U.S. President Donald Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A retired colonel sounded the alarm in a new piece for The Hill this week, warning that President Donald Trump is running headlong into a massive problem that he will inevitably botch.
Jonathan Sweet is a retired lieutenant colonel who had three decades of service as a military intelligence officer and now frequently writes about military affairs alongside national security reporter Mark Toth. Their latest piece, published on Thursday morning, argued that Trump "doesn't know how to win in Iran" as the beleaguered peace talks with the Middle Eastern nation drag on with no end in sight.
"The day the ceasefire began in Iran is the day President Trump’s war strategy began to fall apart," Sweet and Toth wrote. "U.S. and Israeli forces were crushing Iran’s military and were poised to begin systematically targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, Iran’s street-level domestic security force and regime enforcers. Then came Trump’s order to stand down. Operation Epic Fury came to a crashing halt, and the White House and the Persian Gulf have been mired ever since in a ceasefire that is on a road to nowhere."
The pair further argued that, counter to the insistence of the Trump administration, Iran's military is not a "complete and total mess," nor has it been "completely defeated." In fact, they countered, "whether Mr. Trump fully grasps it or not, has learned to fight the U.S., Israel, and its Gulf state allies on an asymmetrical basis," meaning that "a traditional air force, navy or ground army is not required."
"Trump, simply put, does not know how to defeat Iran’s asymmetric war against him," the pair argued. "Plus, he is failing to understand how the Iranian regime is using kinetic tools on a regional basis to gain leverage in the ongoing peace talks. We have described that approach as a three-ring-circus. Mining the Strait of Hormuz is the center ring or main act. Limited ballistic missile and drone strikes against the U.S. and its allies in the region is the second ring. The third? Linking the survival of Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s axis of resistance against Israel, to the ever-elusive deal being negotiated."
They continued: "Trump repeatedly claims that he has effected regime change in Iran. But he has not. The faces changed when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ali Larijani and other top regime leaders were killed on the opening day of the war, but the regime’s militant ideology is the same. In reality, Iran’s regime has only become more entrenched. Most alarming, however, is that Trump seems oblivious that many of his comments, statements, and posts on Truth Social are perceived by Iran’s hardliners as signs of weakness."
Ultimately, Sweet and Toth concluded, as they often have, that the only way for Trump to achieve victory over Iran in a meaningful way is to end efforts for a diplomatic solution, and instead "defeat them for real" by renewing the active military campaign against them.