Donald Trump's improvised comments about Iran while boarding Air Force One on Monday demonstrated his chaotic approach to military strategy — and his apparent blindness to critical consequences unfolding around him, according to a report.
The president made a comment revealing that Iran's regional retaliation caught planners of the military action against the country off guard.
"Look at the way Iran attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them. That was not supposed to-- nobody was even thinking about it," the president conceded before reasserting without substantiation, "But they wanted to take over the Middle East."
The remarks prompted analysis from New Republic correspondent Greg Sargent and Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy.
Sargent highlighted the troubling implications on his podcast. "He said no one anticipated that Iran would attack other countries in an effort to widen the war," he commented. "But in saying that, Trump revealed that he didn't anticipate it — which is a striking admission about his own lack of foresight."
He continued, "We think this captures something broader. On one front after another, Trump plainly didn't prepare for eventualities that most experts fully did anticipate. So how directly responsible are these failings for what we're seeing right now — that by most indications, the war is getting worse for Trump and the U.S. on many fronts?"
Duss responded, "Well, we know that this is going much worse than Donald Trump himself thought it would. We know that Donald Trump does not do the reading. We know that Donald Trump has the attention span of a fly. We know that he just makes stuff up all the time. Trump made this threat over the weekend to bomb power plants — which is clearly a war crime, to attack plants that produce power for civilians. And then I think he woke up and saw that the stock market is in trouble, oil prices are continuing to go higher."
Duss dismissed Trump's characterization that the attacks blindsided everyone as fundamentally dishonest.
"Everyone anticipated this," he stated flatly. "Every one of these countries that Iran has attacked — we should have expected it, whether it's Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, obviously Israel. This is part of Iran's defensive strategy. This is part of how they believe they were creating deterrence."
He went on, "So Iran is following through — they have to follow through, in a sense, if they want to make sure that this doesn't happen again in the future. So yes, to answer your question, of course, people knew Iran was going to do this. Again, Donald Trump does not bother to do the reading."