After weeks of urging Iran to make a deal, Donald Trump on Monday posted a video from Fox News host Mark Levin, making the case that negotiating with Iran was now pointless.
The clip spoke to the US president’s growing frustration that his barrage of threats had so far failed to bring any real concessions from the Islamic Republic.
It also encapsulated the corner that Trump finds himself in as he weighs the biggest foreign policy gambit of his second term: a full-scale attack on Iran.
“I think the reality is the president has put himself in a box,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a former US-Middle East peace negotiator.
Trump has hemmed himself in, Miller said, by pledging assistance to Iran’s protesters and deploying an array of military assets within striking distance of Tehran.
On top of that, the US’s successful operation to remove Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from power has made Trump too confident of his odds in Iran.
“He has put himself in a situation where unless he manages to extract a considerable concession from the Iranians to avoid a war he doesn’t want, he’s going to be forced into one,” said Miller. “This is a crisis of his own making.”
What started as a promise to “rescue” Iranian protesters from the regime’s lethal crackdown in December has evolved into a pressure tactic — even though Trump’s motives remain unclear.
Over the past two months, Trump had cited a “merry-go-round list of rationales” for striking Iran, said Rosemary Kelanic, a political scientist and Middle East expert at Defense Priorities, a Washington think-tank that cautions against interventionism.
The motivations have ranged from the imperative to dismantle a nuclear programme that Trump claimed to have already “obliterated”, to disabling the Iranian proxy militants that US and Israeli officials say have also been dramatically weakened.
Damaging Iran’s ballistic missiles is another motive — although they do not have the range to reach the US. And for a period in January, the rationale, expressed over Truth Social, was a vow to the protesters that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY”.
“There are I think, huge questions about why the United States is doing this in the first place,” Kelanic said.
Hardliners in Trump’s orbit such as Levin have made clear that the goal should be regime change and the US should act now, while Tehran was “weaker than ever before”.
The US cannot “leave it to the next generation” to act. “That regime needs to be eliminated,” he urged Trump on his Fox News show, the video of which Trump shared online.
The president has deployed in recent weeks the largest collection of US military assets to the Middle East since the Iraq war. On Monday, a second aircraft carrier group, the USS Gerald R Ford, was spotted off the coast of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean.
Despite the military build-up and Trump’s repeated threats to use the assets — including for possible limited strikes — Iran has yet to agree any kind of deal, to the bafflement of US officials.
“[Trump is] curious as to . . . why under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power, naval power that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon?’” Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said on Saturday on Fox News.
Witkoff also claimed that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material”, although experts do not share that assessment.
Trump has been clear Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or the capacity to build them, and that they cannot enrich uranium, a White House official said on Monday.
“The president would like to see a deal negotiated, but he has been clear that either we will make a deal or we will have to do something very tough like last time.”
Despite the rapid escalation, however, Trump is also contending with the risks that new strikes or a full-blown war against Iran will bring.
Regional experts and administration officials have warned him that Iran would likely target US military assets, allies and energy infrastructure in the region in any retaliation.
Trump on Monday hit back at reports that General Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had argued against attacking Iran.
“Everything that has been written about a potential War with Iran has been written incorrectly, and purposefully so,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people.”
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday also urged Iran to make a deal, but said that any strike would ultimately be up to Trump. “Our job is to provide options and we will have options for the president should Iran decide not to take a deal,” he said. “Everything is on the table, it’s the president’s decision.”
But Israeli intelligence has concluded that even with the imminent arrival of the USS Gerald R Ford later this week, the US has military capacity to sustain just a four to five day intense aerial assault, or a week of lower-intensity strikes, an Israeli intelligence official told the FT.
American casualties would also risk domestic blowback in Trump’s Maga constituency and among voters generally more wary of war than inaction towards Iran. A quarter of Republicans say they oppose a US military intervention in Iran under the current circumstances, while 40 per cent support it, according to a new poll by the University of Maryland. The vast majority of Democrats said they oppose it.
“Who wants this? Nobody wants this,” said Miller at the Carnegie Endowment. “We’re sleep walking towards a war, in search of a strategy.”
But Trump has been emboldened by his success in Venezuela and Tehran’s muted response to moves his advisers also deemed risky, analysts say. They include his withdrawal from the nuclear pact with Iran in 2018, the US’s assassination of Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and last year’s bombing of Iranian nuclear sites.
On each occasion, Trump rolled the dice on Iran and felt vindicated, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran and US policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment.
“To him, the dire warnings of triggering a regional war proved overblown, and Iran proved a paper tiger. I don’t think his ideal outcome is military confrontation, but if he chooses that route he probably likes his odds.”
Additional reporting by Mehul Srivastava in London. Data visualisation and cartography by Steven Bernard