'Feckless': political scientist torches trump’s 'stunningly incompetent' war

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the signing ceremony for an execituve order on mail ballots, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump’s prosecution of the Iran war has been “stunningly incompetent,” exposing “the worst wartime political leadership America has ever had,” says political scientist Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic.

While giving Trump a break on his changing war objectives, Cohen, who served as a counselor under Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, says: “What is not normal, and what is stunningly incompetent, is just about every other facet of the administration’s conduct of the war.”

He offers a plethora of “egregious failures,” such as the “failure to explain the war to the American people, aside from a presentation by the president in his summer home while he wore an unserious white baseball cap.” There’s also Trump’s failure to consult with Congress, “or at least secure its approval for the war.” And there’s Trump’s “failure to bring allies along with a minimum of surprises and a maximum of persuasion to support the war.”

Rather than attempting to “minimize internal friction and feuds,” Trump has been picking fights over Homeland Security funding, while making “doomed attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and to meddle in states’ election administration” — moves that appear “almost calculated to enhance internal divisions.”

The concept of national unity “in a time of war seems utterly beyond this president, who follows his capricious instincts and continues, as ever, to spray venom at domestic opponents (and, for that matter, allies) when they are needed to wage and win the war,” writes Cohen, a military history expert.

Worse, says Cohen, are Trump’s own advisers, whom he likens to “an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos.”

“Never has the United States had a secretary of defense less capable, more egregiously belligerent, or less suited to provide civilian direction of a war than Pete Hegseth,” Cohen says. He charges that Hegseth has exhibited “unconscionable stupidity” by going to war “with an Islamist power” while the U.S. “has partnered with other Muslim states,” but then deciding” to place his own, peculiarly militant Christian beliefs at the center of his public rhetoric.”

Cohen scorches Trump’s other key advisers, including Vice President Vance, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, all of whom have “avoided leadership in this war as best they can.”

He closes with this dire warning: “With political leadership so feckless, so dysfunctional, so incapable of planning, so willing to betray friends and allies for short-term advantage, so willing to lie and advocate criminal behavior, our military is simply not in responsible hands.”

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