President Donald Trump, seeing the success of the U.S. Navy’s operation in the Strait of Hormuz in blocking most of Iran’s imports and oil exports while restoring some of the non-Iranian oil trade through the strait, evidently does not regard the conflict with Iran as stalemated.
The current situation regarding the flow of oil and distribution of economic pain is actually more complicated and does not constitute a one-sided U.S. advantage, but Trump clearly believes that continuing to squeeze Iran through measures such as a naval blockade — an act of war — will increase U.S. leverage and yield a better result.
Trump always has viewed the world as a zero-sum game. Whether the subject is military conflict, trade agreements, or real estate deals, he regards most outcomes as having a winner and a loser. He also never admits a mistake and certainly will not do so publicly regarding the current war. Thus the conflict continues as a search for something Trump can claim as a “win.”
A book that I wrote more than four decades ago showed how the endings of wars are best understood as negotiated bargains. Even supposed unconditional surrenders are not entirely unconditional and involve bargains in which the surrendering side agrees not to use its continued capacity for resistance in exchange for the other side ending its assault. Other scholars have recently applied the same concept to contemporary conflicts. A lesson is that couching U.S. war-fighting strategy primarily in terms of wins and losses obscures the issues at stake, how those issues affect U.S. interests, and what will be required to end the war and implement a stable peace.
What Trump would welcome as a “win” could take one of two basic forms: either the Iranian regime somehow cries “uncle” and makes concessions that clearly and significantly go beyond anything it offered before, or the regime collapses. A tension between these two possibilities exists, because a regime that believes the U.S. is determined to destroy it has no incentive to make concessions and sees no alternative to continued fighting. Even considered separately, however, each of the two versions of a supposed “win” raises major questions.
For Iranian concessions to play that role, they would have to advance U.S. interests significantly and be what even an Iranian regime under severe pressure could realistically be expected to offer. One difficulty in assessing the value of Iranian concessions is that Trump and his administration never made its war aims clear. They have said different things at different times, including even a demand for “unconditional surrender,” which is unrealistic to expect from any Iranian regime.
Iran’s nuclear program gets mentioned most often, and Vice President JD Vance came closest to a specific demand by stating just last week that “meaningful” reduction in Iran’s enrichment of uranium would be necessary for peace. The Iranian nuclear program is relevant to U.S. interests insofar as it raises the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and in this regard further continuation of the war is not helpful. Previous attacks already largely disabled the Iranian program, and now intentions matter at least as much as capabilities. Being the target of continued attacks by a foreign power will strengthen voices in Tehran — where there already is talk about withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — that argue that Iran needs a nuclear deterrent.
An exhibit of what is necessary for a meaningful agreement on nuclear matters is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known colloquially as the Iran deal, which entered into force in 2015 and effectively closed all possible paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon until it was abandoned in 2018 by Trump, who was determined to destroy what was widely regarded as President Barack Obama’s most significant foreign policy achievement. The JCPOA is 159 pages long. It was the product of difficult and detailed negotiations that spanned several years and involved numerous nuclear experts and other specialists. It is not the sort of thing that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner could knock out in a couple of negotiating sessions.
Any new nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran would require comparable detail, partly to ensure that reductions would be meaningful, enforceable, and verifiable through international inspections. To make completion of such a comprehensive agreement a condition for ending the war — rather than coupling a ceasefire with a commitment to engage seriously in future negotiations — would mean continuing the war for months and possibly years.
The Trump administration has made the task of negotiating a new nuclear agreement with Iran even more difficult and complex by pursuing its recent nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which has justifiably raised concerns among nonproliferation experts because the deal does not require the most stringent form of international inspections and opens the door to Saudi enrichment of uranium, even to the 20% level. Any regime in Iran will resist restricting its own nuclear program to something less than what Iran’s rival on the other side of the Persian Gulf will enjoy, with U.S. approval and assistance.
As for a supposed “win” through regime change, the first thing to note is that Trump already claimed to have achieved such a change after the killings of senior Iranian leaders in the opening days of the war. What happened next is a lesson in being careful what you wish for: Iranian hardliners became more powerful than they were when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was still alive. Another wartime leadership change might move Iran even further in the hardline direction, such as to a military dictatorship that silences remaining moderate voices in the regime.
Even if a leadership change went in a direction appearing more favorable to the United States, securing wins for U.S. interests requires that whoever speaks for Iran can negotiate agreements that stick. A future government would have to deal internally with Iranian factions that have different views and would not vanish even with a leadership change. But the ability to influence those factions does not necessarily reside with those whose ideologies and orientation might seem friendliest to the U.S.
In this regard, a loss was the killing by an Israeli airstrike two weeks into the war of Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Larijani was a creature of the Khamenei regime but also a pragmatist with the political chops and connections to make credible commitments on behalf of the entire power structure in Tehran.
Amid the economic hardship that the Iranian population is enduring, one cannot rule out a popular uprising leading to a more sweeping political upheaval, but several observations about this type of possible regime change are in order.
First, several popular uprisings have occurred during the history of the Islamic Republic but did not lead to regime change.
Second, there currently is no cohesive opposition movement comparable to the one Ruhollah Khomeini led during the revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979.
Third, a popular uprising is less likely during a continued war, which has generated a significant rally-around-the-flag effect among Iranians who unsurprisingly see U.S. military and economic assaults as aimed at Iran as a whole and not just at the regime.
Fourth and related to the previous point, the war will leave lingering and widespread resentment against the United States for the suffering it has imposed on Iranians. Such resentment will be stronger the longer the war lasts. No new regime can ignore this sentiment.
Fifth, policies under any new rulers will illustrate how past Iranian policy has reflected Iranian security concerns and nationalism at least as much as the ideological coloration of whatever regime happened to be in power.
A conclusion is that the United States should not count on major up-front concessions or regime change as the occasion for ending this war. The most feasible way out of the war is a skeletal ceasefire agreement that defers most substantive negotiations, like the Memorandum of Understanding that the parties agreed to in June, but without the ambiguous language concerning the Strait of Hormuz that led the MoU to break down. A president looking for a “win” will have to rely on his rhetorical ability to depict such a ceasefire and the destruction already inflicted on Iranian forces as a victory.