Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Donald Trump has embarked on a war against Iran without a clear objective or plan. That he could so easily do so casts doubt on whether the US presidency faces any remaining constitutional check on its war-making powers. War should be the last resort after exhausting all alternatives. In this case, not only were the alternatives not exhausted, but the administration deprived itself of the means to understand or achieve them. Now the conflict has begun, the weakening of the security apparatus is hampering America’s ability to prosecute it.
The second Trump administration has sought to root out dissent from national security institutions, emphasising ideological fealty over experience. Thousands of diplomats and civil servants have been dismissed or replaced. With them has gone much of the knowledge and institutional memory needed to forestall bad decisions.
Nowhere is this more true than in diplomacy. The president left the delicate negotiations over a new nuclear agreement with Iran to his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Though neither has nuclear expertise, they chose to negotiate without US federal nuclear experts.
The state department under secretary Marco Rubio fired more than 1,300 employees last July in a huge outflow of expertise, including on the Middle East. In December, the president recalled nearly 30 career ambassadors, leaving the US with about 80 vacant ambassadorial posts. These included Gulf allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which had urged US restraint towards Tehran and have become targets of Iranian retaliation. The main US ambassador in place in the region, Mike Huckabee in Israel, is an ardent defender of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rubio has also since last May served as acting national security adviser. Merging the job of executing diplomacy with that of coordinating and vetting intelligence and options, as well as gutting the National Security Council staff, may explain why the decision to go to war seems not to have undergone the usual stress-testing. US military strikes have been powerful, but there was little evident planning for the likelihood, for example, that Iran would shut the vital oil artery of the Strait of Hormuz. The US administration says its planning was comprehensive and it expected Iran to retaliate by closing the strait.
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has similarly overseen large workforce cuts. In some of the most consequential changes, the defence secretary fired judge advocates general, who advise on the legality of combat orders. As part of a drive to ensure the “unapologetic lethality” of US military force, he has gutted the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a congressionally mandated office designed to help military planners avoid non-combatant casualties. It is unclear whether that played a part in what was likely a US missile strike on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children, or whether this resulted from outdated intelligence. But critics including senior Democrats have pointed to the Hegseth Pentagon’s focus on the “warrior ethos” as a factor in the high civilian death toll in Iran.
The downgrading of civilian safeguards as a priority reflects a broader insistence among senior US officials from the president downwards that the urgency of action outweighed any questions over the legality of the strikes. Other powers, including Iran, they say, would not feel constrained by such notions. The US has often been accused of applying international law selectively. But in previous conflicts, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House went to some lengths to try to secure a UN mandate and congressional approval. The current administration has made no such effort. Trump is embracing ever more openly a might-is-right world — even as his pursuit of greater military freedom may have weakened his ability to use US power judiciously and effectively.
