Time: “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.”

Said one insider: “Hegseth was caught off guard. There’s no question.”

Richard Haass: “The president gave a primetime address last night. Normally, when presidents do such a thing, they intend to make a major announcement. I thought it was 70% likely that Trump would declare victory (in the process, misrepresenting or exaggerating what had been accomplished) and lay out an exit strategy. I gave it around a 30% chance that he would escalate, either by undertaking a mission to pressure Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz (perhaps by seizing one or more islands) or by attempting to take possession of and extract Iran’s known enriched uranium. Both, inevitably, involve boots on the ground.”

“What I didn’t foresee was that he would do neither.”

New York Times: “When President Trump moved to claw back vast sums of foreign aid funding last year — first by winning party-line approval from the G.O.P.-controlled Congress to cancel the spending, then by unilaterally doing so without giving lawmakers time to object — his administration did not say which programs it planned to defund.”

“New data reviewed by The New York Times presents the clearest picture yet of where the administration chose to make the spending cuts. It was mostly by taking a meat ax to programs that once enjoyed bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill, as well as slashing almost 90 percent of U.S. economic aid to Africa, by far the hardest hit by Mr. Trump of any region across the globe.”

Francis Fukuyama: “It’s a conceit of foreign policy intellectuals to try to infer from statements and events a consistent doctrine underlying an administration’s activities. It should be clear by now that there is no such thing as a Trump doctrine. The administration itself tried to articulate such a doctrine last November when it went through the ritual of producing a National Security Strategy for the second Trump term.”

“It’s clear today that that strategy document bears no relationship to actual administration foreign policy.”