There is a particular logic to the Trump administration’s approach to the Iran war — a logic that would be almost admirable in its boldness if it weren’t so catastrophically dangerous.
After spending the better part of a decade methodically dismantling any diplomatic architecture that constrained Iran’s nuclear ambitions, bombing Tehran facilities while negotiators were still exchanging talking points in Muscat and Rome, and now watching the Strait of Hormuz transform from a vital artery of global trade into a theater of conflict: President Trump has arrived at what many consider his strategic mastermind. Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourself.
In other words: Washington lit the fire and the world is being handed the bucket. This is not foreign policy. This is not even a deal in any known sense of the word. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of a property developer demolishing a building in a dense neighborhood, watching the debris damage surrounding structures, and then informing the neighbors that the cleanup is their problem because he personally doesn’t use that street.
The architecture of self-inflicted disaster
Let’s be honest about the sequence of events, because the current administration has demonstrated a remarkable talent for amnesia when it comes to the cause.
In 2018, Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the imperfect but workable agreement that had set verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. The stated reasoning was that the deal was a “bad deal,” the product of naïve Obama-era diplomacy, insufficiently punitive and ultimately mental.
What followed was not, as promised, a better deal. What followed was seven years of maximum pressure, increasing enrichment, hardened Iranian resolve, and the systematic elimination of any diplomatic steps that might have made the current catastrophe avoidable.
By the time the June 2025 strikes — what the Pentagon called “Operation Midnight Hammer” — destroyed Iran’s main enrichment facilities, Tehran’s timeline had already been compressed into weeks. The strikes did not eliminate the program. They eliminated inspectors’ access to it.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, as of this writing, cannot confirm where Iran’s highly enriched uranium reserves are located. The administration that claimed to have “completely wiped out” the Iranian nuclear threat has instead produced a nuclear program that is invisible, scattered and, if anything, more determined than before.
The Venezuelan model was always a regional exception, not a universal playbook. Its implementation in Iran was less a strategy than a wish—and in foreign policy, as in markets, wishes have a poor track record against structural realities.
The transactional illusion
There is a deeper intellectual failure here that deserves consideration because it will prolong this particular crisis and inform the next.
Trump’s foreign policy worldview rests on a fundamental premise: that international relations are, at their core, transactional. That every adversary has a price, that every conflict has a settlement structure, and that the reason previous administrations failed was not structural complexity, but insufficient toughness and insufficient cunning.
In this framework, Iran was merely a counterpart who had to feel enough pain before arriving at the table with a suitably chastened attitude. The idea that to make foreign policy work all you need are sharp, tough businessmen who approach adversaries the way they approach their corporate counterparts is misleading, especially when the issues at stake include war, peace and survival.
No one has ever died defending the Trump brand. People have died, and will continue to die, defending the Persian Gulf, the right to enrich uranium, and the sovereignty of a civilization that predates the United States by some two and a half millennia.
What the administration never understood, what it seems constitutionally incapable of understanding, is that Iran’s nuclear program is not a bargaining chip. It is an existential insurance policy, the perceived need for which was dramatically reinforced the moment American bombers appeared over Isfahan.
You cannot bomb a country into submission while simultaneously demanding that it negotiate out of weakness. Conflict isn’t just tactical—it’s strategic.
Narrowing and shrugging
And so we arrive at this week’s extraordinary spectacle: an American president, five weeks after a war his administration precipitated, informing the world’s major economies—Europe, Japan, South Korea, India—that the Strait of Hormuz is their problem.
Trump said the US did not use the strait and called on countries that rely on it for fuel to take responsibility for protecting it. “Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourself,” Trump said.
One searches history for a comparable moment and finds few precedents. A hegemon who instigated a conflict by publicly abdicating responsibility for its consequences, in real time, while the consequences are still unfolding. It has the intellectual coherence of a man who steps on a chessboard and then complains that nobody plays.
The irony, rich enough to be barrel-aged, is that this is a president who came into office promising to restore American greatness, to restore American power, to make allies pay their fair share. He has achieved a version of this.
America’s allies are indeed being asked to pay — to pay for a war they didn’t want, to manage a crisis they didn’t create, to protect a waterway Washington has now casually denied.
Sisters have a logic of their own
I wrote a book in 1992 called “Katraghe: America in the Middle East.” I’d be lying if I took any pleasure in its continued relevance. The quagmire dynamic is depressingly consistent across administrations, across ideologies, across decades.
America intervenes, America escalates, America discovers that the Middle East is more complicated than prewar announcements suggested, and America then spends years looking for an exit that doesn’t exist—because exits must be built through the same diplomacy that was abandoned before the first bomb dropped.
Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria and Somalia. Iran’s war is, by its very nature, incapable of being fought alone. Iran is not a stateless militia.
It is a nation of 90 million people with a sophisticated military, asymmetric capabilities across the region, and the institutional memory of every American betrayal since 1953. It does not forget.
It does not capitulate. And it does not, as this administration expected, simply absorb a hit to its nuclear facilities and send a polite delivery note to Steve Witkoff’s hotel room in Muscat. How this war ends is as uncertain as why it started.
A final note on liability
The world will, somehow, respond to Trump’s invitation to manage the Hormuz crisis. There is little choice. The global economy does not have the luxury of principled abstention when fourteen million barrels of oil per day are at stake.
European fleets are likely to be mobilized. Asian economies will strive for alternative supply routes. The diplomatic machinery of nations that were never consulted before the first strike will work to produce a cease-fire that Washington should have secured before Operation Midnight Hammer was ever fired.
And when that happens—when European diplomats have negotiated off the platform, when Asian economies have absorbed the oil shock, when the international community has cleaned up again after an American foreign policy adventure—the administration will claim credit for the outcome, declare victory, and move on to the next deal.
This is, after all, his art.
it ITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
