As God Bless the USA blared over the speakers, the US president waved from side to side and made small circles with his wrists, like a conductor in front of an orchestra.
At that point, the commander-in-chief felt himself on an enviable roll of foreign interventions. He had pirouetted from last year’s bomber raid on Iranian nuclear facilities to the staggering capture of Venezuela’s former president Nicolas Maduro.
“Have a great time,” he told the crowd. “I’ve got to go and do some work.”
When Mr Trump announced in a social media video that the first wave of strikes had begun, he still sported the white “USA” baseball cap he had worn to the ball.
The president’s mood could only have lifted as, within 24 hours, Israeli jets were confirmed to have assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at his private residence in the capital, along with the 86-year-old supreme leader’s daughter, son-in-law and grandson. The strikes were so effective, Mr Trump would later rue, they eliminated potential US-friendly replacements.
But two weeks into the war, the triumphant music has stopped – and Mr Trump is left holding a military operation with no clear end in sight.
To make matters worse, the Iranian regime and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has picked up the conductor’s baton, cut off oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, and pitched the world economy towards a perilous fugue.
Mr Trump insists that all is going to plan. On March 5, he told Politico that “people are loving what’s happening” and, as if already bored by the extraordinary Blitzkrieg, flicked his eyes towards the next target: Cuba, he promised, “was going to fall, too”.
Addressing a Kentucky crowd at a March 11 rally, he said the US had already “won” the war. “In the first hour, it was over,” he boasted, only to add: “We don’t want to leave early, do we?”
Mr Trump’s press team has denounced US media outlets that dare to criticise the planning of the operation, thundering out statements on “garbage” stories, “hack and loser” reporters, and “100 per cent fake news”.
In reply, the administration points to a series of undoubted military successes on the tactical level. Strikes on more than 6,000 regime targets have sunk most of the navy and spiked the guns of Iran’s rocket forces, leading to a 90 per cent decline in the drone and missile bombardments that caused widespread disruption across The Gulf.
But reports emerge by the day to suggest that Mr Trump and his small inner circle breezily downplayed the risk that the Iranian regime – facing an existential fight for survival – would respond far more drastically than it had during the 12-day war last June.
The White House appeared unprepared for Tehran to reach for its equivalent of the nuclear button: a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.
In the weeks before the war began, Mr Trump huddled with the team that had helped him secure American access to Venezuela’s oil reserves.
Another bounty of “liquid gold”, sucked away from another long-standing enemy of the US, may have enticed the president. Asked on March 9 whether he intended to take Iran’s oil, he mused “you look at Venezuela … certainly people have talked about it.”
But in those preliminary meetings, Gen Caine told Mr Trump that an American attack on Iran could prompt the regime to close the Strait of Hormuz, citing decades of US preparation for such an eventuality.
Sources familiar with the discussion told the Wall Street Journal that Mr Trump acknowledged the risk, but replied that Tehran would probably capitulate before severing the world’s most vital shipping lane. Even if it went ahead, the American military could wrestle back control.
As a precaution, he ordered Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, to develop options to combat a spike in oil prices. But energy executives who spoke to Politico days into the war described frantic efforts by the administration to come up with answers to the inevitable surge, which has driven petrol prices up to $3.63 per gallon, roughly a quarter above the pre-war level.
It is not just oil that has forced the White House into an unseemly scramble. On March 10, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, admitted that the ferocity of Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbours had caught America by surprise.
“I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said. The oversight meant that US embassy staff were not evacuated from the region before hostilities began, and thousands of American citizens made desperate calls for help finding flights home.
Iranian missiles struck a five-star hotel in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, wounding two members of the US Department of Defence. The drone attack that killed six US soldiers on Sunday 1 March – the first US deaths in the war – was later reported to have led to an additional 30 troops being taken to hospital, suffering from a variety of shrapnel wounds, burns and brain trauma.
The US base at Kuwait’s Shuaiba port had concrete slabs to protect against ground attacks but the prefabricated, tent-like structure lacked overhead cover, according to reports.
Iran’s kamikaze drone flew low to the ground, avoiding detection by US radar in a tactic pioneered by Russia’s forces in Ukraine. While American air defences can intercept “most” of Iran’s attacks, Mr Hegseth told a press conference at the Pentagon that “every once in a while, you might have one, unfortunately – we call it a squirter – that makes its way through.”
After the attack, US officials told the Washington Post that Moscow had been providing Iran with intelligence gained from its vastly superior satellite network.
Asked about the reports, the American diplomat entrusted with the dual negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and secure a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear arsenal said Russia denied the accusations – and he trusted the Kremlin.
“I can tell you that on a call with Potus [the president of the United States], the Russians said they had not been sharing,” Steve Witkoff told CNBC, adding: “We can take them at their word.”
Facing anger from Gulf allies about the Iranian munitions striking high-rise hotels, airports and oil refineries, the Pentagon withdrew parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) battery from South Korea – prompting protestations from Seoul.
On Friday, it ordered 2,500 marines to redeploy from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, bringing an expeditionary unit trained for amphibious ground assaults into the theatre.
The belated manoeuvre, along with a lack of mine-removal ships in the conflict zone, pointed to an overall lack of foresight about the worst-case scenario now facing the US military, analysts said.
Trump’s mother of all miscalculations
Story by Memphis Barker
