U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for a state visit to Britain, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 16, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump's plans for the Iran war are "unraveled" and too treacherous "for reality," warned the Republican leader's former Homeland Security chief of staff.
The conversation began when MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace asked Miles Taylor, who worked for Trump during his first term, about the president's Iran war options.
"One involves a mission that, based on the Axios reporting, involves sending special forces in to dismantle, destroy, or steal the enriched uranium," Wallace asked. "I mean, that sounds like a riskier military operation than anything that's been contemplated to date. The other is to take over part of the Strait of Hormuz — there's a blockade of a blockade that doesn't seem to be going very well, so that's an escalation of something we're not exactly crushing."
Wallace added, "And the other is to bomb their infrastructure, which goes very close to the line that Donald Trump telegraphed he wanted to cross, and invited outcry from across the ideological and political spectrum. Are you clear, on this 60th day of the war, what the objective is?"
After telling Wallace that he would have no idea what the objective is, Taylor explained that if he was working for Trump "I would be having this conversation with the president on that first option — about going to try to get the fissile material. Look, it seems very compelling. I'm chief among people who want to see Iran without a nuclear program. But that is an operation so risky it belongs in special forces video games and not reality. I mean, if it could be pulled off without casualties, that's remarkable. But this is the type of thing in a video game you would lose 99 times out of 100."
He elaborated that, despite the optimism projected by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, "it would be an extraordinary assumption that they haven't put every thought into booby-trapping and putting forces around where that material is, so that if the United States or its allies landed in the region, they would be sitting ducks — targets of Iranian firepower. That would be an exceptionally difficult operation to undertake safely." In the end, Trump's policy toward Iran is leading toward "mutually assured destruction. Donald Trump can say he wants to attack Iran's energy infrastructure and the strait — he's talked about blowing up some of their oil capacity. But all that does is make the problems we talked about at the top of this program worse, because we actually need Iranian oil supply to go back into the global economy. We actually need the Strait of Hormuz back open. We need the system to be working. If we're permanently taking these systems and these passageways offline or delaying, we are just making the economic hardship worse."
Trump himself seems to recognize that he is caught in an Iran quagmire. On early Wednesday morning, Trump posted on social media an image of him clutching a large military-like gun, despite receiving many military deferments, while bombs fall in the desert behind him.
"No more Mr. Nice Guy," Trump posted through the caption, then adding himself, "Iran can't get their act together. They don't know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon! President DJT." Despite his bluster, military strategy expert Dr. Robert Pape from the University of Chicago warned that because Trump has helped Iran realize its power over the Strait of Hormuz, "a fourth center of global power is quickly emerging — Iran — that does not rival those three nations economically or militarily. Instead, its newfound power derives from its control over the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz."
He added, "If Iranian control over the strait persists for months or years, as I believe it may, it will drastically reshape the global order to the detriment of the United States."
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