Trump Risks Losing the Plot—and the War—in Iran

Just over a month ago, in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump offered a theory of victory premised on ending Iran’s military and nuclear threats and enabling the Iranian people to rise up.  For all the U.S.-Israeli battlefield success since then, his first prime-time address last week gave the American people, the Iranian regime, and the wider world no idea how this war is actually supposed to end. Regime change is not the goal, but it’s been achieved anyway, he claimed. The war will soon be over because Iran’s capabilities are destroyed, yet still it must be hit extremely hard. Others should deal with the Strait of Hormuz, but it will reopen on its own.

In trying to intimidate Tehran, browbeat our allies, and reassure markets all at once, the net result of the address was to say very little. This is the latest in the steady erosion of the campaign’s initially clear and commendable, if also highly ambitious, blueprint as the president and his officials openly debate themselves. Eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program is either the core objective, or one of several, and it either has been obliterated or set back. Iran’s power plants and oil facilities could be struck, even as energy sanctions are waived. The United States destroyed Iran’s navy and is running out of overall targets, yet it is unready to open the strait, and Iran retains thousands of drones and hundreds of missile launchers. Help from America’s allies should be forthcoming, but is not needed. Perhaps most glaringly, Trump’s declaration that “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” has been superseded by scattershot U.S. ceasefire proposals.

This dissonance reflects a fundamental failure to appreciate that the enemy always gets a vote, and to discern how it would wage this war very differently from before. During prior dustups with Trump, Iran’s regime contented itself with landing the final, if largely symbolic, blow, since it believed this restored deterrence and built diplomatic leverage for any future talks. While it lost the preceding battles, Tehran could somewhat justifiably tell itself that telegraphed one-off missile attacks led to the United States ending hostilities after Qassem Suleimani’s killing in 2020, and after Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. Ultimately, in both cases, it returned to negotiations with confidently uncompromising demands. Though more of a reach, Iran drew similar lessons from its two projectile barrages on Israel in 2024.

In preparing a much bigger operation, Trump officials neglected that Iran might reject a convenient and accommodating cessation of hostilities this time around. The administration reportedly assumed Tehran’s leaders would resort to past practice by containing their retaliation and quickly reaching some modus vivendi—presumably, in the president’s mind at least, by acceding to regime management like post-Maduro Venezuela. To be sure, while Iran was unbending in talks, it limited its kinetic retaliation and sought to goad Trump into taking the win whenever he pursued politics by less diplomatic means.

Now, Tehran’s refusal to be complicit in ending the war has caught Trump flat-footed. The regime is not fighting solely to bolster its credibility after a ceasefire, nor is it saving its toughest stances for postwar diplomacy. It is fighting for something much more like an armistice—a permanent, broader understanding or state of play as the condition for silencing its guns. “We do not intend to negotiate,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared four weeks into the war, answering his own rhetorical question: “What good is it if we go back to talk once again?” Another Iranian diplomat said his country “is not willing for a premature ceasefire like the 12-Day War.”

Before his own death in a March 17 Israeli airstrike, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s de facto successor Ali Larijani warned that Trump’s fondness for calling ceasefires into being on social media—a pastime of Iranian officials, too—would go nowhere this time: “Starting a war is easy, but ending it won’t happen in a few tweets.” On April 6, the next men up in Iran’s post-Larijani leadership rejected Trump’s latest offer, for a 45-day ceasefire, and reiterated the regime’s demands to end the war.

Those demands amount to a categorical U.S. defeat. Limiting Iran’s arsenals is no longer on the trading block, even theoretically. In their place are stipulations to alter the relationship between Tehran and Washington, the regional balance of power, and even the global economy. The United States would have to guarantee future “nonaggression” through war reparations, sanctions relief, an end to operations against Iran’s proxies, and other strict assurances. America also must shutter its Middle East bases and recognize the regime’s “natural, legal right” over the Strait of Hormuz.

Essentially, Iran has forwarded its uncompromising posture from the negotiating table to the battlefield. Most directly, its self-proclaimed right to control navigation in the strait mirrors its equally dubious and belligerent claim to the right of uranium enrichment, which it insisted upon in talks with three U.S. administrations. Similar to how its intransigence ground the Obama administration’s initially robust negotiating demands into the dust of the JCPOA nuclear deal, now Iran hopes to wear down the Trump administration in a war whose duration and intensity it did not anticipate.

Absent such a formal settlement, Iran would win simply by getting America to walk away and wish the problem into the cornfield. It did exactly that with the Biden administration, advancing its nuclear infrastructure appreciably in the process—and even more so after the 2022 collapse of talks to restore the JCPOA, which Trump abandoned. Indeed, Tehran’s demands appear so absolute as to encourage Trump to throw in the towel and leave Iran unhindered to solidify its wartime gains. Larijani’s threat embodies the regime’s determination to keep fighting if Trump abruptly calls it quits.

A serious course correction is required to avoid either outcome. There is no diplomatic offramp that ends this war acceptably. Coasting to a stop by setting a predetermined time frame for operations, and reaching for some fig leaf of victory, is equally untenable. The same goes for escalation that detracts or distracts from the fundamental concerns over which America went to war in the first place—especially if this is meant to intimidate Iran into a ceasefire. Threatening to out-crazy Tehran by lashing out against power plants and bridges, and throwing in fiery expletives for good measure, merely plays into the hands of an adversary that prefers escalation over negotiation. Iran already built this calculus into its war plan, tellingly code-named “Madman.”

If the regime is not about to crumble, therefore, it becomes all the more important for Trump to focus and to state plainly that U.S.-led operations will diminish Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs to the greatest extent possible. Ensuring the safe transit of shipping in the Gulf and Hormuz is just as crucial a benchmark for military success.

Sharpening these objectives—and carrying out operations to affect them—likely will not induce a softer line from Tehran. But they will maximize the hardline regime’s time, effort, and risk to reconstitute these capabilities, in turn widening the windows to detect and preempt such moves—and to foster the Islamic Republic’s eventual collapse. Committing to end Iran’s naval blockade is vital for encouraging allies to pitch in, and for discouraging further gambits from Tehran, its proxies, and others to jeopardize core U.S. national security interests in global freedom of navigation and economic stability.

Taking its impressive wartime cooperation with Israel as a model, the Trump administration also has to improve its coalition-building diplomacy with an eye to the postwar period. Reverse-engineering a scenario where reopening the strait is not America’s problem, as Trump did in his prime-time address, is unhelpful here. It also gives certain NATO allies a convenient excuse to continue doing nothing in terms of burden-sharing. To the extent Iran retains residual nuclear and military resources, and designs on Hormuz, basic alliance management will be critical to distribute the burdens of effective global sanctions enforcement against the regime; interdict Chinese, Russian, and North Korean resupplies; and monitor and preempt the rebuilding of Iran’s most dangerous capabilities.

Even if they are more modest now than when the war began, consistency and clarity in Trump’s objectives will go a long way in determining how this war ends, and its lasting consequences. Negotiating with himself, his administration, or Tehran narrows the options to a disastrous agreement, like Obama’s nuclear deal, or a war that ends with a whimper and lets Tehran run wild, like Biden’s failed attempt to rejoin that same nuclear deal.