Why You Never Want to Improvise Your Way into War
by Luke Zahner
There is an old rule a former boss of mine would often repeat to his team: your lack of planning should not become everyone else’s emergency. It is a principle meant to remind leaders that crises rarely arrive without warning. Most disasters are preceded by signals and indicators that responsible decision-makers factor into contingency planning.
Lately, US foreign policy seems to be operating under the opposite assumption. There is a useful German word for what we are witnessing: Planlosigkeit—the condition of lacking a coherent plan. From the spike in oil prices to attacks on Iran’s Gulf neighbors to US citizens unable to leave the region, the consequences of the US attack on Iran were not difficult to anticipate. Yet the administration appears to have entered the crisis without adequately stress-testing its assumptions and is now operating in a reactive, crisis-management mode.
Consider oil. The administration’s response to rising energy pressure illustrates the broader problem. On March 13, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the United States would temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil shipments, allowing crude already loaded onto vessels to be purchased and delivered through April 11. It was the second such rollback in eight days. On paper, the justification was narrow. The waiver applied only to oil already in transit—a “short-term” measure, in Bessent’s words. But even he acknowledged that Russian gains from the decision were “an inevitability” and “unfortunate.”
The timing is notable. The waiver came one day after Russian officials met in Florida with senior members of the administration’s inner circle, and four days after a Trump-Putin phone call. European allies were neither consulted nor persuaded. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted that most G7 leaders opposed easing sanctions, while European Council President António Costa called the move “very concerning.” The United Kingdom indicated it would maintain its own restrictions.
Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii summarized the optics bluntly: “Looks like we fought Iran and Russia won.” The point is not the slogan. It is that these outcomes were predictable—and should have been anticipated.
Rejecting the Experts
The sanctions waiver is not an isolated decision. It is a symptom of a broader institutional failure that was visible before the first missile was fired. In July 2025, the State Department dismissed more than 1,300 civil servants and nearly 250 Foreign Service Officers, including teams responsible for anticipating energy crises. The dismantling of USAID eliminated thousands of development professionals, while dozens of senior diplomats were recalled, leaving key ambassadorial posts across the Middle East unfilled.
When the strikes began, the consequences were immediate. Several US embassies closed. Americans calling the State Department’s emergency number were warned not to rely on government-assisted evacuation. Hundreds of thousands remained in the region as commercial airspace shut down. Eventually, emergency charter evacuations were authorized—a scramble rather than a plan.
None of this came as a surprise. The vulnerability of US military and civilians in the Middle East was well understood, as was the risk of Iran attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz to precipitate an energy crisis. This was not a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of planning—the predictable consequence of sidelining the professionals whose jobs are to stress-test these assumptions.
A veteran diplomat with 35 years in the Foreign Service described the problem succinctly: the attack was prepared outside the normal interagency process, ostensibly to preserve operational security. But that same secrecy prevented contingency planning—pre-positioned evacuations, staffed embassies, clear protocols—that would have protected Americans when the fighting began and ensured American facilities were prepared for the reprisal attacks that followed.
The State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community employ professionals whose careers are built around top-secret contingency analysis—mapping how crises in one theater cascade into economic and security consequences elsewhere. Those professionals were systematically removed from the process. What filled the vacuum was not superior insight. It was a smaller circle of advisors oriented toward affirming decisions already made rather than testing them beforehand.
The Strategic Consequences
When process breaks down, the consequences are not abstract—they appear as contradictions in policy.
Ukraine, now in its fourth year of war against Russian aggression, has accumulated extensive battlefield expertise in countering Iranian-designed drone systems. That expertise has become a genuine asset in the Middle East, where Ukrainian technical advisors are now assisting US and allied forces facing the same threat.
At the same time, Russia and Iran have deepened cooperation across drone technology and military logistics.
The result is a strategic knot that an organized policy process would have mapped in advance: Ukraine, the country helping the United States defend against Iranian systems, is also the country whose chief adversary is being financially relieved by a sanctions waiver. These connections did not emerge out of the ether; they were visible to anyone paying attention—but only if the right people were in the room to recognize them.
A similar pattern is visible in the administration’s handling of allies. European governments that were not consulted in advance are now absorbing energy shocks they had no role in triggering, and they are being told that their failure to help manage those shocks—militarily, in war zones, in a conflict they were explicitly excluded from planning—constitutes a test of alliance loyalty.
The Problem with All Tactics and No Plan
None of this was unforeseeable. Hormuz vulnerabilities are well documented. Russian-Iranian military cooperation has been visible for years. The risks to Americans in the region were clear. Effective sanctions depend on consistency—the very quality any competent adversary will probe. The problem is not that these risks were unknowable—it is that the process designed to identify and plan for them was bypassed.
The professionals were removed from the room. What replaced institutional expertise was a smaller circle of advisors optimized to affirm rather than challenge decisions. The results are now measurable: American civilians stranded, American personnel under threat, embassies closed or vacant, oil above $100 a barrel, and a sanctions regime whose credibility is under strain.
Planlosigkeit is not a rhetorical flourish. It describes a specific mode of governance: tactical, reactive, and dismissive of the institutional infrastructure that turns intent into coherent policy. Strategy requires seeing connections before they collide.
The collisions are now visible.
We are now paying for the planning that didn’t happen.
Luke Zahner is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), where he works on trans-Atlantic relations and international development. Before joining CAP, he spent 20 years as a diplomat with the State Department, with assignments in Washington and overseas in North Macedonia, Thailand, Madagascar, Iraq, Israel, and Bangladesh. Earlier in his career, he served as USAID deputy spokesperson in Washington. Before entering into US government service, he spent seven years with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), including work on its first postwar mission in Bosnia and on the design of its mission in Kosovo. In addition to his work at CAP, Zahner serves as a senior adviser to Malta-based Binda Consulting International and consults for Deloitte on Ukraine-related projects. He holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, George Washington University, and American University.