{"id":323227,"date":"2026-03-05T13:21:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/323227\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T13:21:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:21:10","slug":"us-attack-on-iran-shows-donald-trumps-preference-for-instinct-over-strategy-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/323227\/","title":{"rendered":"US attack on Iran shows Donald Trump\u2019s preference for instinct over strategy \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting beside Germany\u2019s chancellor in the Oval Office on Tuesday, US president Donald Trump<\/a> offered a brief moment of insight into the decision-making process in the White House on the most consequential of matters: whether to take the country to war.<\/p>\n

His decision to order the attack on Iran<\/a>, he said, was mostly a matter of gut instinct about Iranian intentions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,\u201d he said, while his guest, Friedrich Merz<\/a>, sat expressionless. \u201cI think they were going to attack first, and I didn\u2019t want that to happen. So if anything, I might\u2019ve forced Israel<\/a>\u2019s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set aside for a moment that secretary of state Marco Rubio<\/a> had offered the opposite explanation the previous day, telling reporters that because Israel was going to act, Trump had no choice but to join what he called a \u201cpre-emptive\u201d strike before Iran counter-attacked US bases and allies.<\/p>\n

The next day, Rubio tried to walk back his comments. Then on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump acted because he had \u201ca good feeling\u201d that Iran would soon strike American interests.<\/p>\n

The back and forth confirmed what his former aides almost universally report \u2013 that Trump\u2019s determination to cut out the bureaucracy, to reduce his advisers to a tiny, leakproof few and to trust instinct over intelligence briefings \u2013 applied as he made the gravest decision any commander in chief can make.<\/p>\n

Every president, of course, creates a decision-making structure tailor-made for his own style. Franklin D Roosevelt relied heavily on a kitchen cabinet. Harry S Truman created the national security council (NSC) to formally weigh options and co-ordinate among departments fighting the cold war. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter turned the NSC into an idea generator. In the Obama administration, members of the NSC staff talked about \u201cdeath by Situation Room meeting\u201d and compared the process of policymaking to watching a python swallow a pig.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0US attack on Iran shows Donald Trump\u2019s preference for instinct over strategyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The Trump administration doesn\u2019t have much patience for that. When he came to office, Trump reduced the size of the NSC staff by at least two-thirds, casting out some of its members because of vague suspicions about their loyalty. Trump has made clear his NSC is not there to generate options, but to execute his decisions.<\/p>\n

And when debates take place, the number of players often shrinks to a tiny group. In the Iran case, Rubio, vice-president JD Vance, CIA director John Ratcliffe, the four-star head of Central Command, Brad Cooper, and the chair of the joint chiefs, Gen Dan Caine. (Trump loves the chair\u2019s nickname, Raizin\u2019 Caine, just as he loved \u201cMad Dog\u201d for his first defence secretary, Jim Mattis, who hated the moniker.)<\/p>\n

Not much leaks from those sessions, a major change from, say, the early Obama era, when situation-room conversations sometimes appeared on news websites before the meetings were over. Still, it was widely reported that Caine warned Trump he needed to expect casualties and that he would have to deal with the real possibility of munitions shortages. Vance\u2019s public silences could be explained by his initial, internal cautions against entering the war; once he lost that battle Vance told the president and his national security team that they should \u201cgo big and go fast\u201d.<\/p>\n

But what Trump gains in secrecy he loses in message control. On a range of issues, from the goals of the Iran strike to Trump\u2019s objectives in Venezuela or even in threatening Greenland, there are a blitz of answers. Inconsistency is sometimes celebrated by the administration as wily strategic deception, rather than as a failure to think several chess moves ahead.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump seems to think he doesn\u2019t need options or contingency plans,\u201d said Thomas Wright, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who worked on long-term strategic planning in the NSC during the Biden years. \u201cHe just wants a small team to execute his instincts. But when events go wrong, as they often do, a president without prepared choices will be gambling with a pair of twos.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is what has many foreign ministers, defence officials and world leaders worried. A top Arab diplomat said this week his government has no real insight into the administration\u2019s planning for a transition of government in Iran \u2013 or even whether it wants to play a role, given defence secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s repeated statements that \u201cnation building\u201d was not on the Pentagon\u2019s list of tasks. People familiar with Merz\u2019s visit say he pressed on whether the president has thought ahead to how, and under what conditions, the action in Iran might end.<\/p>\n

In other administrations, these are the kinds of questions the NSC would be tasked to answer. It would also have been the NSC\u2019s role to make sure there was plenty of warning to US citizens to leave the Middle East. Instead, that advice came from the government only after the fighting was well under way, leaving thousands of Americans stranded.<\/p>\n

David Rothkopf, the author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, said he was struck by the absence of basic process.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever has so much risk or such sweeping military action of so much consequence been undertaken with so little apparent planning or weighing of potential consequences, both intended and unintended,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It is the military, he notes, that develops operational plans, which are then vetted at the NSC. \u201cThat process has atrophied to virtually nothing in this administration and what planning there has been is often ignored by a president who trusts his own instincts more than any advisers. That may work with actions that are narrow in scope, but it does not when waging war against a large, consequential country like Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Trump was emboldened by the fact that his previous missions have worked out well. The June 2025 air attack on Iran\u2019s three major nuclear sites was the product of months of careful planning, and the targets were all deep underground facilities that the United States thought it could damage severely with a dozen giant bunker-busting bombs.<\/p>\n

The mission was limited. Most of the targets were so remote that there was little worry about civilian casualties. Its success depended more on physics than politics.<\/p>\n

The operation to remove Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from power was riskier, but Trump made no effort to truly change the government. Instead, he kept the power structure of the country in place, save for Maduro, and made it clear that he was not going to insist on the installation of the clear winners of a 2024 election \u2013 the Venezuelan opposition \u2013 as long as the United States had access to Venezuela\u2019s huge oil reserves.<\/p>\n

But veterans of that long, often drawn-out NSC process say that is exactly the kind of imperfect analogy that the president\u2019s staff should be deflating. Iran and Venezuela could not be more different, in history, geography, culture or politics. Their biggest commonality is their reliance on pumping oil out of the ground.<\/p>\n

Trump said in an interview with The New York Times that he hoped the hardened members of Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia would just surrender their arms to \u201cthe people\u201d, which sounded more like hope than a plan.<\/p>\n

But his political supporters see the conversation about strategic planning as a wonky effort to keep Trump from being Trump. After all, they note, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei perished in one of the first strikes of the war.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s critics see in this conflict everything that is wrong with the working of the Trump White House. \u201cThe president and his administration keep shifting their rationale for the war, the length and level of commitment to the war, the goals for the war and whether or not we\u2019re actually at war at all,\u201d said Delaware Democratic senator Chris Coons.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only thing that has remained consistent is the lack of strategy for how to wage it. That\u2019s what happens when you launch a war based on gut feelings, rather than analysis and advice from experts.\u201d \u2013 This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2026 The New York Times Company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sitting beside Germany\u2019s chancellor in the Oval Office on Tuesday, US president Donald Trump offered a brief moment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[54,42,87,43,40,38,41,39,208],"class_list":{"0":"post-323227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-iran","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories","16":"tag-us"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}