Donald Trump looks for a silver bullet to end the Iran War. There may be none
The President is trying to ratchet up the economic pressure on Tehran, but Iran’s Government is unlikely to make a deal without a big, face-saving compromise.
United States President Donald Trump keeps looking for the magic formula that will deliver him victory in Iran.
First was the airstrike last June intended, he said, to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear programme. Then came the intense February air campaign carried out with Israel and designed, he said, to deliver regime change and a popular uprising. Then he bet on a blockade of Iranian shipping to end the Iranian stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, in a new effort to break Iran’s control over the strait, Trump has announced a plan with few details to help guide stranded ships out through it. Iran responded with missiles and drones, and given the risks, most tankers are unlikely to dare crossing the strait for now.
But Trump’s conviction that these tactics will bring about Iran’s capitulation is deeply flawed, officials and analysts say. They say it is a misreading of the Islamic Republic’s strategy, psychology and capability for adaptation. The Iranian Government believes that it has the upper hand for now, and that it can withstand economic pressure, as it has in the past, longer than Trump can tolerate rising energy prices brought about by the halting of traffic through the strait.
If anything, Iran’s positions have hardened. But Trump’s tactics have not changed.
“At every point when pressure has not delivered the intended result, he’s sought a new tool of coercion which he believed would magically conjure victory,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, said. “He always believes he’s one little turn of the screw away.”
Pressure can work over time, “but pressure without an open door is an exercise in futility,” Vaez said. “Trump doesn’t understand that no matter the pressure, so long as you don’t give them a face-saving way out and a mutually beneficial agreement – not capitulation or surrender – you won’t get a deal.”
Experts are dubious that time will work in Trump’s favour.
The United States “can certainly do more damage to the Iranian economy, but they have withstood more pressure than any other economy in history, and that hasn’t produced the collapse of the regime or more reasonable positions,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and director of the foreign policy programme at the Brookings Institution, said.
Iran is such an authoritarian state that the kind of political drivers that might push compromise don’t exist, she said, with the regime already executing protesters on a regular basis. Trump, too, seems uninterested in compromise for now, despite the economic pain from high energy prices.
In any case, she said: “I’m sceptical that the blockade will succeed in the time frame we would need for the global economy and for Trump’s prospects in the midterm elections.”
Trump told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had been “amazing”, saying, “nobody’s going to challenge the blockade”. He also reiterated his claim that “Iran wants to make a deal” but he said its leaders were “playing games” by talking to him and then saying on television that they had not.
The conflict is a test of wills between Iran and the United States. The two sides have only limited knowledge of each other, having rarely been in the same room with each other, Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, said. “They have culturally very different approaches to dealmaking and they talk past each other,” she said.
“I think President Trump doesn’t really understand what drives the Iranians,” she added. “They don’t make decisions based on their GDP, because if so, they would have done a deal years ago.”
Although the economic stakes are high for Iran, Trump appears to have miscalculated how dire they are. He seems to be betting that Iran’s capacity to store the oil it is pumping but cannot export will soon run out and force Iran to make major concessions.
“If they don’t get their oil moving, their whole oil infrastructure is going to explode,” Trump said late last month, adding, “They say they only have about three days left before that happens.”
That was an obvious overstatement. Experts disagree, but some believe Iran has at least several weeks before it must stop pumping. Iran, which was exporting some 1.81 million barrels of oil per day in April, can reduce its production while continuing to store oil in empty or older tankers, which can hold an estimated two million barrels each, shipping some of it by road and rail to Pakistan.
During Trump’s first term, Iran ramped down production to about 200,000 barrels a day without significant damage to its oil infrastructure.
“Iran is not particularly close to even starting” to shut down its wells, Brett Erickson of Obsidian Risk Advisors said. Sanctions and the blockade will move the needle, but “there is no feasible scenario by which they will produce the necessary result in a feasible timeline” for Trump, he said, one reason the President is now trying his new plan to break Iran’s blockade.
Even if the war ends today, Erickson said, “it will be multiple months before things return to normal”.
In the past, strong American and international sanctions on Iran’s economy and oil industry did eventually bring it to negotiate. Years of talks did finally lead to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, when Iran agreed to strict limits on its nuclear enrichment programme for more than a decade in return for the lifting of most of those harsh economic sanctions.
Iran kept to the deal. But Trump, in his first term, abandoned it in 2018 and reimposed severe economic sanctions in a policy called “maximum pressure,” to force Iran to negotiate a more restrictive agreement. Despite severe economic hardship and Iran’s decision to sharply reduce its oil output, there was no new nuclear deal.
A year later, after European signatories failed to work around American sanctions, Iran began to breach the enrichment limits. Since then, Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium at close to weapons-grade to build an estimated 10 nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so. That stockpile of some 440kg is believed to be intact, and Iran now says that it will not negotiate anything about its nuclear programme until current hostilities end and it has guarantees they will not resume.
Quiet talks with the Americans continue as the regime sees this moment of impasse as a chance to solve its long-standing conflict with the United States. But that is different from caving under coercion.
Iran would like a deal, but its leaders believe that surrender to pressure only invites more pressure in the future, Vaez said. So Iran wants to retain its hold on the strait and charge tolls to pay for reconstruction, not trusting any US president to provide sanctions relief. “They don’t want to survive the hot war to freeze in a cold peace,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Steven Erlanger
Photographs by: Arash Khamooshi
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