Wars are fought with bombs and missiles. But they are also fought with narratives - the explanations leaders give their citizens about why a conflict is necessary, what success looks like, and what sacrifices may be required.
That was the focus of my conversation Emily Horne, founder of Allegro Public Affairs and author of the Substack Spin Class. Horne spent more than two decades in national security communications, including two tours on the National Security Council under Presidents Obama and Biden. She helped lead the Biden administration’s “declassify and share” information strategy ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - a communications effort designed to prepare the public and allies for what was coming.
Which is why the rollout of President Trump’s war with Iran has struck her as so unusual.
“I’ll be generous and say the messaging has been inconsistent and messy,” Horne said. “But honestly, that’s the most charitable description I can offer.”
Going to war is usually accompanied by a deliberate effort to explain the stakes. Even when administrations disagree about whether to seek formal congressional authorization, they typically attempt to level with the American people about the threat, the objective, and what success would look like.
None of that clarity has emerged here. In a line I plan to borrow forever, Emily wrote in the lead up to the war that the administration shouldn’t be able to “yada-yada its way past” the prospect of attacking Iran.
Instead, the administration has offered a series of shifting explanations - regime change, eliminating Iran’s nuclear capability, countering proxy militias, supporting Israel, backing protesters. Each may be part of the picture. But delivered piecemeal by different officials emphasizing different priorities, the result is confusion.
“The American people don’t know what this war is actually about,” Horne said.
She describes the problem in Spin Class using what she calls the “Underpants Gnomes theory of foreign policy.” The reference - borrowed from South Park - describes plans that leap from step one to step three while skipping the difficult middle.
In this case, the logic looks something like: strike Iran, destabilize the regime… and then somehow arrive at a peaceful outcome. The missing piece is everything in between.
Part of the problem, Horne argues, is the absence of the policymaking process that normally precedes a war. In previous administrations, proposals are stress-tested through an interagency process designed to anticipate second- and third-order effects before a president acts.
“When you work at the National Security Council or the State Department, your job is to poke holes in ideas,” she said. “You stress-test them so that by the time a decision is made, you’ve thought through as many ways as possible that it could go wrong.”
That process appears largely absent today.
The communications environment has also changed dramatically. Most Americans no longer receive their news from traditional briefings or presidential speeches. They get it from social media and algorithm-driven platforms. A modern messaging strategy must meet audiences where they are.
But that only works if there is a coherent policy to communicate.
“A good comms strategy requires a good policy,” Horne said. “And right now we don’t have a clearly defined one.”
At the same time, Trump has been conducting a steady stream of brief phone interviews with reporters, often offering new claims about the war or about Iran’s future leadership. The interviews may produce five minutes of exclusive headlines. But they also underscore the absence of something more important: a direct, sustained conversation with the American people about the road ahead.
And some of those comments risk undermining the administration’s own stated goals.
If the objective is to give Iranians the chance to determine their future, publicly speculating about who should replace the country’s supreme leader is counterproductive.
If Trump wanted to give the Iranian people the best possible chance at something new, he would say nothing about who leads Iran next. Every time he opens his mouth about succession, he makes the reformers’ job harder and the hardliners’ job easier.”
In other words, the problem may not just be that the administration is misreading Iran. It may be that the messaging itself is actively working against the outcome it claims to want.
Thank you Cash Flow Collective, I. Avila, Pamela Jiranek, Hava Salita, Jessica Koester, and many others for tuning into my live video with Emily Horne! Join me for my next live video in the app.
