The pattern is so consistent by now it barely qualifies as news: the president fires the people who know the most about a country, then ignores the warnings they would have given him, then the policy fails.
Nate Swanson is the latest example.
Swanson is a career diplomat who served as Iran director at the National Security Council under Biden, then stayed on to join Trump’s Iran negotiating team. He was fired in a purge of career diplomats, part of the administration’s broader effort to replace experienced foreign service officers with political loyalists.
He gave an interview to Foreign Policy this week that lays out, in remarkably direct language, how the administration’s approach to Iran was doomed from the start.
A flawed deal that was still the best option
The Memorandum of Understanding signed in June was supposed to end the war. It lasted weeks.
“The MOU was a very flawed document,” Swanson said. “But it was the best-case scenario because the war had proven that both sides were basically in a stalemate and with diminishing returns.”
The problem, he explained, was that both sides viewed the document as a surrender. “Each side thinks the other is surrendering. What’s happened from the signing of the MOU to where we are now is that both sides view the document as a surrender.”
The US expected Iran to capitulate because of overwhelming military force. Iran believed it had won the war by imposing costs through the Strait of Hormuz and had no reason to give up its gains. The deal was built on mutually incompatible assumptions, and everyone in the room except the president could see it.
The narrowest room in Washington
Swanson described the second Trump administration’s Iran decision-making as “a uniquely top-down enterprise.”
“The president is more involved in day-to-day decision-making than I’ve seen on any other issue, especially related to Iran. The group around him is narrow. This is not a bottom-up system. You basically have a few select cabinet principals who are advising him.”
That inner circle includes Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Pete Hegseth. Swanson said cabinet principals had serious doubts about the strategy but only leaked them after the war, to clear their names, rather than speaking up when it might have mattered.
And Trump, Swanson noted, likes being pitched by outside players: Gulf states, Turkey, Israel, Senator Lindsey Graham. The result is a decision-making process that combines the insularity of a small inner circle with the unpredictability of whoever last got the president’s ear.
Half-hearted war, full-hearted disaster
“If you’re really being honest with yourself,” Swanson said, “I don’t see how a half-hearted military campaign really changes Iran’s decision-making calculus. The only thing that would actually lead to a regime change is a massive ground campaign that is aimed at regime change, a la 2003 Iraq. I think that would be a disaster.”
That is the uncomfortable choice the administration has painted itself into. The “limited” air campaign is not changing Iran’s behavior. A ground invasion would be Iraq on a larger scale. And the diplomatic track, the MOU, collapsed because neither side believed the other was negotiating in good faith.
Swanson’s earlier warning, delivered before the war resumed, now reads like prophecy: “Trump lost the war, but Tehran might overplay its hand and lose the peace.”
What firing the experts costs
The Iran experts who predicted Iran’s response, closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking US bases, imposing asymmetric costs, were all in the government when the war began. They had been warning for months that a strike on Iran would produce exactly the outcome that followed. The president did not listen to them because by the time the decision was made, many of them had already been fired.
“The experts accurately predicted Iran’s response,” the Foreign Policy summary notes. “Trump ignored their advice, partly because he fired them.”
This is the cost of purging institutional knowledge. You do not just lose the people who can tell you what will happen. You lose the ability to recognize the warnings when they come from outside, because you have already decided that the people who know the most are the enemy.
Swanson’s interview is a post-mortem on a policy that was never coherent, run by people who did not want to hear the truth. The war continues. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is above $90 a barrel. And the experts who could have predicted all of it are watching from the outside.