Another Bay of Pigs?

On 24 June 2026, I was on the Katie Halper Show talking with Katie and Yanis Varoufakis — the distinguished economist and former finance minister of Greece — about many of the big issues of the day. Katie has just posted an excerpt of our discussion about the Iran war, which is posted below.

Yanis and I both agree that the US and Israel have suffered a devastating defeat in the Iran war. But we disagreed about Trump’s decision to start the war. I make the case that Trump was confident he could win a quick and decisive victory. Prime Minister Netanyahu and the head of Mossad played a central role in convincing Trump that a great victory awaited him. In contrast, Yanis believes that Trump is too smart to have believed that airpower alone would win the war quickly and must have anticipated big trouble. But he went along with Netanyahu probably because he was being blackmailed.

Turning to Netanyahu’s thinking, I raised the possibility — and it is just a possibility — that the Israeli prime minister knew that the offensive that was launched on 28 February 2026 would not produce a quick and decisive victory, but what he aimed to do was trap Trump into entering a war that he could not exit before the US military (with help from the IDF) toppled the regime in Tehran and achieved all of Israel’s and America’s goals in the war.

As I discussed with Katie and Yanis, this case seems to bear marked resemblance to what happened in the infamous Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, although we do not have sufficient evidence to be sure. The story goes like this.

The Bay of Pigs operation was an American operation that was approved by President Kennedy shortly after he took office. It involved using Cuban exiles — trained by the US — to invade Cuba for the purpose of overthrowing the Castro regime. It was manifestly clear from the get-go that the operation was doomed to fail, which it did almost immediately.

The CIA, which was the driving force behind the operation, surely knew the Cuban exiles were doomed, but nevertheless its leaders pushed President Kennedy hard to launch the invasion. Why? Because the CIA believed that the defeat of the invading exiles would force Kennedy to double down and use the US military to topple Castro. Kennedy, however, refused to use American military forces for that purpose and instead walked away from the fiasco.

Like Kennedy, Trump in this story was initially bamboozled into starting a foolish war and like Kennedy he walked away. Kennedy left the CIA enraged, especially after he fired its director, Allen Dulles. Trump left the Israelis enraged.