Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviewed Danny Citrinowicz, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on the Middle East, for his assessment of the current wars in the Middle East. Citrinowicz was brutal. He says that there is no way for Trump to avoid humiliating failure over the Iran war, that Benjamin Netanyahu is also in a bind, and that it is the Iranians, especially the hardliners, who are emerging from this war stronger than before, despite all the damage from the bombing.

We have to remember what happened on February 28th—that Israel and the United States launched this campaign to topple the regime. In fact, they ended up strengthening it. Opening the strait is not an achievement, since its closing was a by-product of the war itself. The Iranians are going to get some money, and sanctions relief may come after the deal is signed, too. If they don’t get money from this, they won’t do it. So, in that regard, what we’re facing right now is a war that may have been a tactical success for the U.S., but is a strategic failure.

But I think Trump is fed up with the current situation, and I think that he’s also afraid of escalation. He could escalate tomorrow, but I think he’s afraid of having boots on the ground. And I think he might be starting to understand that even escalation won’t change the strategic situation, because the Iranians are not going to capitulate. A blockade won’t do it; hitting energy facilities won’t do it; nothing will. And they’re ready to retaliate. So Trump didn’t have any other options besides this deal.

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I have to tell you something about the Iranian regime: They’re feeling so much in the driver’s seat that they’re not going to forgo anything. They have reached their limitations when it comes to compromising, and that’s where we are right now.
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So I don’t know when they planned to block the Strait of Hormuz, but they definitely decided this was the time to do it. Of course, they got ready for that before the war, but I think that they decided to act once they understood that this was going to be a fight to the end. And I think they were surprised by how effective it was. They probably asked themselves why they didn’t do that before.

So I think that we actually pushed them into this understanding that they had to play all their cards, which they did.

He says that although some of Iran’s military capability has been damaged, they are nowhere close to being destroyed as Trump claims and are rebuilding it.

[T]here was definitely damage, but there are a couple of things you have to remember. They will rebuild that capacity, and are already rebuilding it, as the C.I.A. report from earlier this month says. Secondly, they still have most of their launchers and missiles, as the report says. And they will rebuild it, exactly like they did after the Twelve-Day War in June of 2025. We know that they have the capacity to do so. Yes, the damage probably is greater because of the U.S. working with Israel. But so what? It won’t take them one month. It will take them four months or six months. It doesn’t matter. They will return to their capacity. They have the motivation and the knowledge.

The US has a whole slew of experts on Iran and the Middle East, in the CIA, the state department, and the nuclear regulatory agencies. The US military also has a vast number of people whose full-time job is gaming out the various options, including the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz and the mining of the passage. But Trump despises knowledge and expertise, choosing to surround himself with incompetents and cranks to give him advice. And talking of incompetents, where in the world is defense secretary Pete Hegseth? Given that there is a war on and that he was one of thee most gung-ho proponents of it, you would think he would be constantly in the news. And yet he seems to have disappeared into his burrow.

It seems as if Trump did not call upon all the expertise at his disposal. His choice of rank amateurs Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to be lead negotiators with Iran is a telling sign, since they are ignorant of the complexities involved with the nuclear issue. The Iranians reportedly do not respect them and see them as representing primarily Israeli, not US, interests.

Citrinowicz continues:

[Trump] didn’t have any strategy, any plan, any anything. There were also none of the right experts in the room. Instead, there were people saying, You can do this, you can do that, telling Trump lies. Look at the blockade. How pathetic is his blockade? You should have done it before, not after. Who thought that this blockade would make Iran capitulate? Come on! You don’t know the Iranians. It was obvious it wasn’t going to work.

He also discusses the fix Netanyahu is in, that Iran is not going to give up supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

I can tell you that the Iranians are not going to give up on the Lebanese issue. And this is a major problem for Netanyahu. Hezbollah has proven itself to be a vital element of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. So Lebanon presents a real strategic importance for Iran. And one of the biggest achievements that Iran had during the war was connecting the two conflicts….And this is a major problem for Israel.
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It’s a collapse of the Israeli doctrine regarding Iran. Not only a defeat, not only a fiasco. A collapse. Look at what Netanyahu promised this whole time. He said, Just give me the opportunity to attack Iran. And he got it, twice. He got the U.S. beside him with all that power, the satellites, the air force, everything, and what have we got? A more radicalized regime that can rush into a nuclear bomb and still have a conventional missile capacity. It’s a shit show, because at the end of the day, everything that Netanyahu promised failed miserably. 
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I think Netanyahu thought that this war would change the situation in the polls, and it might, but not in his favor. The gap between what was promised at the beginning of the war and the end of the war is so big that people understand that we were fed lies.

Citrinowicz, then points to what was the original sin, which was driven by Trump’s insane hatred for Obama and determination to reverse everything that he did, without thinking through the consequences.

Leaving the nuclear deal with Iran was one of the greatest strategic mistakes of the twenty-first century, and maybe would qualify as one of the biggest of the twentieth century as well, if you were to include it. Look, it wasn’t an optimal agreement, but it had certain virtues, and the worst thing was that the U.S. actually left the agreement with no counter-strategy. And Iran has learned so much since the U.S. left the agreement, especially on enrichment.

Then you have the fact that we sometimes hear Americans want a Delcy Rodríguez for Iran. Those people exist, but we have no chance of getting one of them now. They all clashed with the hard-liners, and when Trump left the agreement, he weakened them dramatically. They will become the scapegoat of Iran. Now maybe we will get a similar but worse agreement. In sum, it was a total failure. Leaving the Obama nuclear agreement without a strategy was a very, very problematic decision that we are paying the price for even today.

Trump and Netanyahu crowed about how they killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the first days of the war, thinking that it signaled victory and the end of the Iranian government. Not only did that not happen, even greater hardliners and the Revolutionary Guard have gained more power. They have also realized that they are in an existential fight to the end and so can never give in to the US and Israel. And now they realize that they have more resilience and power than perhaps they initially thought.

It is often the case that the threat to use force can provide great leverage. This is what the US and Israel had long used with Iran in order to wring some concessions. But once you actually use the threatened force and it does not work, as is the case here, the threat becomes seen as a paper tiger and loses its potency, so that you are worse off than before.

This is what Trump and Netanyahu are facing. What worries me is that in their rage and frustration at sinking deeper into the quagmire, they may start a new phase of indiscriminate bombing that will cause many deaths and suffering, so that they can claim ‘victory’ before pulling out.