This essay does not exist to defend what is happening in Iran. The human cost is staggering, the legal questions are serious, and anyone who writes about strategy from the safety of a desk owes at least that admission before proceeding. What follows is an attempt to understand the strategic logic at work and to acknowledge honestly that no one yet knows whether it will succeed.
With that said: the foreign policy establishment’s instinct to frame Trump’s approach as chaos and nothing more reflects a failure of historical imagination. Henry Kissinger, who understood power more rigorously than perhaps any American statesman of the twentieth century, helped develop what became known as the madman theory of diplomacy. The strategy involved a leader pushing so many chips into the pot that the other side would think he might be crazy and might really go much further.  The premise was that a rational actor making threats is less credible than one who seems ungoverned by ordinary self-interest. The appearance of irrationality makes otherwise non-credible threats seem credible, since threats by a rational leader to escalate a dispute may seem suicidal and thus easily dismissible by adversaries.  This was not fringe theorizing. It was Kissinger’s Harvard seminar. It shaped American foreign policy during some of its most consequential decades.
Whether Trump is consciously running this playbook or arriving at similar territory by instinct is a question worth leaving open. The outcome, so far, bears some resemblance to the theory in action. Since protests subsided in early 2026, Trump has used American military deployments to add leverage to his efforts to compel the beleaguered Iranian regime to agree to concessions ending the broad range of strategic threats it poses.  Each deployment was a bargaining chip. Each deadline extended and then hardened was another. By late March, Trump was telling reporters that Iran had agreed to never pursue a nuclear weapon and to forgo uranium enrichment, demands that had gone unmet for decades of quieter diplomacy. 
Compare this with what the Obama administration achieved through the approach it considered more measured and responsible. Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 JCPOA across multiple countries and years, with Kerry and his Iranian counterpart meeting on eighteen different dates, sometimes more than once per day, across eleven different cities.  The deal produced real constraints. It also produced, by its critics’ accounting, something more troubling: more than $115 billion in sanctions relief to the Iranian regime, cash the mullahs used to develop their nuclear program, fund their military, and finance their international terrorist network.  The agreement contained sunset clauses, meaning its restrictions were always temporary. Critics argued that once the JCPOA expired, Iran would be able to sprint to develop a nuclear weapon, meaning the agreement was not a lasting solution but simply kicked the can down the road.  Iran was, by early 2024, assessed to have enough highly enriched uranium for multiple weapons.
Trump’s approach has been built on a different premise: that Iran responds to existential pressure and nothing else. The evidence from the current moment supports this at least partially. By late March 2026, Iran’s leadership was described as paralyzed, with severely disrupted decision-making and internal power struggles fed by damaged communications infrastructure.  That is not the posture of a regime negotiating from a position of strength. It is the posture of an institution fighting for survival.
But here is where the war game assumptions most Western analysts use break down entirely, and where the comparison to past crises becomes inadequate. The regime in Tehran has never been primarily a geopolitical actor operating within a cost-benefit framework that resembles anything the State Department models. The Iranian regime considers their nation chosen by Allah to prepare the world for the coming of their messiah, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who will establish justice in the world. They believe that catastrophic world chaos and the defeat of their enemies, especially Israel, are prerequisites for this event.  Some factions within Iran’s clerical leadership believe the Mahdi’s return will be hastened by global destruction and war, meaning that if Iran’s leaders believe nuclear war would hasten the return of this prophesied figure, they would actually be motivated to start such a war regardless of the consequences. 
This is a variable that no war game adequately accounts for, because no war game is designed to model actors who interpret national annihilation as a possible precondition for divine fulfillment. Western policymakers often rely on a rationalist model of deterrence, in which mutual vulnerability ensures restraint, but that model presumes survival is the highest good. In regimes where martyrdom and apocalyptic expectation are interwoven with state ideology, that assumption becomes fragile.  Iran has not been afraid to use suicidal techniques before. The Iran-Iraq war consumed a generation of Iranian youth sent to the front in human waves, with children given plastic keys said to unlock the gates of paradise. As the Iran-Iraq war demonstrated, if this struggle results in mass martyrdom, this is thought only to hasten the coming of the Imam Mahdi. 
This theological framework is also why the human shield strategy carries a logic beyond simple military calculation. Iranian officials called on all young people, athletes, artists, students, and university students and their professors to form human chains around power plants as Trump’s deadline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz drew closer.  The regime understands, with precision, that the United States values Iranian civilian lives more than the Iranian government does. That asymmetry is a weapon.
To be presidential in this environment cannot mean performing the grammar of presidential behavior for audiences who will never be satisfied. It means perceiving clearly what kind of adversary one is actually facing, what its internal logic is, and what it will and will not respond to. The JCPOA’s most fundamental problem was that it assumed a negotiating partner operating within a recognizable framework of national interest. The assumption may have been wrong from the start.
Whether Trump’s approach will ultimately succeed remains genuinely unknown. If Iran doesn’t budge, the worst outcome for Washington would be a symbolic or limited strike, a disadvantageous deal dressed as victory, something that would torpedo American credibility and embolden the regime like never before.  And the outcome of that collision has not yet been written.