From the 1961 Bay of Pigs to the 2026 Iran campaign, from Ukraine's 2023 summer counteroffensive to Vietnam before that — the mismatch between political objectives and military resources among great powers is not an isolated accident but a structural pattern that repeats itself. Political targets routinely overshoot the resources a country is willing to commit, and military risk assessment is systematically underestimated under political pressure. The result, every time, is the same: only after paying a heavy price do decision-makers learn that there has never been a shortcut between goal and means.
The Misreading of Clausewitz
"War is the continuation of politics by other means" — this celebrated line from Clausewitz's On War has been used, over and over, to argue a single conclusion: the military must submit unconditionally to the political.
In the analysis of Two-Tailed Comet (a Chinese-language commentary channel focusing on international strategic issues), this deduction is flawed. In any military action, the political side largely determines two things: what objective you want, and how much you are willing to spend to get it. But once the objective and the resources are fixed, how the money is spent and whether it can be spent effectively are military questions. Politics cannot override military common sense to dictate the battlefield — especially when the political objective and the resources allocated are fundamentally mismatched.
Three Cases, the Same Mistake
The Bay of Pigs (1961)
The Kennedy administration's objective was to overthrow the Castro regime. The approved plan for that objective: dispatch 1,400 Cuban exiles to land at the Bay of Pigs while keeping direct U.S. military involvement to a minimum. The objective was a regime; the resources were 1,400 men. The result: total collapse within 72 hours.
The 2026 Iran Campaign
This same mistake repeated itself, almost identically, more than sixty years later. The objective was "regime change in Iran," but the plan prepared for it was "a large-scale air campaign lasting less than one week" — a series of strikes on military facilities, plus the assassination of several Iranian leaders. The planners believed this combination would be enough to make the Iranian regime "completely collapse."
Three links in the chain failed simultaneously: no clear connection was drawn between objective and resources; no concrete execution plan was laid out; and the scale of resources actually needed to achieve the objective was wholly underestimated.
Ukraine's Summer 2023 Counteroffensive
The third case comes from June 2023. Ukraine's summer counteroffensive, on which the United States and Europe pinned great hopes, committed almost the same misjudgment as the Bay of Pigs.
Force ratio: attacker and defender roughly 1:1, facing in the Zaporizhzhia axis a complete in-depth defense the Russian army had spent half a year building. Equipment ratio: the few pieces of Western equipment in Ukrainian hands offered neither quantitative nor qualitative dominance over Russian gear. The plan: after the 9th Army tore open the line, the 10th Army would race to the Azov coast — an ambitious plan whose execution proved difficult even at the first line's outer village of Robotyne.
The root of the miscalculation lay directly in U.S. intelligence assessments: Ukrainian training and equipment were overestimated, the deterrent effect of NATO weapons was overestimated, and Russian fighting will and defensive preparation were underestimated. The result was that this counteroffensive consumed Ukraine's most elite combat power, and the country sank into a posture of extreme passivity on the battlefield for nearly two years afterward — until the fall of Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk).
Where the Repeating Pattern Comes From
Why does the same mistake keep recurring? Two-Tailed Comet's analysis points to several shared factors:
Political expectations override military assessment. The political level needs an outlook that fits its expectations in order to push a decision forward, and under that atmosphere military advisers are often afraid to voice disagreement. During the Bay of Pigs, doubts about the plan's feasibility were raised inside the military but overruled at the top. Similar doubts existed before the Iran campaign.
The opponent is consistently underestimated. The exiles were thought to trigger "a Cuban uprising as soon as they land"; the Russian army was assumed to "flee the moment it discovered NATO aid"; Iran was supposed to "collapse under airstrikes plus decapitation" — each time, decision-makers set the opponent's will to resist at zero.
One's own side is systematically overestimated. "We are the world's strongest power," "we have NATO's most advanced weapons," "our morale and tactics far surpass the opponent's" — these judgments hold on paper, but on the battlefield they are offset by multiple factors: incomplete information, unfamiliar terrain, and the opponent's ability to adapt in execution.
The diagnosis shared by all three cases is the same: the political level sets objectives that overshoot the resources it is willing to commit, and the military level's risk assessment is systematically underestimated under political pressure. This is not the failure of any individual decision-maker; it is a structural defect that always exists in great-power decision-making machinery.
The Special Features of the Trump Mode — The Shadow of Lyndon Johnson
Across two consecutive videos, Two-Tailed Comet kept up a sustained analysis of Trump's decision-making pattern. The first judgment: Trump has no track record of fighting a war of attrition. From the trade war to the negotiations with the Taliban, his habitual mode is "high-intensity pressure → the other side compromises → done." When the situation turns into a war of attrition, he has shown no capacity to handle it.
The second judgment places this mode in historical coordinates: Trump's Iran policy is structurally similar, in its decision-making constraints, to Lyndon Johnson's during Vietnam.
Common features: furiously searching for a negotiating opportunity, simultaneously ramping up commitment and hesitating. The intent behind ramping up commitment is to build deterrence so that the other side comes to the table on terms "the Americans can accept." But the problem is this — when the scale of commitment is neither large enough to crush the opponent nor severe enough to make the opponent feel unbearable pressure, the commitment itself becomes a waste.
The classic historical parallel is Lyndon Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1968). The U.S. military carried out a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, but each escalation of objectives came with restrictions on the bombing envelope. The result was that enormous amounts of ordnance and resources were expended, without putting enough pressure on Vietnam to alter its negotiating posture. The mistake Johnson and Trump share: lacking both the resolve to crush the opponent and the courage to accept unfavorable terms, they waste time and resources in the middle ground at the same time.
Trump's unilateral ceasefire decision just before the fighting stopped was a key node. After he unilaterally stopped the strikes, Iran no longer had to absorb the pressure of the bombing, but the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continued — which meant Iran could pursue its core strategy (punishing the global economy to compel American concessions) at a much lower cost. Trump counted only his own side's costs, without counting the strategic gains the ceasefire brought Iran.
Two-Tailed Comet's conclusion: in the current situation, if there is no bombing — or if only "small-scale" military action is maintained — Iran really has little incentive to compromise. Iran's posture has visibly hardened over the past few weeks. This is not magical thinking; it is the regular phenomenon that has recurred from the Korean War to Vietnam to Ukraine to the U.S.–Iran negotiations: when one side believes it still holds the initiative on the battlefield, it will not be willing to compromise.
This bears directly on the direction of the current U.S.–Iran talks: if a 60-day ceasefire can be secured, it benefits Iran — they are on home ground, and time is on their side; whether Trump can sustain political will through a long stalemate remains an open question.
The mode Trump is most comfortable with is closer to "hit and run" — or, to put it another way, applying high-intensity pressure and expecting the other side to cave immediately. So far, he has not shown the capacity to wage a prolonged war of attrition, a contest of will and resources.