I disagree. I think zero thought he’d issued total “no action” orders with fluff for the MSM to spin. Being a neophyte with no respect for the military, he didn’t understand that the captain would be smart enough to use that fluff to enable action, which is exactly what the captain did.
And then the MSM spun it to give zero all the credit (or tried to).
To extend the poker analogy to the pirate issue, zero was playing 5 card draw, drew trip 10s, mucked two of those, and accidentally drew a royal flush. And the MSM gushed about how great a poker player he was...
Well, “take no action, unless imminent threat to hostage” put him in the clear (and threw the blame on the military for not reacting fast enough) if the hostage had been killed. The USN captain just had a less constrained interpretation of “imminent threat”