Wars are not often lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misinterpret what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the final war is mistaken for the subsequent one.
The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the newest entry in one in every of the oldest and most deadly traditions in worldwide politics: the catastrophic hole between what leaders consider going in and what war truly delivers.
I’m a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. international coverage, and creator of the e-book “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why the United States repeatedly reaches for navy options and why such interventions not often produce sturdy peace. The deeper downside with the U.S. war in Iran, as I see it, was overconfidence bred by current success.
Dismissed issues
Before the battle involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. escalated, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed concerns about oil market disruption, noting that costs had barely moved throughout the 12-day war in June 2025 between Israel and Iran. Other senior officials agreed.
What adopted was important: Iranian-aimed missile and drone barrages towards U.S. bases, Arab capitals and Israeli inhabitants facilities. Then Iran successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz, via which roughly 20% of the world’s oil provide passes each day − not with a naval blockade, not with mines or massed anti-ship missiles, however with low-cost drones.
Just a few strikes in the neighborhood of the strait were sufficient. Insurers and delivery firms determined the transit was unsafe. Tanker traffic dropped to zero, though the occasional ship has made it through recently. Analysts are calling it the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo.
Iran’s new supreme chief, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since vowed to keep the strait closed. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, reported after a closed-door briefing that the administration had no plan for the strait and didn’t know how to get it safely again open.
With no embassy in Tehran since 1979, the U.S. depends closely for intelligence on CIA networks of questionable high quality and Israeli assets who have their own country’s interests in mind. So the U.S. didn’t anticipate that Iran had rebuilt and dispersed significant military capacity since June 2025, nor that it might strike neighbors throughout the area, together with Azerbaijan, widening the battle nicely past the Persian Gulf.
The war has since reached the Indian Ocean, the place a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles from the theater of war, off the coast of Sri Lanka – simply days after the ship had participated in Indian navy workouts alongside 74 nations, together with the U.S.
The diplomatic damage to Washington’s relationships with India and Sri Lanka, two nations whose cooperation is more and more necessary as the United States seeks companions to handle and mitigate Iran’s blockade, was completely foreseeable. Washington has put them in a tough place, with India choosing diplomacy with Iran to secure passage for its vessels and Sri Lanka opting to retain its neutrality, underscoring its vulnerable position.
But U.S. planners didn’t foresee any of this.
The unsuitable lesson from Venezuela
The swift military intervention by the U.S. in Venezuela in January 2026 produced fast outcomes with minimal blowback − showing to validate the administration’s religion in coercive motion.
But clear victories are harmful academics.
They inflate what I name in my educating the “hubris/humility index” − the extra a management overestimates its personal talents, underestimates the adversary’s and dismisses uncertainty, the larger the rating and the extra possible catastrophe will ensue. Clean victories inflate the index exactly when skepticism is most wanted, as a result of they recommend the subsequent adversary shall be as manageable as the final.
Political scientist Robert Jervis demonstrated a long time in the past that misperceptions in worldwide relations are not random however follow patterns. Leaders are inclined to mission their very own cost-benefit logic onto opponents who don’t share it. They additionally fall into “availability bias,” permitting the most up-to-date operation to face in for the subsequent.
The larger the hubris/humility index, the much less possible there is to be the sort of strategic empathy which may ask: How does Tehran see this? What does a regime that believes its survival is at stake truly do? History exhibits that such a regime escalates, improvises and takes dangers that seem irrational from an out of doors perspective but are entirely rational from within.
Recent circumstances reveal this unmistakable sample.
AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.
The United States in Vietnam, 1965–1968
American war planners believed materials superiority would power the communists in Hanoi to give up.
It didn’t.
American firepower alone didn’t result in navy defeat, a lot much less political management. The Tet Offensive in 1968 – when North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated assaults throughout South Vietnam – shattered the official U.S. narrative that the war was practically gained and that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Athough the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in the end repelled the assaults, their scale and shock induced the public to not belief official statements, accelerating the erosion of public belief and decisively turning American opinion against the war.
The U.S. loss in Vietnam didn’t happen on a single battlefield, however via strategic and political unraveling. Despite overwhelming superiority, Washington was incapable of building a stable, legitimate South Vietnamese government or recognizing the grit and resilience of the North Vietnamese forces. Eventually, with mounting casualties and large-scale protests at dwelling, U.S. forces withdrew, ceding control of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975.
AP Photo.
The U.S. failure was conceptual and cultural, not informational. American analysts merely couldn’t image the war from their opponent’s perspective.
Afghanistan: Deadly assumptions
The Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979 and the United States in Afghanistan after 2001 performed two totally different wars however held the identical lethal assumption: that exterior navy power can rapidly impose political order in a fractured society strongly immune to international management.
In each circumstances, nice powers believed their abilities would outweigh local complexities. In each circumstances, the war developed sooner − and lasted far longer − than their methods might adapt.
Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz
This is the case that ought to most hang-out Washington.
Ukraine demonstrated {that a} materially weaker defender can impose big prices on a stronger attacker through battlefield innovation: low-cost drones, decentralized adaptation, real-time intelligence, and the inventive use of terrain and chokepoints to seek out asymmetrical benefits. The U.S. watched all of it unfold in actual time for 4 years and helped pay for it.
Iran was additionally watching − and the Strait of Hormuz is the proof.
Iran didn’t want a navy to close the world’s most important energy chokepoint. It wanted drones, the identical low-cost, uneven expertise Ukraine has used to blunt Russia’s onslaught, deployed not on a land entrance however towards the insurance coverage calculus of the world delivery trade.
Washington, which had underwritten a lot of that playbook in Ukraine, apparently by no means requested the apparent query: What occurs when the different facet has been taking notes? That is not a failure of U.S. intelligence. It is a failure of strategic creativeness − precisely what the hubris/humility index is designed to spotlight.
Iran doesn’t have to defeat the U.S. conventionally. It wants solely to lift prices, exploit chokepoints and wait for a fracture amongst U.S. allies and home political opposition to power a pretend U.S. declaration of victory or a real U.S. withdrawal.
Notably, Iran has stored the strait selectively open to Turkish, Indian and Saudi vessels, rewarding impartial nations and punishing U.S. allies, driving wedges via the coalition.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously argued that wars begin when either side maintain incompatible beliefs about energy and solely finish when reality forces those beliefs to align.
That alignment is now taking place, at nice price, in the Persian Gulf and past. The Trump administration scored excessive on the hubris index at precisely the second when it most wanted humility.
