Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump agreed on the objective: an Islamic Republic stripped of its nuclear program and of the power to hold the region hostage. But they frequently disagreed about how to make Tehran yield. Graham never wavered. More force, he recommended.
Three weeks into the war, the senator revealed the advice he had given the president: “Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island ... [and] let this regime die on the vine.” In May, he put the theory plainly: “Hurt them more. Maybe they’ll make a deal if you hurt them enough.” And in June, three weeks before his death, he predicted that if Iran contested the Strait of Hormuz, “We will obliterate them.”
Since last Easter, Trump has repeatedly threatened Tehran in accordance with Graham’s advice. Last month, the U.S. military prepared the largest strike of the war. At the urging of regional allies, however, the president again gave the military the order to stand down. Graham did not live to accept that rejection, but many of his political allies, my friends among them, reached what they considered to be an obvious conclusion: Trump had lost his nerve.
Some suspected something even worse. The president, they said, is becoming Barack Obama. The memorandum of understanding that he and Iranian Pezeshkian signed in June commits the United States, “with regional partners,” to provide “at least USD $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It pledges Washington to terminate “all types of sanctions.” It binds both parties to “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” Graham called this formal renunciation of regime change a Marshall Plan for Germany—“with the Nazis still in charge.”
The memorandum, however, never came to life. When Iranian attacks on supertankers resumed in July, the deal collapsed, and administration officials now dismiss it as no longer relevant. The critics’ Exhibit A is a document the administration buried before the critics finished trashing it.
Vice President JD Vance responded to the criticism by promising that Iran would “never get a dime” of American taxpayer money. But the fear was never about the accounting. It was that the president who twice bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities was now distancing America from Israel, addressing Tehran as a partner in regional stability, and buying restraint with money.
The Donald J. Obama interpretation has one great advantage. It makes sense of some of the president’s rhetoric. But it makes little sense of the totality of his actions, which are more reliable than his words as an indicator of his thinking.
His actions reveal a president steering between what he considers to be two wrecks. The first is George W. Bush’s regime-change war in Iraq. Trump called that war possibly the worst decision in presidential history and promised his voters never to repeat it. The second is Barack Obama’s Iran policy. After Iraq, Obama concluded, America’s only remaining course was to retreat, pay Tehran for quiet, and call it peace.
Trump’s critics can imagine only these two headings, so each camp accuses him of steering toward the one it hates. But the president is attempting something harder: He is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without tipping into the war of conquest toward which the dynamic of the conflict is pulling him. The bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Whether that middle course can succeed is the real question of the stalemate. Answering it begins with the military balance, which Graham’s theory took for granted.
Graham’s prescription rested on a simple theory of coercion. Iran could absorb only so much punishment. Apply enough pressure and eventually the regime would conclude that yielding was preferable to taking another beating. Six months of war have exposed the hidden assumption in that theory: that Iran’s breaking point can be reached at a price the United States and its allies are willing to pay.
To be sure, the United States can devastate Iran. Devastation and compellence, however, are not the same thing. Iran’s missiles and drones are dispersed, mobile, buried underground. As long as enough survive, Tehran can impose severe costs of its own, not just on American forces but on the energy and desalination infrastructure on which the Gulf states depend. The question confronting Trump since April, therefore, has not been whether the United States could hit Iran harder. Of course it could. The question was how much Iranian society would be made to suffer, and whether that suffering would change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which in turn would retaliate against civilian infrastructure in the Gulf.
To the hawks, this restraint reflects a failure of political will. It is better understood as a recognition of the limits on military power. Consider the most common hawkish prescription: seize the strait. Graham described it in June as settled policy: the United States would take the waterway by force and control it. But calling for the physical seizure of the strait mistakes the nature of the threat that Iran actually poses to shipping.
Tehran did not hold the waterway in the sense that an army holds ground. It hit a modest number of tankers with drones and laid some mines, but that has been sufficient to paralyze traffic. Just how modest became clear only later. According to American officials, of the more than 200 minelike objects that the U.S. Navy eventually swept from the main shipping lane, only 11 were actual mines. Eleven mines closed the world’s most important energy choke point.
Within 48 hours of the opening strikes, war-risk premiums jumped many times over. Major underwriters cancelled Gulf coverage outright. Lloyd’s of London redesignated the entire Gulf a conflict zone. Insurance rates increased 50-fold. Traffic fell by more than 80%.
The American military cannot seize the Strait of Hormuz from an actuarial table. To reopen it by force, the United States would have to make shipowners and their insurers confident that the next transit is safe enough to justify the risk. Over the last two months, the United States has partially succeeded in that task. It has reopened the strait by laying siege to the besieger. A joint task force with the United Arab Emirates began escorting tankers through the southern channel under air cover. A two-week bombing campaign degraded the IRGC’s capacity to attack shipping. Navy divers, SEALs, and drones swept the mines. And Trump restored the blockade of Iran’s ports.
By late August, 20 to 30 tankers a night were moving 9 million to 10 million barrels, and Trump was declaring victory. “That sucker is open. That’s the whole ballgame,” he told an interviewer.
But look at what the numbers concede. While American officials boast that only 2% of transiting ships were hit in the past month, freight volumes remain at half their prewar level. And the price of keeping the strait open is considerable. Years before this war, the commander of Central Command gave the source of this cost a name. Iran, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned, had achieved “overmatch” against its neighbors—the capacity to attack an adversary who cannot mount a successful defense.
Tehran spent two decades preparing for precisely this war. The IRGC’s “mosaic” defense disperses command, launchers, and production across so many redundant nodes that no single strike changes much. The arsenal sits in tunnel complexes and hardened silos. The weapons themselves are cheap: a Shahed drone is assembled from commercially available components in a workshop small enough to hide. Many such sites operate inside Iran, and factories in Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan duplicate them. The United States can destroy production sites, temporarily, but it cannot bomb away an arms industry that fits in warehouses and can be replicated beyond Iran’s borders.
This inadequacy is hardly unique to the United States military. Drones and missiles are revolutionizing modern warfare. Every power in the world is scrambling to adjust to the new reality. Even as the United States has needed six months and a multinational task force to partially suppress Iranian drones over a 21-mile waterway, Ukrainian drones have damaged Russia’s oil refining capacity, driving production to its lowest level in decades. Cheap precision weaponry favors the side that wants to break things over the side that needs them to work.
Because a relatively small number of drone and missile attacks can close the Strait of Hormuz, and because there is no reliable way to entirely eliminate Iran’s disruptive capabilities, the military problem quickly becomes a problem of compellence. If the United States cannot prevent Iran from firing, it must persuade the IRGC to stop. That brings us back to Graham’s prescription: hurt them until they quit. But what does “hurt” mean, and how much hurting would that require?
The obvious target is Iran’s economy. The United States could destroy its refineries, export terminals, electrical grid, and other critical infrastructure, depriving the regime of the revenue and economic activity that sustain it. But a scorched-earth campaign on that scale would also impose enormous costs on Iranian society. The collapse of basic services could produce social breakdown and potentially a refugee crisis spilling into Turkey and Europe.
Meanwhile, Tehran would not simply sit still while the United States bombed the Iranian economy into rubble. It has threatened precisely the retaliation that America’s Gulf allies fear most: attacks on the energy infrastructure and desalination plants on which their economies and populations depend.
That threat exploits the same military asymmetry that keeps the strait closed. The Gulf is full of things that need to work: terminals, pipelines, refineries, electrical grids, ports, airports, and desalination facilities. Iran does not have to destroy them all. It needs only to demonstrate that it can hit enough of them often enough to make their continued operation uncertain.
Defending every target indefinitely is impossible, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Iran can manufacture drones cheaply and in large numbers; some can be defeated cheaply as well. But Iran mixes those drones with ballistic missiles that require sophisticated interceptors costing millions of dollars apiece. Tehran can replenish its offensive arsenal faster and more cheaply than the United States and its allies can replenish the high-end defenses required to stop it. Even a highly successful defense therefore consumes scarce weapons at an unsustainable rate.
The result is what strategists call an offense-dominant balance. The United States enjoys overwhelming superiority by every conventional measure. It can destroy virtually anything in Iran that it can find. Iran cannot defeat the United States, seize the Gulf, or protect its own infrastructure from American attack. Yet Tehran retains the ability to break things faster and more cheaply than Washington can guarantee that they will keep working. Cheap precision weapons have therefore given a much weaker power a limited but potent form of escalation leverage against a vastly stronger one.
None of this means, as some pundits have claimed, that Iran is a rising power, or that the United States cannot win. It can. If Trump were prepared to destroy enough of Iran’s economy, absorb Iranian retaliation across the Gulf, expend or replenish the necessary stocks of interceptors, and accept the humanitarian and political consequences, American power could eventually destroy Iran’s capacity to resist. But that is very different from saying that Iran can be compelled quickly and cheaply. By August, Trump faced not a choice between victory and appeasement, but between different prices for achieving his objectives.
In late July, that price became visible. Analysts and Pentagon sources disclosed that the war had consumed roughly half of America’s Patriot interceptors and, by some accounts, as much as 80% of its THAAD inventory, against replacement rates of about 20 Patriots a month and an estimated three years to rebuild the THAAD stockpile. The New York Times reported that this shortage was among the reasons the president set aside the August strike. My friends read the disclosures as propaganda manufactured by officials looking for reasons not to fight. To be sure, they were propaganda, intended to sway opinion. But they were also true enough to do their work.
The United States retains enough munitions to prosecute the Iran war under any plausible scenario. The constraint is not Iran. It is Iran and the Pacific at the same time. Every interceptor fired over the Gulf is one unavailable to Taiwan, and the industrial base cannot replace them at the rate a serious campaign consumes them.
That distinction explains Trump’s restraint better than the claim that he suddenly became Barack Obama. Six months of war had tested Graham’s proposition that Iran could be made to yield simply by hurting it more. The experiment did not show that Graham was wrong in the ultimate sense. Some level of destruction will undoubtedly break the regime’s will or its capacity to resist. But no one can identify that level with precision and authority. The costs of searching for it were rising for Trump as much as for Iran.
The political constraint is even harder than the military one, and Trump has never concealed it. He rose in 2016 as the Republican who ran against the Iraq war, promising his party’s convention to “abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.”
That promise built his coalition, which is holding him to it. The war is unpopular. About a third of the country approves. The midterm elections are less than three months away. The neighbors constrain him, too. By the president’s own account, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “was a prime candidate to go into the war with Iran—maybe on the Iran side,” until Trump asked him to stay out. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, it reveals the war Trump believes he is fighting: one that nearby powers might, at any moment, make much bigger.
Some critics might reply that this caution is precisely the problem. Wars are won by escalation dominance. The IRGC will deprive civilians of water and power without blinking, so American reluctance to answer in kind merely hands Tehran an advantage. But humanitarian scruple is not the principal constraint on Trump. The problem is where escalation leads. The IRGC has structured the conflict so that the next rungs on the ladder point toward regime change. Truly eradicating its dispersed arsenal might require controlling the ground on which it sits. Destroying the economy risks social breakdown, refugees pouring toward Turkey and Europe, and American responsibility for whatever emerges from the rubble.
Nor is there any guarantee that such punishment would quickly produce capitulation. The recent histories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza have demonstrated how much suffering Middle Eastern political and military organizations can impose on the populations under their control without abandoning their fundamental objectives.
The IRGC is staring Trump down. Its message to him is explicit: to achieve your stated aims, you will have to become George W. Bush and fight the very war you came to power denouncing. Trump is refusing the dare. Despite his early flirtations with the vocabulary of liberation, he has withheld every act that would make liberation the mission, down to a memorandum that forswears interference in Iran’s internal affairs.
But he has equally refused Obama’s course of purchasing quiet and calling it peace. Since April he has pursued a third option: siege.
On Aug. 24, at Trump’s direction, the Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast. The administration described it as a whole-of-government campaign, in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s words, to “sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime” until Tehran stands alone. Graham had damned the MOU as a Marshall Plan with the Nazis still in charge. The administration is now answering in the same idiom.
Treasury declared five additional sectors of the Iranian economy sanctionable—digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—and in a single day designated nearly sixty entities, individuals, and vessels across an international network. Four days later, it moved against the UAE branches of Banque Misr, alleging that they had processed some $1.8 billion for companies in Iran’s shadow-banking network. The point was not simply to announce another sanctions package, but to demonstrate that institutions helping Tehran evade the siege could themselves lose access to the American financial system.
The financial siege is welded to the maritime siege. Treasury has warned companies that complying with Iranian demands over Hormuz shipping could expose them to American sanctions. Washington is escorting tankers past Tehran’s tollbooth while forbidding the market to pay the toll. It is even applying pressure to institutions in the same Gulf states whose shipping American forces are protecting.
None of this is how a president courts Tehran as a partner in regional stability. “America is no longer managing the Iranian threat,” Bessent declared. “We are ending it.” Whether the boast proves justified is a separate question. As a statement of intent, however, it cannot be reconciled with the proposition that Trump has become Barack Obama.
Trump stands poised, uncomfortably but deliberately, between Bush and Obama, trying to make the siege accomplish what bombing alone has not.
Trump’s predicament reflects something larger than the peculiarities of Iran or his own political coalition. A revolution in the character of warfare is underway, yet the American political debate has not caught up. The stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz is the product of cheap precision weapons, not presidential temperament. To admit this requires abandoning cherished positions.
The Obama camp insists that the strait is closed because Trump chose war over diplomacy. In this telling, Obama’s diplomacy—embodied in the JCPOA—had already solved the Iranian problem. The present crisis is merely the predictable result of abandoning that agreement.
But the JCPOA rested on the assumption that the nuclear problem could be isolated from Iran’s growing disruptive military capabilities. The war has exposed the flaw in that assumption. Missiles and drones, not centrifuges, closed the Strait of Hormuz. As Iran’s missile-and-drone arsenal grew, it also raised the prospective cost of enforcing nuclear restrictions and progressively sheltered the nuclear program behind a widening zone of immunity. An agreement that capped enrichment while leaving that arsenal untouched therefore left its own enforcement increasingly vulnerable.
The hawks’ cherished position fares no better. Graham’s theory held that enough bombardment would eventually produce capitulation. Six months on, Trump appears to have found another way to apply the pressure he prescribed: not simply by escalating the bombing, but by shifting the contest onto terrain where American advantages are greater. Iran created local overmatch in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is answering with naval power, economic warfare, and control of the global financial system.
The stalemate has therefore changed shape. It is no longer a question of whether a course exists between Bush’s war and Obama’s retreat. Trump is attempting to create one: suppress Iran’s disruptive capabilities enough to keep Gulf commerce moving, deny Tehran the same privilege, and use America’s global economic power to impose costs that airpower alone could not. Whether this strategy will compel Iran remains unknown. Five days of financial warfare do not settle a six-month war. But the experiment is now underway. Graham wanted to hurt Iran until it wanted a deal. Trump is trying to do precisely that.