A Dunning-Kruger War, Courtesy of the Dunning-Kruger President

Ignorance plus overconfidence gets you the Iran War.

Photo by Daniel Torok

The week before last I argued that what we are seeing in Iran as well as in places like the Department of Homeland Security was the emergence of the Derp State, a government led and staffed by morons who could only advance in an administration as dumb as this one. Today, I want to look at this issue from a slightly different angle.

The “Dunning-Kruger effect” is a well-known cognitive bias, by which people who know very little about a particular topic overestimate their skill or knowledge, often expressing confidence about their incorrect beliefs. In contrast, those who know a great deal about the subject are more humble; they understand the complexity and uncertainty around it, so they are more aware of their limitations.

We have ourselves a Dunning-Kruger president, one who is supremely confident in his abilities on a range of topics where he is completely ignorant. And now he has taken us into a Dunning-Kruger war, defined by that fatal combination of ignorance and confidence.

While the Dunning-Kruger effect can be a product of ignorance itself — those who don’t know what they don’t know might imagine that their understanding is complete — Trump is also likely driven by insecurity about his intelligence. His “tell” is when he brings up his uncle who taught physics at MIT as proof of his brilliant genes, which he tends to do when in the presence of highly credentialed scientists or successful technologists.

When his ignorance is exposed, Trump claims that he couldn’t have known what he didn’t know, because nobody knew it. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said in amazement in 2017 when he realized how hard it would be to keep his promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare; in fact, everyone knew how complicated it was — everyone except him. Earlier this week he said the same thing about the fact that Iran responded to the war he started by attacking U.S. allies in the Gulf:

“Look at the way they attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them,” he said. “That was not supposed to- nobody was even thinking about it.” How bizarre and unexpected it was! Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said much the same thing. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react,” Hegseth admitted, “but we knew it was a possibility.” Not enough to prepare for it, apparently.

But of course that’s how they would react. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of war, often shorthanded with the saying “The enemy gets a vote.” When you start a war, the other side will respond with actions that it believes will do the most damage, and that could upend your plans. Or as saying goes, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” There’s a reason those aphorisms have become so well-worn.

Yet Trump seemed to believe that Iran, upon being attacked by the U.S. and Israel, would do absolutely nothing in response.

But what levers did Iran have to press, when confronted with an existential threat from the world’s most powerful military? The two most obvious ones were attacking U.S. allies in the region and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which would disrupt global oil supplies and set off an energy crisis. They can’t prevail in a direct military confrontation, so they have to find ways to increase pressure on the U.S. from outside. Which is exactly what they did.

Inside Trump’s bubble

But surely someone must have seen this coming? Yes they did, as the Wall Street Journal reported:

Before the U.S. went to war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told President Trump that an American attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Caine said in several briefings that U.S. officials had long believed Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world’s most vital shipping lane, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Trump acknowledged the risk, these people said, but moved forward with the most consequential foreign-policy decision of his two presidencies. He told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.

The president is, as George W. Bush famously said, “The Decider” — every day, aides come to him with choices only he can resolve to set policy. But the president’s job also involves listening to a parade of staffers who know a great deal more than he does about a wide spectrum of policy areas, then rendering decisions based on what he already knows and what he has learned. The smart ones ask probing questions, wrestle with uncertainty, and try to anticipate unintended consequences.

But Trump is not one of the smart ones. Aides have tried to accommodate his limitations; in his first term, they realized they could not give him lengthy briefing materials, because he wouldn’t read them. So they devised strategies to hold his limited attention, including keeping documents to a page or two and putting lots of pictures. Some clever aides realized, according to reporting from inside the White House, that if they had to give him something with text, the best bet was to include his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned.” As another report revealed, according to his aides, Trump “veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information.”

Even if most of the people closest to him know only a little more than he does — because Trump surrounds himself not with the most skilled people but with yes-men who know their jobs depend on flattering and affirming him — there are still some subject-matter experts around whom he could call on if he chose. There are people in the State Department and the CIA and the Defense Department with expertise in Iran who could have been brought in to help him understand what he was getting into. But we have no evidence that happened, and having that knowledge in the government’s possession doesn’t help if the system doesn’t push it up to the decision-maker.

So how is Trump shaping his understanding of the war today? NBC News reports:

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.

It is unclear whether Trump claps his little hands and cries “Yay!” when he watches the video of explosions.

As disheartening as this story is, it’s also notable that we’re hearing about it at all. While his second administration hasn’t leaked as promiscuously as his first one — in which there were lots of people around who weren’t Trump loyalists, and told reporters what a chaotic mess it was — we’re now seeing more leaks emerge than we got during 2025, perhaps in part because people want to start distancing themselves from what they think is going to turn out to be a disaster.

Especially in an administration so driven by the whims of one man, that man’s ignorance and unearned confidence can have a profound, even catastrophic effect. In the Iran war, we can see Trump’s ignorance operating at multiple levels from the general to the specific, each of which has its own consequences. It would help if he knew more about the history of Iran’s relationship to the United States, which influences the motivations of Iranians and the shape of the regime’s decisions. It would help if he understood the structure of the regime, which has enabled it to survive the kind of decapitation strikes Israel and the U.S. undertook. It would help if he understood internal Iranian politics and the particular nature of the government’s system of repression, which made it highly unlikely that the Iranian people would be willing and able to attempt to overthrow the government.

And perhaps most importantly, it would help if he understood the essential nature of war, which would suggest the obvious responses Iran would make to the U.S. bombing campaign. Of course they would attack U.S. allies in the region, and of course they would shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; those were the most powerful cards they had to play. He didn’t have to be a masterful military strategist to figure that out. All he had to do was consider the possibility that he didn’t already know everything. But that’s not something Trump is capable of, and now the whole world is paying the price.

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