Donald Trump now governs between enemies who want him to fail, and allies who demand impossible victories. He confronts that predicament as he announces that an agreement reopening the Strait of Hormuz is now “largely negotiated.”
Trump faces attacks from both directions at once. Republican allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham fear an ignominious retreat. “If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism,” Graham warned on X over the weekend, “then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.” Such an outcome, he added, “will be a nightmare for Israel.” Meanwhile, Democrats who opposed the war from the start depict the move toward diplomacy as an admission of futility. Senator Chris Van Hollen gloated that the emerging framework amounts to “a return to the prewar status quo.”
Adversaries claim that Trump’s diplomacy vindicates their depiction of the war as needless and reckless, while supporters demand an unconditional victory he cannot realistically deliver. Both sides misrepresent the strategic logic of the moment.
The Democratic critics refuse to acknowledge the war’s substantial achievements, foremost among them the severe degradation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and one of the leading independent experts on nuclear proliferation, assesses that Tehran went from near-certainty of the ability to build a nuclear weapon within months, to facing far longer timelines with substantially lower odds of success.
Meanwhile, Iran’s economy lies in ruins from sanctions, lost oil revenue, and infrastructure damage. Its proxies wield a fraction of their former power and are incapable of coordinated behavior as the “Axis of Resistance.” The new Supreme Leader, a nepo-baby Ayatollah, hides underground and presides over a fractured leadership. Much of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ballistic missile program lies under rubble. The list goes on. Taken together, these gains leave the United States in a stronger strategic position than before the war began.
Republican critics, for their part, do recognize these achievements but argue that Trump’s diplomacy is squandering them. Diplomatic concessions to Tehran, they fear, will dissipate the pressure painstakingly created by the war. To be sure, the Republican critics raise some legitimate concerns. Trump’s move toward diplomacy reflects an acknowledgment of Iranian coercive power. Iran demonstrated that even in a weakened state, it retained the ability to threaten escalation by targeting Gulf infrastructure and menacing commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Clearly, Trump decided that matching Tehran step for step up the escalation ladder carried unacceptable risks for global energy markets and regional stability.
But the critics are exaggerating the loss of leverage that this turn to diplomacy entails. Recognizing strategic limits and stepping back from combat are not the same thing as losing the fight. The question is not whether Iran has retained the capacity to impose some costs. It plainly has. The question is whether Tehran emerges from the war strategically stronger than before it began. The answer is no.
Donald Trump has repeatedly made clear that he is pursuing a single overriding strategic objective: eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The administration is pursuing a disciplined, performance-based approach to reach that goal, not the Obama-era pattern of a narrow nuclear deal paired with sweeping sanctions relief. Far from lifting all sanctions in exchange for limited nuclear concessions that would allow Iran to rebuild its ballistic missile arsenal and proxy network, the emerging framework ties any relief to verifiable Iranian actions.
Even as diplomacy advances, the administration continues to answer provocations. On Monday, U.S. forces conducted self-defense strikes in southern Iran targeting missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines, according to U.S. Central Command. “Central Command continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire,” a spokesman said.
In a conversation with a senior administration official over the weekend, the president’s thinking on the emerging framework became clearer. The president envisions a two-stage process. In the first stage, the two sides would sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz under international monitoring. The initial agreement is designed to stabilize energy markets, ease military tensions, and preserve the ceasefire. In exchange, Iran would receive limited, reversible economic relief, in the form of oil sales.
The second stage would then shift to the core strategic issue: the nuclear program. As the official put it to me, “What we want is a commitment on the enriched stockpile” already in the initial MOU. Here, the administration would press Iran to remove what Trump has taken to calling the “nuclear dust”—the remnants of Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure and its stockpiles of enriched uranium. The guiding principle, the official continued, is “No dust, no dollars. . . we are not giving up anything until they give us something.”
This plan will likely devolve into one of two possible outcomes. Let’s call them the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.
In the optimistic scenario, both stages of the plan come to fruition. An extendable MOU is signed in the coming days, reopening the Strait of Hormuz under international monitoring, easing immediate military tensions and allowing oil to flow normally through the Gulf. Iran receives limited, reversible economic relief. Economic desperation proves decisive. The IRGC concludes that partial accommodation is preferable to prolonged isolation and the risk of renewed American strikes. Serious negotiations follow on the nuclear file. Iran makes meaningful concessions on removing the “nuclear dust.”
The odds of this happening are slim. All available information suggests that the men now running Iran are less flexible than even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was. But the odds are not zero. The senior administration official told me that the Iranian regime is “fractured and broken.” The current emergency footing allows the IRGC to avoid responsibility for the mess it has made. Some administration officials hope the MOU will bring the regime to “the point at which they have to govern this broken country,” intensifying domestic pressure over inflation, corruption, and stagnation.
At the same time, officials remain clear-eyed that the IRGC may continue to ride roughshod over the Iranian people and refuse to budge on the nuclear program. Under those conditions, regional alignment against Tehran would deepen further.
In the pessimistic scenario, the first-stage MOU moves forward and the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but the second-stage negotiations over the nuclear remnants quickly bog down. Delay, mistrust, and tactical maneuvering place the negotiations on a road to nowhere, consistent with the pattern of all previous U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.
Even in this outcome, the United States would still achieve a significant strategic gain. The more relevant historical comparison is the post-1991 containment of Saddam Hussein. A weakened, sanctioned regime remained in prolonged friction with a U.S.-led coalition that retained escalation dominance and overwhelming military superiority. The military campaign would give way to a prolonged contest of pressure, deterrence, and attrition. But Iran now is substantially poorer, more isolated, and further from a nuclear breakout than before the war began. The U.S. and Israel will maintain close monitoring of any remaining nuclear activity and ballistic missile production, ready to react to any alarming developments.
The pessimistic scenario is not the administration’s goal but remains, in my view, the more likely outcome. Republican hawks will have far more influence over this process if they work within the president’s framework rather than reflexively opposing it.
Trump has already demonstrated, through action rather than rhetoric, that he is not Barack Obama. He introduced into these negotiations the element most absent from the Obama years: a credible and demonstrated willingness to use overwhelming military force against the Iranian regime.
His allies, therefore, will strengthen their position by holding the administration to its own calibrated “no dust, no dollars” standard. Three demands immediately come to the fore.
First, significant sanctions relief or direct economic benefits for Tehran must come only in exchange for concrete, verifiable concessions, not merely for participating in a diplomatic process. The administration’s leverage derives from economic pressure backed by military dominance. Dealing away that leverage prematurely would indeed repeat a core error of the Obama approach.
Second, the administration must detach Hezbollah and Lebanon from the nuclear negotiations. Tehran will seek to transform every regional file into a bargaining chip in order to preserve and legitimize its network of proxies. Washington gains nothing by reinforcing the link between the Iranian nuclear file and Hezbollah’s position inside Lebanon.
Third, the military threat must remain visible and credible throughout the negotiations. Tehran entered these talks only after suffering severe military and economic blows. The regime’s negotiating position will harden immediately if it concludes that diplomacy has neutralized the possibility of renewed force. Escalation dominance, not goodwill, remains the foundation of American leverage.
In the coming phase of the conflict, time favors the side that maintains pressure. By emphasizing leverage, verification, and long-term containment rather than maximalist demands for unconditional victory, supporters of the administration can strengthen the president’s hand while preserving the strategic gains achieved by the war.