A newly published editorial in the Foreign Policy Journal has delivered one of the harshest assessments yet of American strategy in the Iran war, describing the US campaign as a “blatant failure” and laying significant blame at the feet of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for overestimating Washington’s ability to achieve regime change without deploying ground troops into the country.
The editorial argues that the Trump administration entered the conflict on February 28 operating on dangerously optimistic assumptions about Iranian fragility, believing that a sustained air campaign targeting leadership and military infrastructure would be sufficient to trigger a popular uprising and topple the Islamic Republic from within.
Those assumptions have since been comprehensively invalidated by events on the ground, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps consolidating power under a new supreme leader and the regime showing no meaningful signs of institutional collapse two months into the conflict.
The Foreign Policy Journal’s piece singles out Hegseth specifically, accusing him of projecting a level of strategic confidence about the air-campaign model that the facts have not supported. The editorial draws a direct line between the Defense Secretary’s public posture in the opening weeks of the war and the absence of any coherent plan for what happens when aerial bombardment alone fails to produce political change inside Iran, an outcome that military historians and intelligence professionals had flagged as the most likely scenario long before the first strikes were launched.
The criticism lands in the context of a broader and deepening debate about the war’s strategic direction. The New York Times reported in April that CIA Director John Ratcliffe had privately described Netanyahu’s regime change blueprint, which formed the operational basis for the February offensive, as “farcical” before Trump approved it regardless. Vice President JD Vance was reportedly the only senior figure within Trump’s inner circle to formally oppose the plan before it was greenlit on February 26.
What followed has done little to vindicate the optimists. Iran’s government moved swiftly to fill the leadership vacuum created by the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the opening night of the campaign, with his son Mojtaba confirmed as the new supreme leader by early March. Military analysts noted at the three-week mark that there was little evidence of significant defections or desertions within the Iranian armed forces, a development widely considered a prerequisite for any genuine regime change scenario to take hold.
Hegseth’s own handling of the conflict has drawn sustained criticism on multiple fronts. Senate Democrats on the Armed Services Committee sent a formal letter to the Defense Secretary last week accusing the Pentagon of failing to take basic precautions against foreseeable Iranian drone retaliation, centring their inquiry on the March 1 attack that killed six US soldiers at an unfortified facility in Kuwait. The letter was signed by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mark Kelly, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Richard Blumenthal, all of whom hold access to classified briefings on the military campaign.
The Foreign Policy Journal’s editorial argues that the regime change failure is not simply a tactical shortcoming but a fundamental strategic error rooted in the administration’s refusal to reckon honestly with what air power alone can and cannot achieve against a determined state adversary with intact security forces. It notes that historical precedent offers almost no examples of aerial campaigns producing immediate political collapse without complementary ground operations or a prior breakdown of the defending state’s internal cohesion, neither of which was present in Iran when the strikes began.
Thirteen US service members have been killed in the conflict to date, with approximately 400 injured. Peace talks mediated through Pakistan have so far produced no agreement, Iran retains control of the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices have risen more than 40 percent since hostilities began. The Foreign Policy Journal’s editorial board argues that the sum of those outcomes, measured against the objectives the administration set for itself in February, meets any reasonable definition of strategic failure, however the administration chooses to characterise what has been achieved from the air.
