Nation States: Eight Lessons From the Iran Conflict of 2026

Steve Yates (0:02)

Welcome to Nation States with Yates, where we aim to serve as your personal national security advisor, helping you feel confident to engage in meaningful conversations with your friends, family, and especially those elected to represent you about all the issues that affect the fate of our nation state. Today, we're going to take a deep dive on lessons learned with Iran.

Setting the scene, a few shots fired at a few ships. Sometimes we couldn't even confirm the damage, and it was enough to freeze commercial traffic through one of the most important waterways on earth, until escorts showed up. That's not naval power, that's information warfare. And in 2026, Iran was very good at it.

The election here is over. Whatever you made of the results and whatever happens next, in negotiations or other activities, this is a moment to take stock. What really happened in Iran this year? What did we actually accomplish? What's still out there to be done? And what should Main Street America be telling the people it elects about what comes next? Today, I'm going to walk through this conflict stage by stage. How it was communicated and the lessons I think still hold.

So again, welcome back to Nation States with Yates. I'm Steve Yates. This year, I've talked about Iran a lot. On television, on radio, on social media, and right here on this show. So today, I want to do something a little different. I want to go back through my own commentary stage by stage and hold it up against what actually happened. Some of it held up well. Some of it raises hard questions. And I'm going to ask those hard questions of my own side too. So with that, let's take a brief break here at Nation States with Yates. Stick with us in a few minutes. We'll come back for a deep dive on 2026 and Iran lessons learned. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. So 2026, Iran and lessons learned. Let's start with how it all unfolded. I see seven stages. For each one, I want to look at what actually happened, what I said at the time and how it was communicated. Because how a conflict is explained is it matters almost as much as how it's fought. And I think that's one of the takeaways from this year's experience. So, stage one is the run-up. Iran was on the national agenda well before the first strike. In late January and February, I was on Fox & Friends, on Newsmax, and on The Count, talking about Iran.

The conversation then was about deterrence and the nuclear threat. Could the regime be kept from a weapon, and what would that take?

Stage two is the initial major combat campaign. On February 28th, President Trump announced, and I'm quoting him, the United States began major combat operations in Iran.

It was launched alongside Israel. Critics point out right away that it began without a vote in Congress. Two days later, on March 2nd, the White House sent Congress a report on the strikes, in quotes, consistent with the War Powers Resolution.

Now let's be precise about what this campaign was. We struck targets inside Iran. We ran joint operations inside Iran in those early stages. But we did not invade and occupy. We didn't take and hold territory. We didn't try to take control of the country. As I said on CNBC back in March, the president's objective in Iran was different from what Bush and Cheney were after in Iraq. A different objective and a different endgame.

But how was it communicated? Washington's message was a limited objective. Strikes, not occupation, but the information war opened on day one. My read is that the Iranian state outlets quickly became the default source for damage claims and casualty numbers. And a lot of outlets repeated those claims before there was any American confirmation. Here at home, the argue about launching without a congressional vote started on day one, too.

Stage three of this campaign is the pause, the Hormuz test, and the shift to maintenance. On April 7th, President Trump announced he would, quote, suspend the bombing and attack on Iran for a period of two weeks. That was the pause for negotiations. Three days later, the first talks between the United States and Iran opened in Islamabad. So the initial major combat campaign ran 38 days, from February 28th to April 7th. And here's the number I want you to remember. Counting from that March 2nd report to Congress, the pause came on 36th of the War Powers Resolution's 60-day clock, 24 days short of the deadline. Since then, there have been no sustained operations inside Iran. Meanwhile, Tehran was threatening to control the Strait of Hormuz, even talking about charging a toll on traffic. On April 11th, I wrote that the regime could not control a toll booth on Hormuz. Six days later, I wrote that the strait was open. As I said here on Nation States back in May, if the war stopped now, Iran, as it's currently constituted, would still be a problem. But I also said the threat was much reduced. And I said we didn't need to occupy anybody. We needed to maintain our gains with our allies.