Trump is waging a knee-jerk war and it’s not working

Some old truths about war have been knocking on the door of the Oval Office in the month since U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent American and Israeli warplanes to bomb Iran.

The failure to learn from the past presents Donald Trump with a difficult choice. If he fails to reach a deal with Iran, he can either try to declare a victory that will fool no one, or escalate the war.

The oldest of the old truths comes from Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” He was writing in 1871, the year Germany was unified into an empire, a moment that was as important for the security of Europe as this war could be for the security of the Middle East.

Perhaps Trump prefers the modern version of boxer Mike Tyson: “everyone has a plan until they get hit.” Even more relevant to Trump are the words of one of his predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American general who commanded the landings in 1944 and who served two terms as Republican president of the United States in the 1950s.

Eisenhower’s version was “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” He meant that the discipline and process of making plans to fight a war allows one to change course when the unexpected happens.

For Trump, the unexpected element was the resilience of the Iranian regime. It appears he was hoping for a repeat of the lightning kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores by the US military in January. They are now in prison in New York awaiting trial. Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, replaced him as president and takes orders from Washington.

Hoping for a repeat of victory over Maduro suggests a glaring lack of understanding of the differences between Venezuela and Iran.

Eisenhower’s adage about anticipation appeared in a speech in 1957. He had been the man responsible for planning and commanding the largest amphibious military operation in history, the D-Day invasion of Western Europe, so he knew what he was talking about.

He went on to explain that when an unexpected emergency arises, “the first thing to do is take all the plans off the top shelf, throw them out the window and start again. But if you haven’t planned, you can’t start working, at least intelligently.”

“That’s why it’s so important to plan, to stay grounded in the nature of the problem you might one day be called upon to solve – or help solve.”

Far from capitulating or collapsing after Israel and the United States killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the first airstrike of the war, the regime in Tehran is functioning and fighting back. It’s good to play a weak hand.

In contrast, Trump gave the impression that he was making it up as he went along. He follows his instincts, not the pages of intelligence and policy advice that other presidents have pored over.

Trump’s final point

Thirteen days after the war began, Fox News Radio asked Trump when the war would end. He responded that he did not think the war “would be long.” As for ending it, it would be “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

He relies on a restricted circle of advisors in office to support his decisions and bring them to fruition. Speaking truth to power is apparently not part of their job description. Relying on the president’s instincts rather than a set of well-developed plans—even if they must be adapted or abandoned—makes it more difficult to fight a war. The lack of clear policy direction weakens the devastating firepower and effectiveness of the U.S. armed forces.

Four weeks ago, Trump and Netanyahu banked on a ferocious bombing campaign that killed not only the supreme leader but also his closest advisers and has so far killed 1,464 Iranian civilians, according to HRANA, a U.S.-based group that monitors human rights abuses in Iran.

Both leaders expected a quick victory. Both challenged the Iranians to follow up their bombs with a popular uprising to overthrow the regime.

Iran’s stubbornness

But the regime in Tehran still stands, continues to fight back, and Trump is discovering why his predecessors were never ready to join Netanyahu in a war chosen to destroy the Islamic Republic. Opponents of the regime did not rise up. They know only too well that in January, government forces killed thousands of protesters. Official warnings were issued that anyone considering attempting to repeat the protests would be treated as an enemy of the state.

The Iranian regime is a stubborn, ruthless and well-organized adversary. Founded after the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah, it was then forged in the murderous misery of the eight-year war with Iraq. The regime is built on institutions, not individuals, and is reinforced by ironclad religious beliefs and an ideology of martyrdom. This means that killing leaders, while shocking and disruptive, does not constitute a death sentence for the regime. After the January massacres, he will view the deaths of even greater numbers of Iranians, either at the hands of the regime’s own forces or at the hands of American and Israeli bombs, as an acceptable price for survival.

The Iranian regime cannot hope to match the firepower of the United States and Israel, but like Moltke, Tyson and Eisenhower, it has developed plans. He expanded the war, attacking his Gulf Arab neighbors as well as US bases there and Israel, spreading the pain as widely as possible.

Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow entrance to the Gulf, cut off about 20 percent of global oil supplies and sent global financial markets into a tailspin.

Iran spent years and billions of dollars building a network of allies and proxies it called the “axis of resistance,” which included Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, to threaten and deter Israel. The Israelis have hit it very hard and effectively since the start of the war in Gaza with the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

But Iran is now demonstrating that one geographic feature, the narrow Strait of Hormuz, can provide an even more effective deterrent and threat than its extremely costly system of military alliances. Iran can strengthen its control of the strait with cheap drones that can be launched hundreds of miles into Iran’s mountainous interior.

Allies are killed. The geography remains the same. Failing to capture and occupy the cliffs on either side of the strait, as well as much of Iranian territory beyond, the United States and Israel—and the rest of the world—discover that the Iranian regime will demand a say in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

As former NATO deputy commander General Sir Richard Shirreff observed on the BBC’s Today programme, any war game assessing the consequences of an attack on Iran would have shown that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would close the Strait of Hormuz.

This brings us back to the importance of planning how to start a war, how to end it, and how to deal with the aftermath. Donald Trump and his entourage, driven by the prospect of a quick and easy victory, seem to have skipped these steps.

The “axis of resistance” also includes the Houthis in Yemen. On Friday, they fired a barrage of missiles at Israel for the first time since this war began with airstrikes on Iran on February 28. If the Houthis resume their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia would lose its western sea route for oil exports to Asia.

The Red Sea has its own chokepoint, the Bab al Mandab Strait, as important to world trade as the Strait of Hormuz. If the Houthis decide to step up their efforts by attacking shipping at Bab al Mandab and further south, as they did during the Gaza war, they would cut off Asia’s route to Europe via the Suez Canal.

This would create an even worse global economic emergency.

Netanyahu’s clarity

Netanyahu, unlike Trump, has been thinking about this war in detail since the start of his political career which made him Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. On the first full day of the war against Iran, Netanyahu recorded a video statement on the roof of the Tel Aviv tower known as Kirya, which houses Israel’s military headquarters. He spoke with a clarity about Israel’s war aims that eluded Trump.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Going to war with Iran is an easier proposition for Israel than for the United States. The concerns of a regional power are different from the much broader global challenges facing the United States.

Netanyahu is convinced that he can ensure Israel’s future security by causing as much damage to the Islamic Republic as possible. The war, he says in the video, was intended to “ensure our existence and our future.” Netanyahu has always considered Iran to be Israel’s most dangerous enemy. Its critics say the preoccupation is one of the reasons Israel failed to detect and stop Hamas attacks from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

He thanked the US military and Trump for their “help” and addressed what he believes is the heart of the problem.

“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have aspired to do for 40 years: hit the terrorist regime in the hip and the thigh. That’s what I promised – and that’s what we will do.”

Netanyahu and the Israeli military establishment have, at different times during its many years in office, explored ways to go to war with Iran, destroy its nuclear facilities and ballistic missiles, and anything else that posed a threat to them. The conclusion in Israel has always been that while this could cause serious damage to Iran, it would only be a setback for the regime. It became accepted that the only way to break Iran’s military capability for a generation or more was to enter into an alliance with the United States.

But that required a president in the White House willing to go to war on Israel’s side, something that had never happened despite the two countries’ close relations and Israel’s dependence on U.S. military and diplomatic support. Netanyahu never managed to convince a US president that it was in America’s interest to go to war with Iran – until Donald J. Trump’s second term.

Despite the bitter and toxic relations between America and Iran since the overthrow of the Shah, a staunch US ally, in 1979, successive US presidents have felt that the best way to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran was to contain it. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the United States did not go to war with Iran, even when Tehran was equipping and training Iraqi militias that were killing U.S. troops. The only justification, they calculated, would be an imminent threat, particularly information that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.

Trump has included the nuclear threat in his evolving list of reasons to go to war. But there, I There is no credible evidence that Iran was about to obtain a weapon or the means to deliver it. Even the White House always has a statement on its website ” dated June 25, 2025 under the headline “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed – and suggestions to the contrary are fake news.”

President Trump today discovers why his predecessors decided that the risks of choosing war would simply be too great.

Asymmetric warfare

This war appears to be becoming a classic example of how a smaller, weaker power can fight a larger, stronger enemy, the kind of conflict strategists call asymmetric warfare. It is still early, after only a month, to compare it to other wars that, on paper, the United States was winning in terms of enemy deaths and bombings carried out in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is important to remember that after years of bloodshed and murder, it all ended in defeat for the United States.

The next round of decisions from Trump and Netanyahu could decide whether the war in Iran becomes another major misstep by the United States. Trump has now twice postponed his threat to destroy Iran’s power grid – which he said could constitute a war crime. He says this is because Iran is desperate to reach a deal to end the war because the regime has been hit so hard by the damage and deaths the United States has already inflicted and fears it could do even more.

Contacts are ongoing between the two sides, mediated by Pakistan and others. The Iranians deny Trump’s assertion that this is a full-fledged negotiation.

No official text of the president’s 15-point peace plan has been released, but leaked versions show a document that is a compilation of all the demands the United States and Israel have made of Iran over the years. This looks more like conditions of assignment than a basis for negotiation. Iran responded with its own demands, equally unacceptable to the other side, including recognition of its control over the Strait of Hormuz, reparations for war damages and withdrawal of US bases from the Middle East.

Unless both sides can take a giant step toward an unexplored compromise, it is difficult to envisage reaching a deal. It’s not impossible. The Iranian regime has a history of negotiations. Arab diplomatic sources confirmed other reports, telling me that Iran was paving the way for an agreement on its nuclear program when the United States abruptly abandoned its diplomacy by entering the war on February 28. A source told me: “you know the Iranians were offering everything.” This seems like an oversimplification, and the Americans deny that progress has been made, but the signs are that there was room for more diplomacy when the United States and Israel sent bombers.

The war is at a critical point. If there is no agreement between the Americans and the Iranians, Trump has very little choice. He could claim victory, saying that America has destroyed the Iranian army, that its mission is therefore accomplished, and that the opening of the Strait of Hormuz is not its responsibility. It could melt global financial markets and horrify its already disgruntled allies in Europe, Asia and the Gulf. A wounded and angry Iranian regime would have ample room to exert more pressure on the global economy.

It is more likely that Trump will decide to escalate the war. The Americans have more than four thousand U.S. Marines aboard ships en route to the Gulf, paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne on standby, and are discussing additional reinforcements.

No one is talking about a full-scale invasion of Iran, but it is possible that the Americans will try to seize the Gulf islands, including Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal. This would involve a series of difficult and dangerous amphibious landings. It might even suit Iran, which wants to drag the Americans into a longer war of attrition. Iran believes that the regime’s capacity for suffering is greater than that of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump finds in Iran that he is coming up against the limits of his power. The Iranian regime has a different definition of victory and defeat. For them, simple survival is victory.

But they now hope for more, believing that control of the Strait of Hormuz gives them new leverage to assert their demands, perhaps even to achieve strategic gains. The Iranians demanded, among other things, a promise not to be attacked in the future and recognition of their control of the Strait of Hormuz as the price to pay for opening it to all navigation.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that “President Trump is not bluffing and he is ready to unleash hell. Iran should no longer miscalculate.”

“If Iran does not accept the reality of the current moment, if it does not understand that it has been defeated militarily and will continue to be defeated, President Trump will ensure that it is hit harder than it has ever been before.”

Being defeated in war is not a choice. If Iran had been as badly beaten as Trump and his people claim, the regime in Tehran would have collapsed by now. He wouldn’t need to threaten them into accepting their fate.

America and Israel can do much more damage and kill many more people in Iran. In Lebanon, Israel continues its offensive against Hezbollah, Iran’s main ally.

In the absence of a ceasefire, they believe they can increase the level of force until the Iranians have no choice but to give in.

This is far from certain.

The longer the war continues, the greater the consequences for the region and the world as a whole. A prominent Iran analyst, Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, told me it could be “catastrophic.”

In 1956, the United Kingdom and France went to war on Israel’s side after Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, a global waterway that was as important a chokepoint to the global economy as the Strait of Hormuz is today. They achieved all their military objectives but were forced to withdraw by President Eisenhower of the United States.

For the British, it was the beginning of the end of their imperial rule over the Middle East.

America is faced with the rise of China. When writing the history of their competition to become the world’s leading power, Donald Trump’s poorly planned war against Iran could be seen as a turning point, a stage of decline, as Suez was for the United Kingdom.

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