General Ahmad Vahidi has a talent for getting under Donald Trump’s skin. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” President Trump recently said of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and his colleagues. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. . . .As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. It’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”
But of course it isn’t over. On Friday, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones slammed into Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing two American service members, leaving a third missing, and wounding four others. The IRGC claimed responsibility within hours.
Vahidi launched the attack not simply to answer Trump. He was also sending a message to Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the officials negotiating with Washington. You may sit across the table from the Americans, the strike in Jordan signaled to them, but I am the man really calling the shots.
Vahidi is a die-hard jihadi. For him, men like Ghalibaf and Araghchi have their uses, but they also need to know their place. They serve the Islamic Republic as infidel handlers: officials who translate the demands of the IRGC into language acceptable to Western diplomats. Their proximity to foreign power, however, can breed illusions of their own importance. To remind them who rules, Vahidi occasionally speaks in the language he knows best—violence.
That was also the purpose of the attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz that triggered the latest round of escalation. The IRGC struck ships that transited the waterway without coordinating with it and failed to follow its prescribed routes. These attacks were not mere acts of terrorism. They enforced Vahidi’s interpretation of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in mid-June between Trump and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.
According to Trump’s interpretation, the MOU established a 60-day negotiating period during which the United States would suspend its embargo, allowing Iran to resume oil exports. In return, Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and treat it, as before the war, as an international waterway rather than a sovereign asset.
Vahidi never accepted that view. According to his interpretation, Iran had merely agreed to suspend tolls during the negotiations. Commercial shipping would still acknowledge Iranian sovereignty by coordinating with the IRGC and following routes designated by it.
Araghchi and Ghalibaf almost certainly understood this gap. As experienced infidel handlers, they negotiated language that deliberately papered over the competing interpretations. Whether they believed they could eventually persuade Vahidi to accept Trump’s understanding or instead hoped to wear down the Americans through prolonged negotiations remains unclear. In either case, the ambiguity was the document’s central feature.
President Trump responded to Vahidi’s escalation by rescinding the waiver permitting Iranian oil sales, restoring the embargo, and ordering military strikes against IRGC targets. Many pundits therefore declared the MOU dead. Reports of its demise, however, are greatly exaggerated.
Rather than return to major combat operations, Trump has opted for a campaign of calibrated escalation designed to force Vahidi to accept the American definition of the MOU. His strikes have focused on coastal military infrastructure around Bandar Abbas and associated logistics links—such as bridges near Bandar Khamir—seeking to impose enough pain to make the status quo untenable without igniting a wider regional war.
The strategy reflects the same logic that originally informed the MOU. Trump seeks to combine military pressure with economic pressure. Superior American firepower sustains an embargo that Iran cannot indefinitely survive. Access to markets—and eventually to money—becomes the reward for compliance.
The theory is hardly implausible. It comports with the views of Tehran’s diplomatic establishment. President Pezeshkian and his allies point to looming water shortages, soaring unemployment, and an economy buckling under sanctions as evidence that the regime cannot afford prolonged war.
But the theory expects Vahidi to place the welfare of Iranian society above the institutional interests of the IRGC.
For decades, many Iran analysts assumed that the Islamic Republic differed fundamentally from, say, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, where no meaningful compact between ruler and ruled existed.
During the Syrian civil war, in every city regime loyalists painted a slogan on the walls: “Assad, or we will burn the country.” Recognize Assad as leader, or we will destroy everything. They meant it. With the assistance of the Russians and the IRGC, Assad’s forces turned Syrian cities to rubble and drove millions of people from their homes.
Would Vahidi tolerate Syrian levels of devastation inside Iran simply to preserve the IRGC’s grip on power? No one can answer with certainty. But Vahidi doubts he will ever face such a drastic choice. Unlike Assad, he possesses powerful tools of dissuasion in the form of missiles and drones.
Trump’s ongoing campaign centered on Bandar Abbas, the port city that guards the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz, will hurt the IRGC and impose additional economic costs, but it is unlikely to eliminate the drone threat. Iran does not need to mine the Strait of Hormuz continuously or deploy swarms of fast-attack craft to close it. Intermittent drone attacks on commercial shipping are enough to drive insurers from the market and achieve severe disruption.
Nor is shipping the only target. Vahidi recently struck a desalination plant in Kuwait and, with ballistic missiles that are also hard to eradicate, he has now killed American soldiers in Jordan. Vahidi’s confidence rests not only on belief in his holy cause but also on military reality. His strategy assumes that the United States cannot eliminate Iran’s remaining missile and drone capabilities without launching a regime-change invasion—and that assumption points to a much larger lesson.
The American debate about the war has yet to catch up with battlefield realities. Despite the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East since the Iraq War, American and Israeli forces have failed to fully neutralize Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz or threaten debilitating escalation against Gulf States. Critics cite this outcome as evidence of flawed decision-making. They mistake symptoms for causes.
The resilience of the IRGC’s missile and drone forces reveals how profoundly warfare has changed. These are not simply Iranian capabilities. They are increasingly coalition capabilities. Chinese technology and space-based services have become integral to Iran’s precision-strike complex, while Russian operational experience and military cooperation continue to shape its evolution. Affordable precision-guided systems, agile unmanned platforms, and hardened underground facilities have eroded the assumptions of American military dominance that shaped strategy after the Cold War. The era in which U.S. airpower could rapidly neutralize a regional adversary at acceptable cost is ending. It is being replaced by a more contested, attritional environment in which weaker states can buy time and impose significant costs.
These battlefield realities are already reshaping American strategy. Washington will increasingly prize allies that possess battle-tested militaries, functioning defense industries, advanced intelligence, and practical experience defeating missiles, drones, and hardened targets. It will prize, above all, allies that help the United States understand and counter the emerging Sino-Russian-Iranian military system. Israel meets those criteria. Very few others do.
Vahidi understands this perfectly. He knows that Trump will seek to remain within predictable limits, applying steadily increasing pressure while avoiding a wider war if possible.
That leaves four plausible outcomes. The least likely is a return to sustained, large-scale combat. More plausible is a prolonged low-level conflict that stretches through the American midterm elections. More plausible still is an accommodation under which Washington effectively accepts a degree of IRGC authority over commercial navigation in the strait.
The most favorable outcome for the United States—and the one on which Trump has currently placed his bets—would see sustained military and economic pressure eventually compel Vahidi to accept the American interpretation of the MOU.
That scenario is why Bandar Abbas has become, for the moment at least, the center of gravity in the conflict. It is the place where two competing visions of regional order collide. Trump is trying to prove that the United States—not the IRGC—sets the rules governing the Gulf’s most important waterway. Vahidi is trying to prove the opposite.
The real negotiation, therefore, is about who establishes the political facts that the memorandum will eventually ratify. Vahidi believes he has discovered the limits of American coercion. Trump believes those limits can still be pushed. Until one of them proves the other wrong, every missile strike, drone attack, and American retaliation around Bandar Abbas will be less an abandonment of the MOU than an argument over what it means.