Trump follows his gut. His National Security Advisers try to keep up.
He said the decision to order an attack on Iran was mostly a matter of instinct regarding Iran’s intentions.
“We were having talks with these madmen, and I think they were going to attack first,” said his guest, Friedrich Merz, as he sat expressionless. “I think they were going to attack first and I didn’t want that to happen. So if something had happened I could have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
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Never mind that Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered the opposite explanation the day before, telling reporters that because Israel would take action, it had no choice but to join in what Trump called a “preemptive” strike before Iran launched strikes against U.S. bases and allies.
The next day, Rubio attempted to walk back his comments. Later on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump took the action because he had a “good feeling” that Iran would soon attack American interests.
The back-and-forth confirmed what his former aides had almost universally reported: Trump’s determination to bypass the bureaucracy, reduce his advisers to a small, watertight minority and trust his instincts on intelligence briefings was exercised in making the weightiest decision a commander in chief can make.
Each president, of course, creates a decision-making structure that suits his own style. Franklin D. Roosevelt relied heavily on the kitchen cabinet. Harry S. Truman created the National Security Council to formally evaluate options and coordinate among departments fighting the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter turned the NSC into an idea generator. In the Obama administration, NSC staff talked about “death in the Situation Room meeting” and likened the policymaking process to watching a python swallow a pig.
The Trump administration has little patience for this. When Trump took office, he reduced NSC staff by at least two-thirds and dismissed some members over vague doubts about their loyalty. Trump has made clear that the NSC is there to implement its decisions, not to generate options.
And when debates do occur, the number of players is usually reduced to a small group. In the Iran case, they include Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Central Command’s four-star chief Brad Cooper, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. (Trump loves the chair’s nickname, Raizin’ Caine, just as he loves “Mad Dog” for Jim Mattis, the first defense secretary to hate that name.)
There aren’t many leaks from these sessions; This is a big change from the early Obama era, when, for example, Situation Room conversations sometimes appeared on news sites before the meetings ended. Still, Caine was widely reported to have warned Trump that he should expect losses and deal with the possibility of live ammunition shortages. Vance’s public silences may be explained by his initial internal warnings against going to war; When he lost that battle, Vance told the president and his national security team that they needed to “go big and go fast.”
But what Trump gains in privacy, he loses in message control. There are many answers on many topics, from the targets of the Iranian attack to Trump’s targets in Venezuela and even threatening Greenland. Inconsistency is sometimes celebrated as a cunning strategic deception by management rather than a failure to think several chess moves ahead.
“Trump seems to think he doesn’t need options or contingency plans,” said Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked on long-range strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden years. “He just wants a small team to follow his instincts. But when things go wrong, as they often do, a president without prepared choices will gamble two by two.”
That’s what worries many foreign ministers, defense officials and world leaders. A senior Arab diplomat said this week that he has no real knowledge of his government’s plan for a change of government in Iran or whether it even wants to play a role, given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s repeated statements that “nation-building” is not on the Pentagon’s list of tasks. People familiar with Merz’s visit say Merz pressed him on whether the President had considered how and under what conditions the action in Iran might end.
These are the kinds of questions the National Security Council would answer in other administrations. It would also be the NSC’s duty to ensure that US citizens are given adequate warning to leave the Middle East. Instead, this advice came from the government only after the fighting was well underway and left thousands of Americans stranded.
David Rothkopf, 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.
“Never before has such a comprehensive military action, with so much risk or such consequences, been undertaken with so little apparent planning or weighing of potential consequences, both intentional and unintended,” he said.
He notes that it was the military that developed the operational plans, which were then reviewed at the NSC. “This process has blunted almost nothing in this administration, and the planning done there is too often ignored by a president who trusts his own instincts more than any advisor. This may work for narrow-scope actions, but it won’t work when war is waged against a big, important country like Iran.”
Perhaps Trump was encouraged by the fact that his previous missions had worked well. The June 2025 airstrike on Iran’s three major nuclear facilities was the product of months of careful planning, and the targets were all deep underground facilities that the United States thought it could seriously damage with a dozen giant bunker-busting bombs.
The mission was limited. Most of the targets were so remote that there was little concern for civilian casualties. His success depended more on physics than politics.
The operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power was riskier, but Trump made no effort to actually replace the government. Instead, he has kept the country’s power structure in place, except for Maduro, and has made clear that he will not insist on bringing to power the clear winners of the 2024 elections – the Venezuelan opposition – as long as the United States has access to Venezuela’s massive oil reserves.
But veterans of this long and often protracted National Security Council process say this is exactly the kind of flawed analogy the president’s team should belittle. Iran and Venezuela could not be more different in terms of history, geography, culture and politics. The biggest thing they have in common is their reliance on getting oil out of the ground.
In an interview with The New York Times, Trump said he hoped hardline members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia would surrender their weapons “to the people,” which sounded more like a hope than a plan.
But his political supporters see talk of strategic planning as a risky effort to keep Trump from being Trump. After all, they state that Iran’s religious leader Ali Khamenei lost his life in one of the first attacks of the war.
Trump’s critics see in this conflict everything that is wrong with the functioning of the Trump White House. “The President and his administration continue to change the justifications for war, the length and level of war, the objectives of war, and whether we are actually at war,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “The only thing that remains consistent is the lack of strategy on how to go about it. This is what happens when you start a war based on your instincts rather than the analysis and advice of experts.”
This article was first published in The New York Times.
