America’s Iran failure is bigger than Trump

Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source. Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures. Less than a month after stepping back from military escalation in pursuit of an interim understanding with Tehran, the Trump administration has returned to the same maximalist strategy that nearly 40 days of fighting had already shown could deliver neither a favorable outcome for the United States nor regional or global stability. In the latest wave of escalation, three more US service members were killed, bringing the US. military death toll to 17. The United States has widened its strikes to include bridges, electrical infrastructure and, according to Tehran, the unfinished Darkhovin nuclear power site, while Iran has attacked US bases and critical infrastructure across Jordan and the Persian Gulf. It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion. For nearly half a century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have largely operated from the same basic theory: that escalating economic and military pressure would eventually force Tehran to concede or buckle under the weight of coercion. The Obama administration’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear agreement was the clearest break from that logic. Yet the agreement never escaped the coercive architecture surrounding it. Its promised economic benefits for Iran depended heavily on reversible presidential waivers, making the deal easy to dismantle and difficult to trust. When Trump withdrew, Washington drew no lesson from the collapse beyond the one it had always preferred: apply more pressure. Trump’s principal departure has not been from America’s fundamentally coercive approach to Iran but from the way that approach is conducted. Consequential foreign policy decisions have increasingly been concentrated in the hands of family members, trusted friends, and informal envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, bypassing many of the institutions meant to provide expertise, deliberation, and accountability. Yet those institutions have long struggled to fulfill that function. Trump’s approach has only further diminished their ability to challenge assumptions, incorporate dissenting views, and learn from failure. Indeed, Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source. As one of the authors, Sina Toossi, argues in a recent Center for International Policy report, Washington has consistently approached Iran through linear assumptions about how states respond to coercion. The underlying assumption has been simple: more sanctions create more pressure, more pressure yields more concessions, and overwhelming US military superiority will inevitably translate into the political outcomes Washington seeks. The historical record, however, tells a different story. Rather than producing a predictable chain of cause and effect, US pressure repeatedly reshaped the very political system it was intended to influence, often in ways Washington neither anticipated nor understood. The economic siege weakened the social and political forces most invested in engagement while strengthening the security institutions best positioned to thrive under confrontation. Diplomatic reversals discredited Iranian leaders who argued that accommodation with the United States could produce lasting benefits, reinforcing the arguments of those who insisted that Washington could not be trusted.