By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot – Commentary
With regard to any who believe that President Trump has mismanaged the war with Iran, or any who, in their opinions believe that President Trump has ignored the lessons of history, made his strategic decisions based on advice from those who simply don’t understand how to fight or win a war, ignored his top cabinet and military advisors or built his strategy purely around political and/or personal aggrandizement, that simply couldn’t be further from the truth.
The strategy employed by the U.S. against Iran is very well documented, tested, successful and goes back much, much further than most would believe.
The basis for what has developed into the current strategy started with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, (5th Century BCE) ‘Sun Tzu’s The Art of War repeatedly frames victory not just through battles but through breaking the enemy’s alliance network, using spies and deception, and depleting the enemy’s state treasuries while preserving your own resources.’
The Arthashastra, an ancient Indian piece written by Kautilya in India, roughly a century after ‘The Art of War,’ became the first formal version of the strategy listing four elements rather than Sun Tzu’s three. After the end of WWI, ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis,’ by British political scientist E.H. Carr again narrowed it back to three elements.
During WWII, the U.S. engaged in the four element strategy and soon after the end of WWII, United States military and defense strategists formalized it as only the U.S. military can…with an acronym and it has been the blueprint taught by our military through leadership and academy classes ever since. That is certainly not to say it has always been followed and obviously, when not, our efforts have suffered for it, but it does remain the U.S. military blueprint to this day.
The acronym?
DIME.
To Sun Tzu’s three elements were Military, Information, and Diplomacy. To Kautilya’s four elements were, Diplomacy, Economic, Information, and Military. E.H. Carr’s three elements were, Military Power, Economic Power, and something he referred to as Power Over Opinion – basically…Information.
After WWII, the U.S. military called it DIME – Diplomatic – The managing of foreign relations, building alliances, and conducting negotiations. Basically the Department of State, under the direction of Secretary Rubio. Information – Controlling strategic communications, intelligence collection, public diplomacy, and cyber initiatives. That is a combination of the Joint Forces and would now include our, and our ally’s intel agencies along with such as satellite and cyber surveillance under the direction of Air Force General, Dan Caine. Military – Employing or threatening kinetic force to compel an adversary to do a nation’s will. That would be the Department of War under the direction of Secretary Hegseth. Economic – Promoting domestic prosperity or using financial tools like trade sanctions and foreign aid as leverage under the direction of Secretary Bessent.
The reason DIME was certified by the U.S. Military in 1947 was clear – the combination of the four elements as a full construct was the blueprint to our victory. The Diplomacy element included The Atlantic Charter (1941), the The “Big Three” Conferences in Potsdam, Yalta and now ironically in Tehran, and The Declaration by United Nations (1942) which formed the allied powers. The Information element included Office of War Information (OWI) The Voice of America (VOA) and Military Deception which was a key piece of the D-Day landings. The Military component should be obvious – Europe First, seize strategic islands one after the next to cut off Japans supply chain, and the Manhattan Project just to name a few, and the Economic element included The Lend-Lease Act, War Production Board (WPB) and of course, the Economic Warfare comprised of naval blockades, freezing Axis assets, and the preemptive purchase of materials from “neutral countries” thus keeping such materials from being used by either Japan, or Germany.
Diplomacy, often cited by President Trump’s war strategy critics as “negotiating with the enemy” or with terrorists IS, or COULD be the most problematic of the four constructs until you realize what I saw early on and wrote about in “The Iran War – Options vs. Alternatives Part 2” – every time a “pause,” for a ceasefire or further negotiations occurred, the critics insisted that Iran was using the time to regroup and rearm. To be fair, they were able to rearm to a minor extent, but every time they, and Trump’s war strategy critics thought Trump was foolish, the (I) and the (M) elements came into play because as soon as the IRGC violated the “pause” and started launching missiles and drones, the U.S. was able to target and eliminate the hiding places when Iran had stored their weapons. It was, and still is a “rinse and repeat” strategy.
Obviously, the other most highly criticized part of the strategy against Iran has revolved around the misguided notion that Trump made the war all about oil and Hormuz. Nope. Iran did that when THEY declared they would never give up their leverage by giving up the Strait. I brought that up in my commentary, “Hormuz and Beyond.” The DIME construct was employed in every aspect from using Diplomacy (the “pauses”) to gather Information (targeting IRGC once hidden sites) Military (the destruction of exposed sites and the destruction of IRGC radar and communication apparatus) and Economics (the Steel Wall blockade) to weaken the regimes military capability, and strangle their economy.
None of this is a fluke. It is exactly what led to the allied victory in WWII, and it was also the key to winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Don’t think so? Well – (D) Containment alliances (NATO), exploiting Sino-Soviet splits like isolating Moscow by engineering a strategic relationship with China, and the Helsinki Accords. (I) Voice of America and Radio Free Europe highlighting America’s high standard of living while exposing the USSR’s anti-American propaganda. (M) The arms race, supplying weapons to the Soviets enemy in Afghanistan, and Reagan’s tech threat called “Star Wars.” And (E) The combined sanctions and tech embargos, exposed the USSR’s dependence on exporting their oil when barrel prices crashed in the 1980’s wrecking the Soviet economy, and forcing the USSR to spend an unsustainable 15-20% of its GDP on the military which led to internal uprisings, and irreversible external collapse of the Soviet Union culminating President Reagan’s great speech and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yes, DIME does have grey areas and it’s critics often claim that it is too bureaucratic but it is precisely when the bureaucracy rises above the pragmatic base construct that DIME fails to produce positive results. Further, it was obviously conceived well before today’s advances in technology that permeates every aspect of modern warfare, and if utilized solely based on tech that only existed decades or centuries ago, it would be useless, however, adapting the base construct to utilize today’s tech advancements, it remains more than viable, it stands as a blueprint for military success.
A major part of the process of adapting modern war tech into the DIME system is the ability to take what your advisory presents and adapting on the fly to turn their predisposed weakness and arrogance against them. That requires the exact right people in each of the positions necessary to understand and quickly tweek the tools at hand to the construct in the situation room. It also takes one more very important thing…a final decision maker who trusts those not only providing the advice, but applying the four elements.
In Marco Rubio, we have a former Member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the former Chairman/Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who would have been well-versed on DIME long before this war began. Gen. Dan Raisin’ Caine actually learned the DIME construct frontward and backward having earned a Master of Arts in Air Warfare from the American Military University in 2005, and between 2021 to 2024, Caine served as the Associate Director for Military Affairs at the CIA specializing in intelligence, diplomacy, and covert military. Trust me, Gen. Caine’s DIME resume goes much deeper that these examples. In Pete Hegseth we find a Secretary of War who, while at Princeton University, and at Harvard Kennedy School, studied, public policy and national security becoming deeply entwined in the DIME construct not to mention his active service in the U.S. military as an officer requiring Hegseth to have a full understanding of DIME. And clearly Scott Bessent had a much more than passive understanding of DIME as he created what has been dubbed the “Bessent Doctrine”, highlighting national economic capacity and supply-chain isolation as direct elements of national security well before the war with Iran started.
That leaves the top link in the Chain of Command, the Commander in Chief, President Donald J. Trump. I believe it is safe to say that President Trump, before his second term, had at best a passive knowledge of the DIME construct. He had heard about it, but I do not believe he had any deep understanding of it, or of its importance. His first term was spent rebuilding our military from a hardware standpoint, but his second term, well that’s different.
Rubio was an easy choice and an easy confirmation as the first of the DIME key players. Cain was obvious, but first, President Trump had to fire Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as Brown was an outspoken advocate for DEI in our military, something incompatible with DIME, and to be clear, it was Pete Hegseth who offered that advice to President Trump. Trump signed a special waiver to get around the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, requiring officers to have specific prerequisite experience to serve as the nation’s top military advisor. Hegseth was the closest call, but the right call being confirmed after a contentious process on a vote of 51-50. Scott Bessent was chosen by President Elect Trump on November 22nd, 2024 and he became the second of the DIME key players confirmed less than a week into Trump’s second term, the day after Rubio’s confirmation.
From the beginning of this war, all eyes have been on President Trump, and global media has hung on every word Trump has uttered while his critics regarding the handling of the war have focused hard on the “Diplomatic” end of the strategy…the negotiations, and who was conducting said negotiations. So too did the Iranian regime and both the regime and the Trump war strategy critics believed Trump was the fool.
While Witkoff and Kushner were in the spotlight, Secretary Rubio was holding high-level meetings with the leaders and key security administrators in Israel, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, Yemmen, and Saudi Arabia.
Remember how this all started – the first strike was in June, 2025 which ended Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and was followed on February 28th, 2026 by the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes that sent the Iranian regime’s 47 year long power structure into chaos, quickly followed bu the destruction of Iran’s blue water navy, their piloted air force and the systematic degradation of Iran’s ability to communicate. That was directly in line with Sun Tzu’s “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”
‘Sun Tzu’s The Art of War then repeatedly frames victory not just through battles but through breaking the enemy’s alliance network. We’ve been doing just that for the past several months and by Iran continually striking what used to be their own allies, our ability to adapt DIME on the fly widened that gap. Sun Tzu also advocated depleting the enemy’s state treasuries while preserving your own resources. Hello Steel Wall and Economic D-Day driving Iran’s economy into oblivion while preventing the global price per barrel from soaring anywhere near what the regime predicted. And, Sun Tzu believed in using spies and deception. That’s the (I) in DIME and between the Mossad, the CIA, and of course the (D) in DIME, that too has been followed the blueprint.
For the DIME strategy to be successful, understand that all four elements MUST be utilized and all four key directors of those elements must coordinate the use of the elements dialing them up of down as necessary. No single element can achieve success on its own, or leave any element out altogether, and the construct crumbles.
Everything I have written in this commentary to this point is 100% verifiable and 100% fact, although I do suspect some of the Trump war strategy critics will continue to refuse to it, and regard it as contrived coincidence. What follows is my own opinion and speculation.
So, were Witkoff and Kushner just dupes in all of this? No, not at all because Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’ also said, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”
The 12er Shia regime as I stated in my commentary, “The Mullah’s Madness Exposed,”will never surrender, but they will in one last desperate “blaze of glory,” attempt to drive up oil prices globally and will most likely include the drone launching of bio weapons by the regime either at Israel, U.S. regional bases or at their own people. I believe that the full weight of the (M) in DIME, including the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi Kurds will combine with the Iranian People to end the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, as the imminent collapse of the regime is close at hand.
Where war strategy is concerned, what we are witnessing now is a textbook masterclass in action.
DIME – https://www.thelightningpress.com/the-instruments-of-national-power/
Copyright © 2026 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved
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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s latest Op-Ed at The Patriot Factor, Even In a Time of War 2+2 Should = 4.
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Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 25th from 7 to 8:30pm EST, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss ‘Even In a Time of War 2+2 Should = 4‘’; “The U.S. War Strategy vs. Iran – -A Textbook Masterclass”and important news of the day. Tune in to RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on https://rspradio1.com Click ‘LISTEN LIVE.’
