Five Things Donald Trump Didn't Think Through Before He Started a War

He planned for the best-case scenario. The war is now being shaped by the worst-case ones.

When the United States launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28th, President Donald Trump told the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

That sentence—breezy, belligerent, and untethered from any serious understanding of Iran, its people, the strengths of the ayatollahs’ regime, or the calculus of war—is perhaps the best summary of how this conflict began.

Wars don’t end the way they begin. They rarely end at all on the terms the aggressor imagines. Trump appears to have planned for the best-case scenario. The problem is that wars are often decided by the worst-case ones.

Here are five he either missed—or chose to ignore. Five things this president plainly did not think through.

1. What if the regime doesn’t fall?

Trump called on Iranians to seize their government once American and Israeli strikes had crippled its military and decapitated its leadership. It hasn’t worked.

The Iranian government didn’t crumble when Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed on February 28th. The Islamic Republic followed a constitutional path for transition and moved to select a new leader. And a spirit of nationalist pride arose as the bombing took civilian lives, especially the lives of the schoolgirls of Minab.

Many Iranians are rallying around the flag as American and Israeli strikes damage residential buildings, kill civilians, and cripple critical infrastructure. The same thing happened during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; fury and defiance temporarily set aside popular grievances. Worse, Trump’s own decapitation campaign backfired: the strikes killed many individuals previously considered as potential moderate and pragmatic alternatives, hindering the “Venezuela model” of replacing a leader from within the system.

Now, weeks into the war, no large-scale uprising has manifested, and US officials have largely ceased to speak of regime change. Trump wanted the Iranian people to do his dirty work. He didn’t understand Iranian nationalism, the depth of the regime’s security apparatus, or—a problem now very much his own—whom he might talk to.

2. What if Iran closes the Hormuz Strait?

This one was entirely foreseeable.

Analysts and strategists in every major capital have worried about it for decades. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been described as the largest disruption to the energy supply since the 1970s energy crisis, as well as the largest in the history of the global oil market, with prices surpassing $126 per barrel at their peak.

But oil is only the beginning. The Gulf region produces nearly half of the world’s urea and 30 percent of its ammonia, with about one-third of the world’s fertilizer passing through the Strait. Urea prices have increased by 50 percent since the start of the war.

A third of the global helium supply also travels through the Strait, clogging transport of a key ingredient for the production of electronic chips. Plastics, pharmaceuticals, rubber—the cascade goes on.

The Dallas Fed estimates that the closure removes close to 20 percent of global oil supplies from the market and is expected to lower global real GDP growth by an annualized 2.9 percentage points in the second quarter of 2026. Every day that goes by means higher prices, deeper impacts on growth, and compounding damage to the world economy.

What makes it worse is that Trump seems to be winging it. One moment he is demanding NATO allies in Europe send their ships into the battle; the next he declares “We don’t need anybody.”

So if American boots go on the ground to try to force open the Strait—as looks increasingly likely—they’ll go largely alone, with consequences no one has begun to calculate. It turns out you need allies when you go to war, and should inform and coordinate with them before you start shooting.

3. What if Iran targets the Gulf’s most vital infrastructure?

Without desalination technology, roughly 100 million people living in the Middle East would have no regular access to drinking water. None.

More than 90 percent of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants—a concentration and proximity to Iran that makes the infrastructure particularly vulnerable. In Kuwait and Bahrain, desalinated drinking water accounts for around 90 percent of the countries’ supply, along with roughly 86 percent in Oman, and about 70 percent in Saudi Arabia.

A leaked diplomatic cable from 2008 warned that Riyadh would “have to evacuate within a week” if its main desalination plant and pipelines were seriously damaged. A CIA report warned as far back as 2010 that disruption of desalination facilities in most Arab countries “could have more consequences than the loss of any industry or commodity.”

Iran has already struck a desalination plant in Bahrain. And Iran claims there was a strike against its desalination facility on Qeshm Island, cutting water to 30 Iranian villages. The US and Israel denied responsibility, but the incident generated a dangerous atmosphere of mutual targeting.

Then there are the vast gas fields in the Gulf that the world depends on. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex—a cornerstone of the global natural gas market—was hit on March 18th, causing a 17 percent reduction in Qatar’s LNG production capacity, with damages expected to take three to five years to repair.

The gleaming cities of the Gulf—Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, the great experiment of building civilization from seawater and hydrocarbons—are now staring at a future they never imagined. That dream is on life support. Iran is furious at the Gulf states for siding with Washington. And Iran, facing an existential fight, does not care.

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4. What if we run short on interceptors?

Iran prepared for this kind of war. It dispersed its missiles and especially its drones, and appears to have partially held fire in the opening phase while the US and its allies scrambled to intercept every projectile.

Now, Israel has informed the United States that it is running critically low on ballistic missile interceptors, having entered this war already depleted from last summer’s 12-day conflict. The US expended about a quarter of its supply of THAAD interceptors during that earlier war.

The math of the missile/drone war is looking brutal and asymmetric: an Iranian Shahed drone costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to build. A PAC-3 interceptor costs roughly $4 million. That is a cost exchange ratio of more than 100-to-1 in Iran’s favor. Iran is reportedly producing some 10,000 drones per month.

Triage has already begun. Interceptors have become precious. Which tells you, once again, that Trump best-case-scenarioed this conflict—and that Secretary Pete Hegseth and his team did not prepare for the long war that every serious military analyst said was possible.

5. What if no one believes you?

Wars demand credibility. Trump has none to spare. He is not stable nor is he a genius at this.

Trump launched this war unilaterally, without consulting the American people or major allies, on a timeline and for goals that have shifted by the week—from destroying Iran’s nuclear program, to regime change, to something hazier still.

Trump announced the US had accepted an Iranian proposal for negotiations; Iran’s second-ranking official subsequently ruled out talks. Iran’s foreign policy adviser has said the country sees no option for diplomacy. The Omani foreign minister said the United States had “lost control of its own foreign policy.” Trump has claimed “virtually unlimited” munitions while leaks from his own Pentagon tell a different story. He projected the war would last four to five weeks. It is not four to five weeks.

You cannot bluster your way out of a war. Of all the things Trump failed to foresee, his own character may be the most dangerous variable of all. Wars require leaders who can look honestly at what is happening, tell the truth to their allies, and make hard decisions for reasons beyond personal vanity.

Donald Trump is a man constitutionally incapable of looking in the mirror and telling himself the truth. He has surrounded himself with loyalists rather than strategists. He has confused theatrical aggression with strength. And now the economic and security futures of much of the world rest in the hands of a man who has never, in any domain of his life, distinguished between what he wishes were true and what is.

And that might be the greatest danger of all. Not the drones, not the interceptor math, not even the Strait. It is the low character of the man who started this war. The bill for that, in every man’s life, always comes due.

—Terry