Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was not in the room when the Trump administration made its most consequential decisions about the Iran war - a conflict that has produced the biggest energy shock since the 1970s.
Historian Niall Ferguson identified the absence as evidence of a systemic failure of process inside the National Security Council, drawing on recent New York Times reporting, as "Hvylya" reports.
"It's clear that the National Security Council did not perform its designated role - allowing the president to see pros and cons, to see that military success had to be weighed against economic downside risks," Ferguson said. "Treasury Secretary Bessent was not in the room and doesn't appear to have played any major role at all in the decision-making around this conflict."
Ferguson admitted he had to publicly reverse his own previous position. Last year, he debated Hoover Institution colleague Stephen Kotkin, who warned about the lack of process in the Trump administration. Ferguson mocked the concern at the time. "I'm afraid I'm now going to have to get out my knife and fork, order the crow, and eat it," Ferguson said. "I think what we've seen since February the twenty-eighth suggests a failure of process."
The core problem, Ferguson argued, is that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will always promise military victory - "in every administration they're always going to win the war" - but someone needs to weigh that against the economic consequences. Without Bessent or another economic voice at the table, nobody challenged the assumption that military success would translate into strategic success.
The NSC exists to present the president with competing perspectives - military, economic, diplomatic. When that process breaks down, presidents make decisions based on incomplete information. In this case, the military plan worked exactly as advertised; the economic fallout was the risk nobody forced into the conversation.