Donald Trump is the Mr Magoo of American statecraft: blind as a bat but luckier than a leprechaun with a four-leafed clover tattooed on his forehead. In an orgy of indiscipline and self-indulgence, the US president scorched every sensible talking point his officials offered for the 22 June attack on Iran, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer. At several earlier points, Trump almost undermined the operational secrecy of the mission itself. And yet, the mission worked anyway. One may now justifiably add a last line to Otto von Bismarck’s famous aphorism: “God protects drunks, fools, and the United States of America… particularly President Donald J. Trump.”

Which is to say that the US military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities succeeded to the extent it did despite Trump not because of him. To compensate for Trump’s Ray Bolger scarecrow-in-a-cornfield act, the White House and most of the upper echelon of the US government’s national-security establishment turned into an ensemble of spin whores, just as Trump’s economic team did after the “Liberation Day” tariff disaster. Leading the White House whitewash was press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whom one observer has aptly described as a “chirpy attack-bunny.” At one point, Vice-President J.D. Vance—who can probably still distinguish between a fact and an invented self-serving narrative in private—answered a reporter’s question about damage assessment with this: “Severely damaged versus obliterated—I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.”

But Vance really had no choice: All senior administration officials must routinely engage in this kind of mortifying ego-fluffery if they expect to have any future influence on the president. Trump, after all, judges the quality of the advice he receives on the basis of its deference, not its wisdom, which he is helpless to determine. The US President’s conduct before, during, and since the twelve-day Israel–Iran war provides vivid evidence of his encyclopaedic ignorance of the intelligence craft, the conduct of war, and the arts of diplomacy; his ego-driven delusion and mendacity; the process incoherence of his administration; and a general lack of concern with the consequences of his own decisions.

None of this will harm the president politically, of course. On the contrary, his good fortune—made possible by association with the competent professionalism of the Israeli and US militaries—will, at least temporarily, rescue his plummeting approval ratings, even as it opened cracks in Trump’s support coalition. By the time any major downsides of his decisions emerge, most of his core constituents will have long since forgotten any pesky facts concerning those decisions as Trump weaves his weird way onward.

Not a New War

Torrents of electrons have already poured forth about the Twelve Day War, but some key observations have been misread or missed altogether. For example, many observers seem to assume that this was a new war. It wasn’t; it was an inflection point in an ongoing war, fought mainly by proxy, terror, and counterterrorism efforts, dating back almost as far as the founding of the Islamic Republic itself in 1979. It is a war started by the Iranian regime’s leaders in pursuit of their theologically mandated goal of destroying the State of Israel, and it is not over.

In pursuit of this goal, the Iranian regime spent decades building a ring of proxy terror organisations to surround and assault Israel—Hezbollah in Lebanon, sustained via the Assad regime in Syria; the Houthis in Yemen; and Hamas in Gaza and (less prominently) the West Bank. And for many years, the Israeli response to this gathering threat was tactically adept but strategically timid, which only encouraged the regime in Tehran to push its luck. Jerusalem was finally impelled to unfreeze its verve when a combination of massive Israeli misjudgments and its enemies’ fanatical ruthlessness resulted in the catastrophe of 7 October 2023. Israel’s muscular breakout since then is what moved the newly vulnerable Iranian regime to accelerate its nuclear program. All that and more became prelude to Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, which was prelude to Operation Midnight Hammer. But this long and winding road to the Twelve Day War is opaque to President Trump, and its extended future does not really interest him either. Only his own role, and how much attention and benefit he can squeeze and conjure from it, motivates him.

The interstate attacks of the Twelve Day War were not unprecedented. Israel and Iran had already targeted each other’s homelands in October 2024. But the scale and duration of this most recent set-to are unprecedented, and so have altered the domestic political situations in both countries, changed the calculus of military danger and deterrence in and around Israel and Iran, and may yet reshape the US–Israeli relationship as well. Time will tell how these new dynamics play out, but on the core issue—the future of the Iranian nuclear program—several observations may be made.

Playing Nuclear Chess

Contrary to the President’s routine mash-up of delusion and vanity, the Iranian nuclear program has not been “completely and totally obliterated” by Operation Midnight Hammer, or by the Israeli operation it followed, as Trump initially claimed. Even after evidence from his own intelligence services cast doubt on his boast, he insisted: “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term! The white structure shown is deeply imbedded into the rock, with even its roof well below ground level, and completely shielded from flame. The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!”

Trump’s handpicked Joint Chief of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine was among those who did not agree—he is one of only a tiny number of senior US officials who have retained their professional dignity in recent weeks. Caine, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, first cautioned that it was too soon to say how much damage had been inflicted by the US strike. A leaked assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), subsequently paraphrased by CNN, then appeared to confirm that the Iranians’ nuclear program has been set back by perhaps six months or a year, just as anticipated. Whoever leaked that report, CNN should not have reported its contents. But now its journalists have done so, the information bears consideration.

What prior circumstances and judgments explain this quarrel between the White House and the US intelligence community (IC)? And what deeper circumstances and judgments explain the actual outcome of the American operation? It is easy to explain Trump’s insistence on “obliterated” in the face of both expectations and evidence, an insistence that led Trump to disclose Israeli intelligence methods, which he thought—prematurely or mistakenly or both—supported his view. It was churlish of Trump to scold CNN for leaking when he himself leaked something even more damaging, but that thought would never occur to him because anything that serves his interests—whether immoral or illegal or both or neither—is fine, by definition. Trump cares about the perception, not the reality; he cares about the narrative he tries to craft, not about what actually happened. He has been doing this sort of thing for many years. A good example from near the beginning of his first term illustrates the general point.