While the diplomatic efforts were under way, Vice-President J. D. Vance, who negotiated with senior Iranian officials in Pakistan and Switzerland, told Jake Tapper, of CNN, “The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even I.R.G.C. officials, say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for forty-seven years is a mistake.’ ”
Now, as Trump’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants policy on Iran implodes, he has taken to disparaging Iranian interlocutors as “scum,” “cuckoo,” “sick,” “vicious, violent people,” and “a bunch of lying guys.” He has stooped to the level of the belligerent Iranians who have shouted “Death to America” for nearly half a century.
“It is impossible to overstate how quickly and comprehensively the U.S. has undermined deterrence and squandered its leverage over Iran,” Philip Gordon, who served in the Obama and Biden Administrations, noted this week. Last summer, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites in a limited military operation, targeting facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The extent of the damage was debated, but the balance of power remained fundamentally unchanged. “It was only Trump’s decision to roll the dice on regime change that led a cornered regime to start attacking its neighbors and close the Strait, grabbing a stranglehold on the world economy,” Gordon, who is now at the Brookings Institution, wrote. “That genie can never be put back in the bottle.”
David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama and a founder of the bipartisan Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, lamented, on X, “There are days when I feel as an American like a passenger in a plane being piloted by a 6-yr-old. You’re strapped in your seat, as the plane dives and weaves crazily, and all you can do is hope and pray that it lands safely.”
The core issue now is control of the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t even part of the original justification for war. For existential reasons of geography and security, Tehran now wants to exert authority over the narrow waterway, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies transit. Washington favors freedom of navigation but, most of all, doesn’t want Iran to have any say over the strait. Both countries have threatened to impose steep tolls. “The breakdown of the MOU reflects its remarkably shoddy, imprecise drafting,” Robert Malley, an architect of the nuclear deal with Iran, in 2015, by the Obama Administration, wrote on X. “One could drive a truck—or an aircraft carrier—through paragraph 5 on Hormuz, with Washington & Tehran each pointing to different clauses to assert diametrically opposed interpretations.”
On Tuesday, Trump met with his national-security team to talk through next steps. Anonymous Administration sources began to leak to the press this week that the President was considering expanding military strikes to target bridges, water-purification facilities, and power plants if Iran did not return to the negotiating table. The threat sounded familiar. In late March, almost a month into the war, Axios had reported that the Pentagon was preparing for a “final blow” that could include more ambitious offensives, such as seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s primary hub for oil exports. At the time, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, warned that the President “doesn’t bluff, and he is ready to unleash hell. Iran shouldn’t miscalculate again.” Neither bluster nor bombs will “work any better this time,” Gordon said, at a conference organized by the International Crisis Group, on Thursday. “The Iranian regime has shown it doesn’t care about the welfare of its people, and, as I said before, is more ready to endure pain than the United States is.”
John Limbert, a diplomat who was held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the 1979 revolution, has pointed out that Trump is not the first foreign leader “driven by hubris and ignorance” to launch an ill-advised military campaign on Iran. Four Roman military leaders did, too. “Crassus met his doom because he ignored his ally, obsessed over the triumphs of his rivals, and imagined that his becoming rich by real estate speculation made him a military genius,” Limbert wrote, for Responsible Statecraft. “Marc Antony ignored geography and underestimated his enemy. Valerian both underestimated the enemy and overestimated Roman military strength. Julian was misled when a Persian exile prince, who had lived abroad for decades and spoke fluent Greek, claimed that Persia would welcome him as a liberator.” Their fates, Limbert cautioned, “should offer lessons for our times.”
Robin Wright
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