For two decades, Washington tried different ways to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear advance. Some administrations leaned more on sanctions. Others leaned more on diplomacy. Some tried both. Yet through all of it, the Islamic Republic moved from zero enrichment to 60 percent. By June 2025, the IAEA said Iran had 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to that level, enough for multiple nuclear bombs if enriched further. At the same time, the IRGC’s missile stockpile grew, its range and destructive power increased, and those capabilities spread to proxies from Lebanon to Iraq and Yemen. That was the result of the old approach.
The war has costs for the United States, politically and financially. But inaction was costlier. Washington began negotiating with Iran when enrichment was at 3 to 5 percent. It was still negotiating two decades later, after that level had reached 60 percent.
Trump’s answer was different. He was no longer trying to manage the problem or secure another temporary arrangement. After returning to office in January 2025, he demanded rollback: an end to enrichment, limits on the missile programme, and the dismantling of the proxy network through which the Islamic Republic had built regional power. Tehran refused, as it had through two decades of diplomacy and negotiation. The result was a shift from bargaining to attrition. The regime began to lose, by force, the very instruments through which it had built deterrence and projected power. In that sense, coercion was producing the rollback that diplomacy had failed to secure.
The 12-day war began in June 2025, after diplomacy failed and Israel struck the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and military infrastructure. The attack came at the end of a two-month negotiating window set by Trump. It marked the shift from coercive diplomacy to open war.
Trump stopped the war after twelve days. That pause, too, was part of the strategy. The June war did not target the political leadership. It was meant to shock the regime and force a choice, while giving its political leaders time to assess the damage and decide whether saving the system now required giving up some of its strategic assets.
That did not happen. A few months later, negotiations resumed, but within the same coercive framework. They were not a fresh search for compromise. They were another attempt to force acceptance of the same core demands.
Ali Khamenei rejected those terms again and was killed in the opening moments of the second war. This followed the same logic. If Khamenei himself was the main barrier to surrender, then removing him could create space for others inside the system to accept what the Islamic Republic had long refused.
But the regime remained defiant. Seventeen days after Khamenei’s death, Ali Larijani, another senior political figure, was also killed. Now, Ghalibaf’s name is being floated as the man who could be pushed to accept those demands. But the deeper reality is that Ghalibaf is not the man calling the shots in Iran today. Nor was Larijani. After Khamenei, no one is fully in command. This, too, is a sign of a system struck at the centre and beginning to unravel.
The administration’s refusal to recognise Mojtaba Khamenei, along with Trump’s dismissal of him as “a lightweight” who would be “unacceptable” as Iran’s leader, is part of the same coercive sequence. By denying him legitimacy from the outset, Washington is floating names, testing possibilities, and searching for someone within the regime willing to sign. At the same time, the regime’s nuclear, missile, naval, and proxy assets, together with the wider military machinery on which its regional power depended, are being steadily degraded. The Islamic Republic still has a choice: relinquish what remains by agreement, or lose it by force.
In Trump’s approach, negotiation and war are not opposites. They are successive phases of the same campaign. Negotiation presented the terms. Force raised the cost of refusal. The pause tested whether the strikes had altered the regime’s calculations. Negotiation then resumed from a position of greater pressure. That is not incoherence. It is strategy.
Whatever happens next, Trump has already changed the strategic picture. If this war ends with the fall of the Islamic Republic, he will have secured a historic victory. If the regime survives, it will survive in a diminished form. In less than a month, Washington has already achieved what twenty years of negotiations did not: an Islamic Republic with its nuclear and missile programmes sharply pushed back and its regional reach greatly reduced. Either way, the old status quo is gone.
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The very states Iran hoped to intimidate are moving in the opposite direction
The more the regime threatens shipping, attacks infrastructure, and uses missiles, drones, and proxies as tools of pressure, the more it convinces its neighbours that their own trade, investment, and long-term stability cannot safely coexist with the Islamic Republic as it is. Tehran’s calculation was that regional havoc would frighten neighbouring Arab states into pressing Washington to stop the war. Instead, the logic has begun to reverse. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have declared Iranian diplomatic personnel persona non grata, while the UAE has closed its embassy in Tehran and withdrawn its diplomatic mission. The very states Iran hoped to intimidate are moving in the opposite direction, concluding that its capacity for disruption must be reduced, not accommodated.
So the central argument is simple. Much of the prevailing media reading is wrong because it mistakes visible continuity for strategic success and escalation for surprise. It sees a regime still speaking, still firing, still standing in some form, and concludes that Washington must have no plan. But the plan is visible. Trump appears to have concluded that sanctions, diplomacy, delay, and partial restriction did not stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear advance. They only slowed it while the programme moved closer to threshold status. His answer was not to manage the problem more carefully, but to try to end it.
One may say this strategy is dangerous. One may say it is too blunt, too risky, or too ambitious. But it is not absent. The question is no longer whether Trump has a strategy. The question is whether the Islamic Republic, under the greatest pressure it has faced in decades, will accept strategic retreat before the cost of refusal becomes existential.
REMEMBER:
THE SUBTEXT OF THIS WAR IS TO SHOW CHINA AND RUSSIA WHAT WE ARE CAPABLE OF
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