U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 18, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Ever since the overthrow of the late Mohammad Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Iran's fundamentalist Shiite regime has been a major thorn in the side of the United States and Israel. Nonetheless, the regime is still in power after 47 years. According to i Paper Paul Wood, U.S. President Donald Trump badly underestimated the government in Tehran when he launched a war in late February. And military experts are warning that Trump is in way over his head.
"Donald Trump may be having buyer's remorse over the Iran war," Wood explains in the i Paper. "U.S. fuel prices are near an all-time high; his approval ratings are at an all-time low; and oil tankers remain stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to tip the global economy into recession."
One of the military experts who is sounding the alarm is Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Gates believes that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to realize how strong the Iranian regime is.
"Robert Gates, a grandee of America's defense establishment as secretary of defense under Republican and Democratic presidents (George W. Bush and Barack Obama), delivered a withering assessment this week of Netanyahu's pitch," Wood observes. "Interviewed by CBS, he said that Netanyahu had told him, in July 2009, all the same things he had told Trump in the Situation Room in February. Gates said he had pushed back during that 'no-punches-pulled discussion' of Iran, telling Netanyahu he was underestimating the resilience of the Iranian regime. 'He was saying, in 2009: the regime is fragile, it'll crumble at the first attack, and they won't have time to do anything else.… I told him then, he was dead wrong.'"
Wood adds, "Netanyahu has — almost comically — been warning that Iran is weeks or months away from getting a nuclear bomb for decades."
Trump, Wood notes, "did not have to take Netanyahu's word" about Iran moving closer to developing a nuclear bomb."
"His own intelligence services contradicted the alarming claims," according to Wood. "Before last year's bombing, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate committee that the U.S. intelligence community 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.' At the time, Trump declared, 'I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.'"
Wood points out that CIA Director John Ratcliff dismissed Netanyahu's nuclear bomb claims as "farcical," while Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them "b– –."
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Wood adds, is an outspoken critic of the war on the MAGA right.
"Carlson said he warned Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency," Wood observes. "If it does, he has only himself to blame…. So far, in less than 18 months of his second term, Trump has bombed not only Iran, but also Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and Venezuela. He has threatened to attack Cuba, Panama, Greenland and even Canada. Though Netanyahu may have manipulated Trump, he was only feeding Trump's deep desires. Whatever regrets he might have, Trump owns this war."