Bloomberg Surveillance · Monday, July 13, 2026
The US administration's approach to Iran is criticized for relying on instincts rather than professional advice, leading to underestimations of Iranian leadership's persistence. The belief that a confrontation would be short-lived proved incorrect, failing to adequately consider the security implications of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Well, I think the one number one thing that went wrong, and it's related to that, is relying on their own instincts rather than on the advice of professionals in places like the State Department and the Pentagon. The Pentagon has thought about the strait of horror moves for a very long time that we've had since nineteen eighty since the Iranian revolution, a concern about disruption of supply, and they have thought about it in a way that a wish well thinking Trump administration thought that this would be over in a week, didn't think about what would happen if it was more than a week, and didn't think about what the security of the strait were all about.”
“So I'd say it was a little bit based more not on the thing ebat Iran, but on the hutzba of where they were.”