When a former Secretary of Defense goes on national television and says he told the Israeli Prime Minister he was “dead wrong,” not privately, not in a memo, but on camera, it’s the kind of moment that cuts through the political noise. Not because it’s partisan. Robert Gates served Republican and Democratic presidents. The warning he gave in a private meeting in July 2009 turned out to be exactly the warning no one wanted to hear in 2026.
The situation the United States now finds itself in with Iran did not arrive without warning. It arrived with decades of warnings, just not the ones that were heeded. In recent weeks, it has become obvious that President Trump walked into this war carrying assumptions about the Iranian regime that were wrong in 2009, wrong in 2012, and wrong again when he made the decision to act. He didn’t have to rely on faith alone. He had his own intelligence community telling him something different. He chose not to listen.
A president who ends up in over his head rarely gets there through a single catastrophic mistake. It happens through a series of choices, each one sounding reasonable at the time, that stack up into a situation nobody fully prepared for. That’s where things stand right now.
The Pitch That Never Changed
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS that Netanyahu made essentially the same case for striking Iran to the Obama administration in 2009 that he later successfully made to President Trump, and that Netanyahu had been making the same prediction, that the Iranian regime would “crumble” after a few days of airstrikes, for at least 17 years. “He was saying in 2009, the regime is fragile, it’ll crumble at the first attack, and they won’t have time to do anything else,” Gates recalled.
Gates didn’t nod politely and change the subject. He told Netanyahu he was “dead wrong,” that Netanyahu was underestimating the resilience of the Iranians, and that he had been lulled into an unrealistic position by the absence of an Iraqi reaction when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor decades earlier. The same argument Netanyahu was making in the Situation Room in early 2026, Gates had already rejected point by point in a meeting nearly seventeen years prior.
What makes this sobering is the consistency. For more than three decades, a familiar refrain has echoed from Netanyahu: Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Since 1992, when he addressed Israel’s Knesset as a Member of Parliament, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, declaring at the time that “within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.”
The countdown clock has been reset so many times it stopped being a clock. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, Netanyahu famously held up a cartoon drawing of a bomb, warning “by next spring, at most by next summer… they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage.” Spring came. Summer came. The bomb did not. In 2002, Netanyahu appeared before a US congressional committee advocating for the invasion of Iraq and suggesting both Iraq and Iran were racing to obtain nuclear weapons. The US-led invasion followed. No weapons of mass destruction were found.
None of this is ancient history. It’s a pattern that runs unbroken from 1992 to the present day, surviving contact with every American administration, surviving the absence of every predicted bomb, surviving every intelligence assessment that said something different.
What the Intelligence Actually Said
Trump didn’t have to take Netanyahu’s word for it. He had his own intelligence community. The problem is that what they told him didn’t match what he wanted to hear.
In her written opening statement to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard confirmed that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had been “obliterated” by the 2025 strikes and that there had been “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.” This was the formal, collective judgment of the intelligence community, not a fringe view or a political opinion. It was the assessment that directly contradicted Trump’s central justification for launching a new war on February 28, namely that Iran was two weeks away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Trump’s response, when asked about it on Air Force One, was direct. “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters, adding that in his view Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear bomb. His statement aligned him with Netanyahu, who had described a nuclear-armed Iran as an imminent threat, rather than with his own top intelligence adviser.
Inside the administration, the fractures went deeper than one disagreement between the president and his intelligence chief. Top counterterrorism official Joe Kent stepped down over the decision to go to war with Iran, arguing in a resignation letter that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the nation, and writing that he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” Kent became the first high-profile Trump administration official to resign over the conflict, but he was not the last voice of dissent.
A War With Consequences Nobody Wanted to Price In
The Iranian regime’s response to being bombed was not, as Netanyahu predicted, to crumble. It was to shut the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of the strait, through which around 20% of the world’s oil trade passes, drove a massive disruption in global oil supplies and pushed fuel prices sharply higher across the country.
The numbers are not abstract. According to FactCheck.org’s reporting on gas price data, the average US price for regular grade gasoline reached $4.50 per gallon as of the week ending May 11, up $1.56, or 53%, from the average price of $2.94 during the week before the war began. Energy experts say prices will start to fall when the conflict is resolved, but it could take far longer than most people expect. “For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy.
The political cost has been steep. Americans’ assessments of Trump have declined steadily over the last several months, and a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 20-26 among 5,103 US adults found his job approval at 34%, the lowest mark of his second term. Confidence in his use of military force dropped more sharply than any other leadership trait, falling from 46% last summer to 38% in late April 2026. Within his own party, Republican confidence in his foreign policy judgment declined 7 points over the same period.
Even within his own coalition, the cracks are visible. More than six in ten Americans say that US military action in Iran has done more harm than good, and 63% of Americans place a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the rise in gas prices, including 32% of Republicans.
The Footprint Nobody Promised
Trump’s foreign policy pitch was easy to understand: no more endless wars, America First, bring the troops home. It’s the pitch that resonated with voters who were exhausted by twenty years of Middle Eastern military entanglement. Trump ran in 2024 on a campaign that swore to avoid dragging the US into foreign wars, focusing instead on home prosperity. Earlier in his second term, the White House even referred to him as the “President of Peace.”
His second term looks rather different from that promise. After returning to office in 2025, Trump approved the expansion of counterterrorism operations that included bombing targets in Nigeria and Somalia, ordered US military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, targeted Houthi militants in Yemen, and in early 2026 bombed Venezuela and captured the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. In the first 12 months of his second term, Trump ordered strikes on seven countries, and the Trump administration carried out 658 air and drone strikes in 2025 alone, a figure close to the 694 strikes conducted by the Biden administration during its entire four-year term.
The Lowy Institute’s analysis of Trump’s foreign policy trajectory draws a direct line through the psychology of recent military victories. The January 2026 raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro built Trump’s agenda to deliver outsized results. Plenty of people had predicted catastrophe, just as they had ahead of the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but it did not occur. Trump saw both operations as clear successes and came out convinced he had developed an instinct for when force would work.
So when Netanyahu came to him shortly after with the argument that Iran was weaker than at any point since the 1979 revolution, with proxy groups Hezbollah and Hamas gutted, the pro-Iranian dictator of Syria gone, and sustained protests erupting inside Iran, the case sounded familiar and winnable. Deal the regime a blow from which it would never recover. It was the same pitch Gates had rejected in 2009. This time, Trump took it.
The Regime That Refused to Crumble
The core of Gates’s criticism is simple but worth sitting with. He assessed that the likelihood of a near-term uprising in Iran is very low, because internal controls remain in place. The Iranian regime that Netanyahu described to the Obama administration in 2009 as fragile, and described again to Trump in 2026, is still functioning. Despite the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of Operation Epic Fury, and a number of top national security officials, the intelligence community’s assessment is that Iran’s regime has not collapsed. “The regime in Iran appears to be intact but largely degraded,” Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2026.
Gates has also argued that negotiation, not bombardment, is the only path with any real chance of ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions for good. His argument was that if you attack Iran’s nuclear program in a way designed to destroy it, you simply make Iranians more determined to eventually have a nuclear weapon and bury the whole program deeper underground. “It buys you a little time, but it doesn’t solve the problem.” He was saying this clearly before the war began.
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What Owning This Actually Means
There is a temptation, when things go wrong at this scale, to look for the person who whispered in the president’s ear. Netanyahu made the pitch. He’s been making essentially the same pitch for over thirty years. He finally found a president willing to act on it.
But the decision was Trump’s. The intelligence that said Iran was not building a nuclear weapon was Trump’s. The advisers telling him this war was a mistake were sitting inside his own administration. His approval rating on Iran has cratered, his overall numbers are in the mid-30s across multiple polls, and the economic damage is registering at the gas pump every single day. Americans are not confused about who made the call.
The harder truth underneath all of this is that “in way over his head” isn’t just a description of one man’s miscalculation. It describes what happens when the gap between the story told to justify a decision and the evidence available to inform it becomes too wide to close. Gates made his argument. The intelligence community made its assessment. Trump heard what he wanted to hear, and then signed off anyway.
The Strait of Hormuz is still largely closed. The International Energy Agency has called it the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” The price at every gas pump in the country is a daily reminder of what that means for ordinary people. And the regime that was supposed to crumble at the first strike is still standing, degraded but intact, negotiating from whatever position it still holds. Robert Gates was right in 2009. The tragedy is that being right, when nobody in the room wants to hear it, changes nothing.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.