Trump Has No Plan

There was an article in The Guardian during the Obama years built around a single uncomfortable observation: that everyone in positions of authority is essentially making it up as they go, projecting an image of calm proficiency while improvising in something closer to controlled panic. The phrase that stuck was simpler than that. Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.

When Obama was president this caused me no alarm really. He may have ordered more global assassinations than any previous president (he took out bin Laden), but he was a reasonable man even if you didn’t agree with Obamacare or whatever. To know this improvisational aspect of authority felt like an insider secret, a knowing wink at the gap between institutional surfaces and the messy reality underneath. The improvisation was real, but it was buffered — by process, by decorum, by advisors, by a kind of professional restraint that kept the adjustments behind the curtain. You had to infer it. The system projected coherence even when it didn't have any.

Vlad Vexler posted a video recently that brought that article back for me. He was reading a Trump Truth Social post about NATO and working through it phrase by phrase, applying psychoanalytic frameworks to the language with genuine precision. The binary devaluation of an ally who failed him. The theatrical denial of dependence. The closing signoff as psychic self-repair. His core claim: the surface is the thing. There is no coherent strategy beneath the posts waiting to be uncovered. What you see is what there is.

Trump in the Middle East is all surface level thinking taken place before an audience of yes-men.

Except for Joe Kent.

Kent was running the National Counterterrorism Center. He resigned a few days after Epic Fury did its epic whatever. He resigned specifically over the Iran war and did not do it quietly. He wrote a letter to Trump directly, posted it publicly, and the operative passage was this: high-ranking Israeli officials and influential American journalists had constructed an echo chamber around the president that was "used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. This was a lie."

The word that matters there is not "lie." It's "echo chamber," because it specifies the target. There was no mass popular pressure for war with Iran. Nothing like the daily saturation that preceded Iraq in 2003. The American public was not the audience. What Kent is describing is something tighter and more precise: the information environment immediately around the president was shaped from outside until the same conclusion arrived from enough directions to feel like validated reality. Not propaganda aimed at voters. Curation aimed at one man.

I have previously stated that Benjamin Netanyahu has been working toward striking Iranian nuclear research assets for decades. Not improvising. Positioning — waiting for the right American administration, the right moment, the right configuration of pressure and opportunity. Trump isn't a co-architect of that project. He's the vehicle. His ego gets stroked, he gets to feel like the historic actor, he gets to own the operation the way he needs to own things. The operational direction sits elsewhere. Kent describes a decision point where the premise was false and the information pipeline was tilted. I'm describing the architecture that made that moment possible. Same current, different part of the river.

Kent is not some peacenik wandering in from a philosophy seminar. Special forces, CIA background, Trump-aligned politically until he wasn't. When someone that far inside the tent says the tent is on fire, dismissing him as "weak" — which is what Trump did — is a way of not touching the substance of the claim.

Operation Epic Fury was, by any conventional military measure, a major success. Iranian targets degraded, command structures disrupted, air defense systems hit, nuclear capabilities set back years (that was the Israeli contribution). The scale was described in more than one place as the most extensive air campaign in Israeli history. If you evaluate it on its own terms, it worked.

Then there’s the matter of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US soon destroyed Iran’s coastal Navy. So, instead, Iran moved directly to the one domain where it doesn't need parity: a 21-mile choke point through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil flows, where geography does most of the work and where uncertainty alone is enough to stop traffic. Mines dropped from fast boats. Drone strikes on tankers. Selective harassment calibrated to make transit feel like a coin flip with bad odds. You don't close the Strait formally. You make it feel dangerous enough that no captain or corporation wants to test it and no insurer will underwrite the test.

Within days, traffic collapsed from over a hundred ships a day to a handful. Some of the world’s largest tankers were sitting outside waiting rather than attempting the run. Iran told the United Nations that "non-hostile vessels" could pass — while reserving to itself the definition of hostile. Chinese tankers kept moving because Iran sells eighty to ninety percent of its oil to China and cannot strangle its own economic lifeline. Other ships broadcast signals designed to read as Chinese, hoping the pattern of selective enforcement would protect them. That ships were gaming their own nationality markers tells you exactly what kind of control this is. Not a blockade. A tollbooth operated by the party the United States just spent billions of dollars supposedly bombing to smithereens.

Oil prices spiked forty percent in weeks. American gas prices jumped thirty percent, pushing toward four dollars a gallon. Saudi Arabia warned of a hundred and eighty dollar barrel. Iraq halted exports because it couldn't move crude through the Strait. The United States temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil to push more supply into global markets and dampen the price effects — a striking thing to do in the middle of a war against the country whose oil you're now trying to sell.

The U.S. response to the Strait had a different character from the initial strikes. Mine clearing, naval escorts, hunting small boats, carving out temporary corridors — all necessary, none sufficient. The UN shipping agency said flat out that escorts cannot guarantee safe passage. Iran's toolkit is deliberately cheap and redundant. Lose twenty boats, still have two hundred. Lose two hundred, still have the coastline. The United States is playing an expensive, precise game against an adversary that spent decades building a cheap, dispersed, asymmetric one. There is no named operation for the Strait. What exists is Operation Sentinel, a standing patrol mission predating all of this, now supercharged and adapted on the fly. You can name the bombing campaign. You cannot easily name "keep a narrow waterway barely functional while the other side keeps reintroducing risk."

No coalition was pre-assembled before Epic Fury launched. Seven allies expressed support for a potential maritime stabilization effort — in statements, not naval assets. European navies are "subdued" is how one report put it. They didn't want the war. They're disinclined to fix the consequences of a decision they opposed, which is rational. It also means the most powerful military on earth is managing a global choke point largely alone, against tools that cost a fraction of what it costs to counter them.

Two days ago, Trump's NATO messaging made this worse in a direct way. "NATO has done absolutely nothing. The USA needs nothing from NATO." You cannot say that and then build the coalition you'd need to stabilize the Strait. Vexler's analysis of the language is correct here: the binary devaluation of a failed ally makes the adult formulation — you frustrated me and I still need you — is psychologically unavailable. Trump has a narcissistic disorder. Now we get to watch this shit play out. There are no guardrails for this. It oscillates between extremes instead, and each oscillation erodes the structure that would help solve the actual problem. Which is not just a rhetorical observation. It feeds directly into the strategic situation on the water.

Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum: open the Strait or the United States strikes Iranian energy infrastructure. Iran responded the same day — hit our energy and we hit Gulf infrastructure across the region, and we close the Strait completely. Then Trump pivoted to a five-day pause, citing "very good and productive conversations." Iran said there were no conversations. Intermediaries in Oman, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan were reportedly passing messages, which is not a negotiation. Oil dropped briefly when Trump said "talks," then climbed again when the Strait stayed unstable. The market understood. The pause is real as a U.S. decision. It is not shared. One side is watching a clock the other side doesn't acknowledge. When it expires, the decision logic shifts from "this action moves us toward a defined outcome" to "here's the latest thing I just thought up." 

Trump is all over the place. There are no goals beyond hit more targets. Blow more stuff up. There are just tweets and widely wavering details about "talks" that probably are only happening in Trump's mind. There is no "productive" conversation.  There isn't a "5-day" pause. This is a fantasy Trump declares real and his yes-man parrot him. It’s embarrassing that some people still call this a strategy.

The Pentagon is considering the deployment of up to ten thousand additional troops, with serious discussion of seizing Kharg Island, which processes roughly ninety percent of Iran's oil exports. That this conversation was even happening signals what the Strait has actually become: not a secondary effect of Epic Fury, but the place where the absence of a plan past the first strike is most visible.

This is where it is important to say what Iran actually is, because going in it looked like a bounded military problem.

Iran has thousands of missiles remaining by most estimates, even after the strikes. It can sustain hundreds of drone attacks per day over extended periods. Its proxy network spans Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen — multiple fronts, none of which require Iran to absorb the hit directly. Its whole doctrine is built around absorbing the first punch and remaining in the fight: underground facilities, dispersed command structures, redundant systems. The regime has shown significant internal resilience under pressure — organized protests suppressed, no major defections, control maintained across months of heavy strikes and international scrutiny. 

Gulf states called Iranian strikes an existential threat to their infrastructure, which tells you the regional reach is not a small thing. Iran's initial response to Epic Fury was not symbolic: hundreds of missiles, thousands of drone strikes, across Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan simultaneously. It was actually a very impressive response consider they were utterly surprised. Volume dropped after the opening surge — they front-loaded the shock and shifted to a long-game posture — but the capacity was not eliminated.

Once upon a time, Hitler thought the Soviet Union was a bounded military problem. The Wehrmacht performed brilliantly in the opening phase, June and July 1941. What the initial success opened up was too much space, too much capacity for sustained resistance, too much of a system that didn't register as military capability in the original framing.

Iran is not the Soviet Union in scale. But the structural echo is hard to miss. As of this post, Iran is much more vast than it seemed before Israel launched Roaring Lion, the strike that decapitated the Iranian regime.

"It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate." I read that in book recently about Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, a campaign that looked overwhelmingly successful before disintegrating into defeat.

Epic Fury stimulated a Strait crisis that Iran is actively managing to its own advantage and that has not been resolved. It stimulated oil prices acting as a domestic political weight on the administration that launched the operation. It stimulated an escalation ladder now including potential strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure and ground operations against Iranian territory — neither of which was the plan when the first bombs fell. It stimulated a coalition problem that wasn't solved before and isn't being solved now. It stimulated a regime in Tehran that has demonstrated, by every available indicator, that it is considerably more resilient than the targeting assumptions suggested.

Vexler is right that there is no coherent strategy in the day-to-day behavior. The ultimatum, the five-day window, the "productive talks," the denial, the extension — that sequence doesn't look like a plan unfolding. It looks like reactions being retroactively framed as intentional. But I disagree with Vlad a bit. He flattens too much into psychology. Epic Fury wasn't produced by mood. That operation was planned, coordinated, and executed at high precision. The structure was real. What stopped short was how far it extended — through the strike campaign and not much further, leaving everything after the first phase to be figured out as events moved.

That's the old article in The Guardian without the reassurance. Everybody's winging it all the time, except now the winging is out loud, the timeline is 48 hours instead of months, the tools are blunt, the coalition is thin, and the space inside the problem is larger than anyone said going in. All our hopes depend upon whatever he decides to tweet next.

Dangerous times. And half of Americans voted for all of it.