The Trump Administration Strategy Fail

Daniel W. Drezner · 9 Sept 2026

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A leader too impatient to sustain a waiting game will undermine strategies built on economic pressure and waiting out an adversary.
Mental modelPlay long games

Their wordsTrump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that's what this strategy entails
Our reading
Governments running pressure campaigns tend to wishfully overestimate how close the adversary is to collapse.
Mental modelCognitive biases

Their wordsA second pathology is the administration's wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing.
Our reading
A government's foreign-policy failures often stem from its policymakers' laziness rather than strategic miscalculation.

Their wordsthe Trump administration's foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging.

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