The US war against Iran has been shaped by what George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures, has described as a systemic intelligence failure - a fundamental misreading of who actually holds power in Tehran. Speaking on a Geopolitical Futures podcast, Friedman pushed back against the narrative that places all blame on Donald Trump personally.
"Presidents do not do that and I do not think this president or any president is capable of developing either a political or military strategy on his own," Friedman told "Hvylya". The intelligence community misunderstood how Iran functioned. The military operated with a simplistic model of how the war would unfold. "There were many people involved in this mistake," he said.
At the heart of the failure was the assumption that destroying Iran's civilian government would cause the state to collapse or capitulate. Washington treated the formal leadership - the prime minister and his administration - as the regime. In reality, the IRGC had long served as the true governing force, controlling not only the military but large parts of the economy and internal security apparatus.
Friedman acknowledged that Trump bears ultimate responsibility as president but stressed that the intelligence picture he received was likely already flawed. "It is possible that the president was told this and dismissed it, but there is no evidence of it," he noted. The more probable explanation, in Friedman's view, is that the entire national security establishment shared a defective understanding of Iran's power structure.
The consequences of this miscalculation have been immediate. The IRGC's decentralized "mosaic force" structure has allowed it to continue operating despite the destruction of central government facilities. Iran has kept up retaliatory strikes and closed the Strait of Hormuz - an outcome Friedman said he himself did not fully anticipate. "I am not going to claim that I understood the IRGC and they were stupid. The structure of the IRGC was misinterpreted by myself as well as others," he admitted.
Also read: Iran's Regime Survives America's Best Punch: Foreign Policy Warns of "Islamic Republic 2.0".