The Trump administration is making a new bid to prove a core assumption the Iran war so far suggests is flawed: that punishing strikes from a far superior US military force will force Tehran to capitulate.
President Donald Trump ordered new attacks on multiple Iranian targets on Wednesday, hours after accusing the Islamic Republic of “tapping us along” and not making a deal. “They keep playing us for suckers,” he said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained that Washington was “clearly signaling” to Iran’s leaders and hoped to “enhance” its diplomatic position. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” he said.
The full extent of the target list and damage from the new air strikes was not immediately clear. US Central Command said in a statement that American forces fired precision munitions at Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems and air defense assets.
Analysts will assess in coming days whether the attacks, some in southern Iran and apparently meant to loosen Tehran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, will narrow Iran’s options and shift its negotiating stance.
Sometimes in warfare, adjustments in strategy and strikes that reach a critical mass can change outcomes. But the risk is that this new offensive may simply prolong a pattern that has confounded Trump. While US forces repeatedly chalk up tactical wins, military options are yet to secure an overall strategic triumph.
Evidence of the last three months suggests that Washington only instills greater stubbornness among Iran’s leaders when it intensifies military pressure and reinforces a belief in Tehran that Trump can’t be trusted on any eventual deal.
“No lasting agreement can be achieved through threats, intimidation or the use of force,” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani said Wednesday, according to Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
In other words, Iran wants the world to know it can’t be bombed back to the negotiating table.
What the new US wave of attacks reveal about Trump
New US raids underscored three factors driving the conflict. First, Trump is increasingly and publicly frustrated that Tehran won’t cave to his terms for reopening the strait and ending its nuclear program. Second, the new US military action reinforced a sense that Trump believes only confrontation can compel an adversary to close a deal. It also again showed the president’s tendency to risk upsetting talks at a delicate moment by using force.
The fresh wave of strikes took place after a team of Qatari negotiators traveled to Iran on Wednesday morning to meet with Iranian counterparts in an effort to bridge final gaps in a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran.
At least twice before, Trump has performed an end run around ongoing diplomacy: before his long-range bombing runs against Iran’s nuclear sites last year, and again when he lost patience with a laborious process in Geneva at the end of February, when he and Israel jointly launched the war.
Wednesday’s assault followed a previous set of strikes against Iranian assets on Tuesday in response to Tehran’s downing of a US Apache helicopter. “I guess we have the right to do that,” Trump said Wednesday. Realistically, he had little choice, because to do nothing would imply that Tehran exercised dominance over the Strait of Hormuz.
But every time Trump chooses to use more force, he increases the risk that a conflict simmering on the edge of escalation will race out of his control.
Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday that Iran retains the capacity to destroy energy infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates or Qatar in retaliatory attacks, and that it could also order allied Houthi rebels in Yemen to cut Red Sea oil exporting routes.
“They have a lot of cards to play, and all of those cards point in one direction, which is gasoline prices going very, very high — a lot higher than they are right now — for the American people,” Himes said.
But US officials implied that their intent was not to reignite a full-scale war with Iran, reflecting Trump’s keenness to put the conflict behind him. Hegseth said the operation was an attempt to “set terms” and was “not because we want to restart anything we don’t have to restart.”
Why Iran may not respond in the way Trump hopes
On the face of it, the attacks ripped another hole in the ragged ceasefire that halted an earlier round of combat operations. The supposed truce, however, has become less a traditional pact to quiet the guns than a tacit understanding to keep exchanges below a certain level to prevent a return to full-scale warfare.
Perhaps the administration’s push to force Iran’s hand will change the equation. But officials also risk slipping into a familiar gulf of misperception wherein actions that seem logical and proportionate in Washington are not accepted as such by US adversaries in the Middle East.
For the latest US gambit to reset “terms” for diplomacy, Iran must conclude that the administration’s claim to have already won the war is true. But Tehran seems to think it holds the cards — one reason why it is yet to agree to edits that Trump made to the memorandum early last week.
Moreover, with its stranglehold on the strait — which is inflicting severe economic damage worldwide and driving up political heat on Trump — Iran may have concluded that it is in the dominant diplomatic position. The regime’s survival after the US and Israeli onslaught is itself a kind of victory. And while most analysts assume that it cannot indefinitely ride out extreme economic, social and financial damage of the US blockade, there’s no sign the critical point is imminent for a brutal regime that cares little for the welfare of its people.
This all explains why Tehran has yet to give Trump the kind of unequivocal climbdown the president needs to justify his war and to reverse polls in the United States that show majorities of voters disapprove of it.
But Trump’s sudden return to offense may only further confuse voters who long ago turned against his war. It also seems like a return to the erratic messaging that plagued the war’s early weeks. After all, it was only Tuesday when Trump said he was in the “final throes” of making a deal with Iran and that the strait could open in “two or three days.”
Last week, Trump confirmed that he called Netanyahu “crazy” in a phone call over Israeli action in Lebanon he believed could thwart a peace deal. Then Trump told Axios that he’d told the Israeli leader he risked isolation with new attacks on Iran this week.
Yet here is Trump, again unleashing the might of the US military on the country.
How the president’s lifetime principles are shaping US war strategy
The mixed messages show Trump remains trapped in a snare built from his own decisions.
To meaningfully change the strategic calculus, the president might need to order more intense and prolonged military action. This would almost certainly trigger an Iranian response that pulls US Gulf allies back into the firestorm and exacerbates a global energy crisis that is destroying Trump’s approval ratings. But without altering Iran’s perception that it is in the ascendancy, the president may never be able to push the regime across the line to making a deal.
Another complication is that any agreement to reopen the strait and end the US blockade is likely to be only the precursor to weeks or months of talks on Iran’s nuclear program, the fate of its stocks of enriched uranium and its demands for the lifting of sanctions in return for its cooperation.
If the new round of attacks doesn’t work, there’s sure to be a renewed focus on Trump’s return to coercion. One answer is his lifelong stance that each showdown has only a winner and a loser. His instinct that bringing down the hammer may force Iran to fold, meanwhile, is right out of the real estate magnate’s playbook — even if such an approach is yet to yield big wins for his diplomacy.
The president’s aggression infuses his administration’s worldview. “You can see when someone’s trying to tap, tap, tap on a deal,” Hegseth said. “Instead they’re going to have tap, tap, tap, bombs dropping on key facilities in Iran from the United States of America.”
But if the new air strikes don’t force Tehran to concede, Trump will again be asked why he’s so wedded to an approach that keeps failing.
