Every generation has its priesthood. Not the kind wearing robes and incense, mind you, but the modern American version: the credentialed “expert.”
The kind who appears on cable news with a perfectly rehearsed tone of certainty, speaks in confident syllables polished by graduate seminars, and assures the public that what they are about to say is simply the inevitable outcome of “the science,” “the intelligence community,” or the always-handy “consensus.”
These people are never tentative. They are never unsure. And yet, curiously, they are almost never right.
Which raises a small question that apparently nobody in Washington wants to ask: If the experts are wrong about everything, why are they still the experts?
Consider the most recent episode in this long-running comedy of arrogance. As military action unfolded around Iran during what has become known as Operation Epic Fury, the foreign policy establishment immediately did what it always does. It predicted catastrophe.
The experts were unanimous in their warnings.
Strike Iran and the world will ignite. Touch the regime and the Middle East will erupt. Support Israel and America will be isolated, diplomatically neutered, and strategically humiliated.
It was the geopolitical equivalent of a weather forecast that predicts volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and locusts the size of Buicks.
Then reality showed up.
According to analysis published by Fox News, many of the most confident assumptions about a confrontation with Iran are already collapsing under the weight of events. The predictions that were treated as sacred doctrine just weeks ago now look like fortune-cookie wisdom.
Four “inevitable” outcomes were supposed to define any clash with Tehran.
All four are wobbling like a Jenga tower at a frat party.
The first assumption was that Iran’s Supreme Leader would remain untouchable, an immovable piece on the global chessboard whom nobody could realistically threaten. Foreign policy analysts spoke about him the way medieval peasants spoke about the king’s divine right to rule. In their telling, he was insulated by geography, power structures, and a web of security that made any direct pressure impossible.
Yet the current moment has revealed something experts tend to overlook: regimes built on intimidation often look far stronger from a conference room in Washington than they do when actual pressure arrives.
Authoritarian systems are notorious for projecting invincibility while quietly rotting from within. History is full of such illusions. The Soviet Union looked permanent until it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall looked immovable until it crumbled like a stale cracker.
Experts rarely see that moment coming because their professional ecosystem rewards consensus, not skepticism.
Which leads to the second sacred assumption: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would unleash its terrorist proxy networks across the region and ignite a full-scale war.
This prediction was repeated so often it achieved the status of dogma. Hezbollah would fire rockets. Militias in Iraq would attack American positions. The entire region would supposedly light up like a Christmas tree wired by an electrical engineer with a grudge.
Yet the reaction has been far more complicated than the experts promised.
Reality, which stubbornly refuses to follow PowerPoint presentations, tends to expose the difference between capability and willingness. Proxy forces exist. But deploying them carries consequences. And those consequences become more serious when American leadership signals resolve rather than hesitation.
In other words, deterrence works when the people doing the deterring actually believe in it.
This concept used to be common knowledge during the Cold War. Presidents like Ronald Reagan understood that strength projected clearly can prevent conflicts that weakness practically invites. Reagan didn’t end the Soviet Union with a panel discussion and a white paper. He ended it by convincing Moscow that America meant what it said.
The third prediction from the expert class was almost poetic in its gloom. If Israel struck Iran or its infrastructure, the Jewish state would be isolated in the Middle East and vulnerable to retaliation from Arab neighbors.
This theory might have sounded plausible twenty years ago. The Middle East, after all, spent decades defined by hostility toward Israel.
But experts, apparently distracted by their own brilliance, overlooked one small development: the region has been changed under Trump.
The Abraham Accords, brokered under President Donald Trump, dramatically reshaped the diplomatic landscape. Countries that once treated Israel as a permanent enemy have increasingly recognized a shared strategic interest in containing Iran’s ambitions. While tensions remain throughout the region, the assumption that Arab states would automatically unite against Israel now looks outdated.
Geopolitics evolves. Expert assumptions rarely do.
Which brings us to the fourth and perhaps most dramatic prediction: the United States would find itself isolated on the world stage if it supported Israel during a confrontation with Iran.
This idea has become a staple of Washington’s professional pessimists. According to them, every exercise of American power automatically produces diplomatic loneliness. Allies will abandon us, rivals will gain strength, and global opinion will supposedly collapse like a soufflé in a wind tunnel.
Yet the real world keeps undermining that narrative.
America remains the central military power in the international system. Its alliances remain vast. Its economic reach remains unparalleled. Even countries that criticize U.S. policy often rely heavily on American security guarantees and trade relationships.
In other words, the world is more complicated than the cable-news version of “America alone.”
Of course, the experts are already preparing their escape hatch. They will insist that these predictions could still come true someday. Perhaps the proxies will activate next week. Perhaps the diplomatic fallout will arrive next month. Perhaps the crisis will escalate in ways not yet visible.
And technically they are correct.
Given enough time, any prediction can eventually stumble into accuracy. If a meteorologist predicts rain every day for thirty years, he will eventually be right. The problem is that such predictions provide no useful guidance for the present.
That is the deeper problem with the expert class.
Their predictions often operate on timelines so vague and elastic that they cannot be meaningfully evaluated. They are never wrong today because they might be right tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the people making decisions in the real world must act now.
If this pattern sounds familiar, it should. The foreign policy experts are simply the latest members of a much larger club.
Think back to the COVID era, when public health authorities issued proclamations with the confidence of Roman emperors.
Masks would stop the virus. Six feet of separation was presented as if it had descended from Mount Sinai carved into stone tablets. Lockdowns would “stop the spread.” Then came the vaccines and boosters, promoted as the definitive solution.
The messaging was absolute. Questioning it was treated not as skepticism but as heresy.
Years later, even mainstream institutions have acknowledged that many of those claims were exaggerated or unsupported. Studies continue to debate the effectiveness of certain policies, while data about economic damage, educational setbacks, and public mistrust accumulates.
Yet the same voices that insisted they possessed unassailable authority now appear on television discussing the next crisis with identical confidence.
Experts rarely lose their status. They simply move on to a new topic.
Today it is Iran. Tomorrow it may be climate catastrophe or the alleged dangers of political dissent.
One begins to wonder whether the credentialed class is less interested in accuracy than in maintaining its cultural authority.
There is also a deeper psychological component at work. Expertise creates incentives for groupthink. Scholars build careers inside intellectual communities that reward conformity to prevailing theories. If everyone around you believes the same framework, challenging it becomes professionally risky.
The result is an echo chamber with impressive résumés.
Washington, D.C., is perhaps the purest example of this phenomenon. Policy analysts attend the same conferences, read the same journals, and rotate through the same think tanks. Their disagreements often resemble debates between cousins rather than genuine intellectual diversity.
When outsiders challenge their conclusions, the response is predictable: dismiss them as uninformed.
Yet the outsider occasionally sees what the insiders miss.
President Donald Trump has long been a disruptor of expert orthodoxy. His critics frequently portray that disruption as recklessness. But the results, at times, have forced even skeptical observers to reconsider assumptions that once seemed permanent.
The Abraham Accords are one example. For decades experts insisted that peace between Israel and Arab states required first resolving the Palestinian issue. Trump ignored that theory and pursued direct normalization agreements instead. The result was a diplomatic breakthrough many analysts previously declared impossible.
History offers countless reminders that consensus can be spectacularly wrong.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Soviet specialists believed the USSR would endure for decades. Before the 2008 financial crisis, economists insisted the banking system was stable. Before the internet revolution, media experts predicted newspapers would remain the unchallenged gatekeepers of information.
Experts are not useless. Knowledge and experience matter. But expertise becomes dangerous when it transforms into unquestioned authority.
At that point it stops being analysis and starts becoming ideology with footnotes.
The American public has begun to notice this pattern. Polls consistently show declining trust in institutions once considered pillars of authority. Media, academia, government agencies, and international organizations all suffer from credibility gaps that widen each year.
People are not rejecting knowledge. They are rejecting arrogance.
The irony is that genuine expertise thrives on humility. The best scientists treat conclusions as provisional. The best strategists acknowledge uncertainty. The best historians understand that events rarely unfold exactly as predicted.
Confidence may look impressive on television. But humility is what actually survives contact with reality.
As events continue to unfold around Iran and the broader Middle East, the ultimate outcome remains uncertain. Conflicts evolve, alliances shift, and unexpected developments appear with remarkable speed.
Yet one conclusion already seems clear.
The people who claimed absolute certainty once again appear far less certain than they advertised.
And perhaps that realization should inspire a new rule for the American public.
When the next crisis arrives and the experts step forward with their polished predictions, speaking in that familiar tone of absolute authority, it might be wise to remember their batting average.
After all, if history is any guide, the safest bet is not that they will be right.
It’s that they will be confidently wrong.
