Experts Warned For Years That A War With Iran Would Happen This Way

Time has a new article out in which unnamed sources assert that the Pentagon was caught totally off-guard by Iran’s aggressive retaliation against the US-Israeli onslaught which began last month, reporting the following:

“Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth ‘was caught off guard. There’s no question,’ says a person familiar with his thinking.”

🇺🇸 Pentagon misjudged Iran response ahead of war, report says

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expected limited retaliation from Iran before the war, but “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” a person familiar with his thinking told Time.

The report says Hegseth had… https://t.co/jXamN04aHc

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 2, 2026

It’s so wild how we keep seeing reports that Iran’s retaliation caught the US off guard. For all the years I’ve been paying attention to this issue I’ve been reading experts and analysts saying if the US attacks Iran, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz and strike US bases and the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region.

A few examples:

A 2006 Oxford Research Group paper titled “Iran: Consequences of a War” warned that Iran has numerous options at its disposal in the event of a US attack, and that the “most significant of these would be any possible retaliatory Iranian action to affect the transport of oil and liquefied natural gas through the Straits of Hormuz,” adding that stopping Iran from doing this “would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, leading to a fear of attack which alone would have a formidable impact on oil markets.”

A 2007 Cato Institute paper titled “The Iraq War and Iranian Power” warns that “Iran possesses the largest ballistic-missile inventory in the Persian Gulf — missiles which can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and US military bases in Iraq,” and that “experts argue Iran could also use the ’oil weapon’: blocking the 34km-wide Strait of Hormuz and conducting submarine and anti-ship missile attacks against ports and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council states.”

A 2012 NPR article titled “Can Iran Close The World’s Most Important Oil Route?” features then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledging that Iran absolutely can block the Strait of Hormuz, saying Tehran has “invested in capabilities” which specifically enable them to do so.

A paper from the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and the Center for a New American Security titled “IN DIRE STRAITS? IMPLICATIONS OF US-IRAN TENSIONS FOR THE GLOBAL OIL MARKET” warns of a potential scenario “that includes damage to Gulf oil infrastructure and a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”

These weren’t a bunch of keffiyeh-wearing peaceniks making these assessments, they were deeply entrenched swamp monsters entirely loyal to the US empire. They opposed war with Iran not because it would be an evil act of unforgivable mass murder, but because it would be bad for the imperial power structure.

For people who say it couldn't be predicted that the Iran war would be this consequential for the global economy, watch this 2012 video of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski 👇

He predicts what did in fact happen: "[Iran] can hurt us a lot… Can you imagine… pic.twitter.com/T3SgDtkKKl

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 1, 2026

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton recently tweeted that other administration officials had warned the president to dismiss Bolton’s urging to attack Iran because of the easily foreseeable consequences of that war, saying “In 2018–2019, I made the case for regime change in Iran as often as I could. Voices in Trump’s orbit often cited Iran’s capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz as a reason against regime change. Trump has been fully aware this is a possibility, and yet did not prepare.”

I have zero military training or expertise — on military matters I’m just some schmuck with internet access — and yet nothing Iran has done has surprised me. It’s playing out exactly how the experts warned it would play out. There’s no way any literate, thinking person didn’t see this coming; when they say they didn’t, it’s because they’re either lying or amazingly stupid.

Trump’s war machine is either made up of liars, morons, lying morons, or (most likely), an eclectic mixture of all three.

Reading by Tim Foley:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/experts-warned-for-years-that-a-war