “Intelligent people in the State Department have told me that Walt would funnel in the stuff that sustained his own thesis.” Rostow’s relationship with Langley understandably soured. When forwarding some raw eyewitness testimony to LBJ in the fall of 1967, Rostow wrote, “This is what the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong really looks like—with all due respect to intelligence analysts 10,000 miles away.” Rostow was certain that the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam that he helped devise was winning the war and discounted intelligence that challenged his take. It was almost an article of faith for him. The architects of the war against Iran in February held similar overconfidence in bombing’s coerciveness in an incredibly complex theater of operation. Airpower is indeed a crucial military tool, but unrealistic political goals—forcing North Vietnam to give up on its war of unification or forcing regime change in Tehran—are rarely achieved from the skies. Ignoring the intelligence that points this out simply invites failure. Wolfowitz and Rostow were ideologues who believed they had finessed fundamental truths about the wars they strategized that the intelligence community had missed or refused to see. Trump’s worldview is very different to these two defense intellectuals—a Cold War liberal and a neoconservative—with their Ph.D.s from Chicago and Yale and scholarly books and publications. But the certainty that Wolfowitz and Rostow held in the efficacy of the wars that they pushed in Iraq and Vietnam is mirrored by the confidence with which Trump launched his Iran misadventure. Few things are as dangerous in foreign policy as a powerful individual with undue confidence in a bad idea. And like Rostow and Wolfowitz, who did not later question the soundness of the advice that they dispensed, the president is not naturally predisposed to critical self-reflection. “I would have done it again,” the president told reporters recently. It will be interesting to see how this position holds up as Iran becomes a critical flash point in the 2028 Republican primaries.