Tom Nichols points out:

The Trump administration, for its part, bumbled into this war without a strategy. Instead, it relied on bad assumptions, outdated information, and the president's gut feelings. It assumed"because the president wished very hard"that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who encouraged Trump to go to war) ignored years of analysis and war-gaming from the military and the intelligence community, and then were caught flat-footed when the Iranians closed the strait and choked the international economy, the one thing everyone else in the world knew they would do. The administration has since tried to bomb its way out of this war, but without the ability to hold territory, the United States is now merely depleting its stocks of expensive ordnance to little strategic effect.

"I taught strategy at the Naval War College to military officers and senior civilians for a long time," Nichols writes. "The subject does not have a lot of hard-and-fast rules; wars share common characteristics but each conflict has its own peculiarities and exigent circumstances. One good guideline, however, is to avoid threatening your enemy and then immediately announcing that you really have no stomach for a fight. Strong leaders keep their own counsel and let their actions speak for them; weak leaders make threats and then broadcast how much they don't want to carry them out."