For anyone who cared to listen to my opinions since the debacle and tragedy of October 7, 2023, I had one overarching message about where I thought Israel would ultimately find itself down the line. I said Israel would emerge stronger, safer, and regionally more powerful.
And for a few years, at least, I believe I was correct in that assessment.
Those were the days when Joe Biden was in the White House, Antony Blinken was Secretary of State, and Lloyd Austin was Secretary of Defense. Whatever you may think of that group—and they certainly made some mistakes—their competence and decades of experience cannot reasonably be questioned (not even Biden's mental competence, despite what his critics claimed).
Compare them to Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth.
After a devastating security humiliation—the worst in the country's history—Israel's operations against Hamas militants and Iranian proxies were successful beyond expectations. The Hamas attack failed to draw the other members of the so-called Axis of Resistance into the fight. Instead, Israel seized the initiative through a series of surprisingly effective operations: the devastating pager attacks, the killing of Hezbollah's leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, and the eventual elimination of Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the principal architects of the October 7 attacks.
Iran was decidedly on its back foot. Domestically, it was facing unrest brought about by years of crippling international sanctions, while citizen protests were steadily growing in both size and frequency.
Its regional proxies also appeared to be on the verge of serious defeat.
The high point, arguably from a strategic standpoint, was Israel's successful campaign to systematically dismantle Tehran's air defense system. That, in turn, opened the door for the U.S.'s limited strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities during the June 2025 "Twelve-Day War."
Trump proclaimed victory, repeatedly declaring that Iran's nuclear program had been "obliterated," which was patently untrue. Nevertheless, Iran was at a low point, as demonstrated by the widespread street protests at the end of December 2025, which the regime was forced to suppress brutally.
A series of tit-for-tat strikes between Iran and Israel followed over the next several months. Iran was against the ropes and needed to demonstrate both its resilience and its capacity to inflict damage.
This led Netanyahu to press Trump for further, more decisive action against Iran. He calculated that the Iranian regime was teetering and argued that the moment had arrived to act decisively to bring it down.
This was the gross miscalculation that marked the beginning of the conflict turning in Iran's favor.
That miscalculation was operationalized on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel coordinated a military strike aimed at decapitating Iran's leadership. The theory was that removing the regime's senior leadership would either collapse the government or render it impotent, inspiring a widespread popular revolt.
Although militarily successful in eliminating a large portion of Iran's senior leadership—including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many members of his family—the operation proved to be a major strategic blunder.
Subsequent attacks by Israeli and U.S. forces, including those that killed Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammed Pakpour, and Ali Larijani, the senior security official acting as Iran's de facto leader after Khamenei's death, along with internal security chief Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, only served to demonstrate the depth and resilience of the regime.
We had now entered what I call a "Rope-a-Dope War," borrowing the term from Muhammad Ali's famous boxing strategy during the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" against George Foreman.
Iran did not need to go toe-to-toe with adversaries that possessed overwhelmingly superior military capabilities. It merely had to absorb the blows, outlast its opponents, and occasionally lash out at carefully chosen strategic targets to demonstrate that it retained the capacity to inflict meaningful damage. Then, when the time was right and its adversaries had been weakened politically and economically, it could strike decisively.
That is exactly how it played out.
Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes against U.S. military bases, attacked neighboring Gulf states, and finally closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz—which every military strategist and defense analyst had anticipated as a likely Iranian response since the 1979 Revolution—gave Iran the upper hand permanently. It fundamentally changed the stakes of the war and convinced the Iranian leadership that the longer it could sustain the conflict, the greater its chances of achieving objectives that extended far beyond merely surviving.
Those ambitions included lifting economic sanctions, stabilizing the economy through renewed sources of revenue, consolidating and legitimizing its control over the Strait of Hormuz, driving the U.S. military presence out of the Gulf, reshaping the regional balance of power, and extending Iranian influence throughout the Middle East.
That is where we are now.
Almost three years after October 7, Israel finds itself in a quagmire of its own making in both Gaza and Lebanon. It is despised throughout much of the world, and its relationships with the United States and key regional partners are at their lowest point in decades. The strategic opportunities it once possessed have been squandered.
This is what bad strategic planning and overreach look like when combined with hubris, corruption, ignorance, and incompetent political leadership.
The Abraham Accords are effectively dead. The Gulf states now understand—as much of the rest of the world has for some time—that the United States is an unreliable partner. Iran, meanwhile, is well on its way to becoming the region's dominant power.
Oh yes—I almost forgot the supposed reason for all of this in the first place: Iran's nuclear program.
There is now nothing to stop it from moving forward, and Iran has more motivation than ever to pursue a nuclear deterrent. Trump himself appears to have conceded as much with the recent Saudi agreement to assist the kingdom in developing civilian nuclear energy.
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