Some excellent work on how Trump’s failure in Iran resulted from his destruction of US government capacity at home:

Likewise, the administration launched the war with no consultation with its transatlantic allies. So when the president later pressed European navies to send minesweepers into the Strait of Hormuz to reopen it, every major NATO ally refused. This was the foreseeable cost of starting a war without consulting the very partners whose help would be needed to end it.

In his first term, Trump appointed seasoned professionals, including retired Marine Corps four-star Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as his secretary of defense for the first half of the administration. In his second term, Trump has chosen vastly less experienced leaders, appointing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host whose military career had ended at the much more junior rank of major. Hegseth had never led a policy-planning process or an institution approaching the Pentagon’s scale—a gap that showed when the department needed contingency plans and had no process left to produce them.

On assuming office, Trump’s team and its allies began a witch hunt against those deemed disloyal to the president or associated with so-called “woke” or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., less than halfway into his four-year term, without a stated cause, along with the chief of naval operations and the military’s most senior lawyers.

Each firing cost the United States expertise developed over decades. Those who remained watched their backs or simply left to avoid being dismissed over a tweet—or by one. Trump then elevated as chairman Gen. Dan Caine, a less-qualified officer seen as less willing to contradict him. The officers who rose in the purged leaders’ places understood the terms of their promotions—and what candor with this president had cost their predecessors.

Worth reading the whole thing. While the colossal failure of the Iran War has some roots in the last thirty years of US Middle East policy, it’s most critical elements all stem from Trump’s destruction of US government expertise over the last two years.

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