Groupthink with a Group of One

Introduction

Before the war:

1. Iran didn't control the Strait of Hormuz. Now it does.
2. Iranian oil was sanctioned. Now it isn't.
3. Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Now it will.
4. US bases in the Gulf were assets. Now they are liabilities.
5. US inflation was declining. Now it is increasing.

That five-point summary, from financial analyst @TheMaverickWS, is the most concise strategic audit of Operation Epic Fury yet written. Each point is directionally clear, even if the margins of some are debated. One note on point one: control doesn't require a physical blockade. Iran's missile threat has been sufficient to make the risk calculus unacceptable to insurers and ship operators alike. The result is functionally identical – traffic has stopped. Together the five points describe a war that has actively worsened the situation on every dimension it claimed to be addressing. File it away. We will return to it.

A Confession About My Prior Estimates

When I wrote my original analysis of this conflict, I assigned a 66% probability that the war would be over by end of March and 75% by end of April. I am now revising those estimates to 0% and 25% respectively, with only a 50% chance of resolution by the year's end.

I want to be precise about the nature of my error – because it is different from, and in some ways more interesting than, simply miscalculating Iranian resolve.

I did not make the same analytical mistake as the Trump administration. I made a mistake one level above it. I assumed that the people launching a major military operation against Iran – with all the classified briefing infrastructure, the professional military planners, the decades of US strategic thinking about exactly this scenario – had done the analytical work properly. I gave them the benefit of the doubt on competence and process.

That assumption turned out to be false.

The Enemy Gets a Vote

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of a particular observation: once hostilities begin, “the enemy gets a vote.” It is a simple formulation. It is also, apparently, one the current administration forgot entirely.

Writing in The Atlantic on 13 March, Phillips Payson O’Brien documented what reporting across multiple outlets has since corroborated: the Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings that it had not made provisions for an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz because officials assumed that such a move would hurt Iran more than the United States. Military planners have pointed out for decades that the waterway – through which one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passes – is highly vulnerable to Iranian assault. The CNN reporting that broke this story prompted a dismissive response from Defense Secretary Hegseth: “Of course, for decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do.” Yet multiple current and former US officials confirmed that the Pentagon and NSC significantly underestimated Iran's willingness to act on that threat.

A former official who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations put it plainly: “Planning around preventing this exact scenario has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades.”

It was about ten days into the war that the Strait of Hormuz problem was fully on the president's radar. The reactive ultimatums started then. That ten-day lag tells you a great deal about the quality of pre-war planning.

The administration assumed a rational economic actor calculating costs and benefits. Iran was calculating as a regime fighting for its survival. Those are fundamentally different decision-making frameworks, and conflating them was not an intelligence failure – it was a failure of strategic imagination.

The Venezuela effect may have made this worse – though this is hypothesis rather than established fact. If the previous operation's quick results reduced appetite for rigorous red-teaming, that would be a familiar pattern: overconfidence from an easy win corrupting the planning process for a harder one. Iran is not Venezuela in any dimension that matters strategically – the Strait, the proxy network, the nuclear programme, the regime's demonstrated willingness to absorb punishment. If Trump imported the wrong lessons from Caracas to Tehran, the cost of that category error is now visible in the five points above.

Groupthink With a Group of One

The Bay of Pigs is the standard reference point for American strategic planning failures driven by groupthink. A room full of intelligent people – Kennedy's best and brightest – talked themselves into collective stupidity through shared assumptions, suppressed dissent, and a desire for consensus that overwhelmed critical analysis. Kennedy had the intellectual honesty to ask afterwards: “How could we have been so stupid?” He restructured his decision-making process as a direct result. That restructuring arguably saved the world thirteen months later during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What has happened here is both similar and structurally worse.

Classic groupthink requires a cohesive group that suppresses dissent through social pressure. Trump has achieved the pathology of groupthink while eliminating the group. The suppression of dissent isn't social – it's architectural. There is nobody to dissent because the decision-making process has been reduced to a single point of failure: a president whose absolute conviction that he is the smartest person in the room eliminates the demand for rigorous analysis before it reaches him.

Normal groupthink is recoverable in principle. You change the group composition, introduce red teams, bring in outside voices. The Kennedy lesson was institutionalised into better process. Trump's version is irreducible to a process fix because the problem isn't the process. It is the singular decision-maker's psychology.

The five-point list at the top of this piece is the output of groupthink with a group of one. Each of those deteriorations represents an unasked question. The unasked questions accumulated because there was nobody in the room whose job was to ask them – or whose asking would have been heard.

Military Success, Strategic Failure

It is important to be precise here: by the metrics of military execution, the campaign appears to be performing broadly as designed. Iranian military infrastructure has been degraded. The nuclear programme has been struck. Proxy networks have been damaged. The operational competence of the US military is not in serious question.

The failure is primarily at the strategic level – and this distinction matters because it is one of the most recurring tragedies in modern American warfare. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. In each case the military performed its assigned tasks with considerable competence. The failure was never primarily military. It was the strategic logic upstream of the military mission that was flawed.

Sending a competent military to execute a strategically misconceived mission doesn't produce coherent outcomes. It potentially makes things worse than doing nothing – because you've spent the credibility, paid the economic costs, created the blowback, and ended up in a worse strategic position than your starting point. The five points are the ledger.

The Real Rationale – and Its Problems

My original essay argued that the most strategically coherent explanation for the war was nuclear prevention – specifically preventing a dying regime from transferring fissile material to a proxy with no return address and nothing to lose. I still think that is the most coherent public justification. I am now considerably less confident it reflects the actual driving logic.

Too many people with genuine insight into the intelligence architecture have questioned whether the nuclear-proxy threat was ever real enough to justify the scale of the operation. If they are right, the war's actual rationale reduces to a combination of Israel's strategic interests, Trump's red-line credibility problem, and alliance entrapment. None of those are nothing. But none of them individually or collectively justify the costs at the scale now being paid.

Israel's interests deserve careful treatment here. Iran's hostility to Israel is constitutionally embedded and operationally real – decades of proxy funding, weapons supply, and explicit eliminationist rhetoric. Israel's desire to permanently degrade Iranian capability is not cynical opportunism. It is rational self-defence by a small country facing a documented existential threat. The self-interest is legitimate.

But legitimate self-interest and selective intelligence presentation are not mutually exclusive. You can have a genuine existential threat AND frame the specific justifications offered to Washington in ways designed to maximise American involvement. Netanyahu, facing a corruption trial, a sustained domestic protest movement, and the legacy burden of October 7, had personal political incentives that plausibly aligned with escalation – though causal weight here is difficult to assign from the outside. Trump, fresh from Venezuela and susceptible to flattery about his historic legacy, was not ideally positioned to apply sceptical scrutiny to the case being made to him.

The result: a war that is genuinely in Israel's existential interest, arguably in broader regional stability interests, and considerably less clearly in core American strategic interest than the public justification suggested.

The Gambler's Fallacy Question

Iran's strategic response has been coherent and effective. The Strait closure imposes a domestic political cost on Trump through oil prices and inflation – the variable that moves presidential approval faster than almost any other. Strikes on Gulf neighbour infrastructure create a second clock: US allies whose private pressure on Washington operates independently of the domestic inflation problem. Iran is not trying to win militarily. It is trying to break Trump's domestic political coalition before he breaks Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

This creates the exit problem. Trump cannot declare victory with the Strait still effectively closed – the optics of the world's most powerful military being unable to reopen a critical waterway are politically untenable. But Iran has signalled, through its five maximalist conditions including sovereignty over the Strait, that it will not surrender this leverage cheaply.

The pressure to push on – specifically, to continue until Iran's Strait interdiction capability is degraded below the threshold of credibility – looks rational on its surface. But it raises a question that deserves more honest scrutiny than it receives in most commentary: is this the gambler's fallacy?

The classic form: sunk costs are enormous – political capital, credibility, domestic coalition – and continuing feels necessary to recover them. But none of those sunk costs change the underlying probability that continued force produces an acceptable resolution. There is a non-fallacious version of the same logic – credibility as a future deterrence asset, the forward-looking cost of being seen to accept Hormuz closure – but from the inside these two logics are nearly indistinguishable. A president telling himself “I must push on to preserve credibility” and a president telling himself “I cannot be seen to lose” are making superficially identical decisions for very different reasons.

The people around Trump probably cannot tell which it is. Neither can we.

Where This Ends

The divergence between Israeli and American interests will become increasingly visible as the war continues. Israel has largely achieved its core objective regardless of how the Strait question resolves. Netanyahu's incentives to help Trump find an off-ramp are limited. Trump will eventually register that he is holding costs that are not equally shared.

Back in the US, there is no rally-around-the-flag effect. The public has not internalised the nuclear justification the way the administration needed them to. A proliferation of rationales – eight at last count, catalogued in my earlier piece – produces no clear emotional response. People are paying real costs – fuel prices, supply chain disruption, inflation – without feeling personally threatened. That is a politically toxic combination, and it erodes faster than genuine national solidarity.

The one scenario that transforms the domestic political dynamic is an Iranian conventional or terrorist attack on US soil or personnel in significant numbers. That would unify opinion overnight, silence the “why are we in this war” critique, and give Trump the Pearl Harbor moment his presidency currently lacks. Iran almost certainly understands this, which is why the Strait and Gulf infrastructure have been the preferred pressure points rather than direct strikes on Americans. Sustaining economic pressure without triggering the rally is Iran's strategy. It is, so far, working.

My revised assessment: 25% chance of resolution by end of April – essentially the “original thesis plays out, just delayed” scenario, requiring sustained US force to degrade Iranian Strait interdiction capability below the threshold of credibility. 50% by year end. The longer tail reflects not Iranian military resilience alone, but the absence of a visible off-ramp that doesn't require Trump to either appear to accept a defeat, pay heavily or escalate further.

The military campaign may well succeed on its own terms. The strategic question – what does the architecture look like the morning after? – was apparently never seriously asked. The five points are the answer to the question nobody asked: what happens if the enemy refuses to behave as expected?

Postscript – 1 April 2026

A note on the date first: yes, this postscript is being added on April Fool's Day, which is either appropriate or ironic given what follows.

Within hours of this piece being published, Trump announced his intention to withdraw US forces within two to three weeks – without a peace treaty and without resolving the Strait of Hormuz. Whether this is a genuine statement of intent or a pressure tactic designed to shock allies into joining a Hormuz coalition is genuinely difficult to assess from outside. Trump's communication style makes these two things nearly indistinguishable. He has floated and retracted positions within the same news cycle throughout this conflict.

But here is what is analytically significant regardless of which it is: a president who is winning does not threaten to leave. The withdrawal signal – genuine or tactical – reveals the constraints he is operating under in a way that no amount of "we're ahead of schedule" messaging can obscure. Either he is genuinely exhausted of options and preparing an exit, or he is so short of leverage that threatening abandonment of allies is the strongest card he has left. Neither reading is a picture of strategic strength.

If it is a bluff, the immediate question is whether allies call it. The Gulf states have every incentive to let Washington bear the cost of reopening the Strait rather than contributing forces to a coalition that makes them Iran's primary target. Europe has limited naval capacity and limited appetite. The bluff may not produce the coalition it is designed to conjure – in which case Trump is left having publicly floated withdrawal and received nothing for it, weakening his position further.

If it is genuine, the consequences are structural and lasting. Withdrawal without resolution hands Iran de facto control of the world's most critical energy chokepoint. Iran has already floated transit tolls – roughly $1 to $2 per barrel on a typical tanker carrying two million barrels. The direct cost is modest. The precedent is not. Every tanker that pays normalises Iranian sovereignty over a waterway that international law designates as open passage. The countries most exposed are not the United States – which barely uses the Strait – but the Asian economies that depend on it for the large majority of their seaborne energy: Japan, South Korea, India, China and ultimately Australia. Oil prices will remain elevated for months regardless – war risk insurance and shipping risk premia settle slowly, compounding the economic damage long after any ceasefire.

There is a further dimension that deserves emphasis. Iran enters the post-war period not only motivated to reconstitute its nuclear programme but newly financed to do so. Sanctions on Iranian oil exports were partially lifted mid-war by Trump in an attempt to ease the global oil shock – restoring a revenue stream that years of maximum pressure had been designed to deny. The Hormuz toll, if it sticks, adds a second and entirely novel income source: Iran need not export a single barrel through the Strait to profit from it. It simply taxes everyone else's exports instead. The sanctioned state becomes the toll collector. The war that was supposed to eliminate the Iranian threat has provided it with motivation and financing together, which is a categorically more dangerous combination than either alone.

Also, Israel publicly rejected participation in any ground operation in Iran. Whether or not Trump's withdrawal signal is genuine, Israel's rejection is unambiguous. They have achieved their core objectives – the degradation of Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure they have sought for decades – and have now stepped back from the phase that would cost them further. The interest divergence this piece identified is no longer a prediction. It is publicly confirmed.

The nuclear question remains deferred rather than resolved under either scenario. A damaged but surviving Iranian regime, with accelerated motivation to reconstitute its nuclear programme and every incentive to do so, is the morning-after architecture regardless of how the next two weeks unfold. It is only a matter of time before Israel and the US feel compelled to revisit it – on worse terms, from a weaker position, with less international tolerance for another intervention.

The probability paragraph in the main piece was overtaken by events within hours of publication. That is itself the point. The five points we opened with – filed away at the start, promised to return to – are looking less like temporary dislocations and more like the permanent ledger of a strategic failure. Whether Trump exits in two weeks or stays another two months, the architecture those five points describe is increasingly the one the region is settling into.

Groupthink with a group of one. The question nobody asked. The enemy got a vote.

---

This piece updates my earlier analysis published 17 March 2026. I am grateful to @TheMaverickWS for the five-point formulation which I have used with attribution.