President Trump’s April 21 decision on to extend his original two-week ceasefire with Iran, less than 12 hours after he expressed reluctance to do precisely that, is giving the U.S. and Iran more time to salvage a diplomatic process defined by misleading statements, rhetorical chest-thumping, and conflicting agendas.
While shooting has stopped for the time being, the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz remains. The good news is that neither the United States’ nor Iran’s best interests are served by a long-term conflict, which suggests both sides are at the very least keen to keep the diplomatic option open in order to determine whether a settlement to the nearly two-month long war is possible. The bad news is that Trump’s poor assumptions about how Iran would react to U.S. pressure tactics have led to poor decisions and a conflict in the Persian Gulf whose outcome remains in doubt. Far from squeezing Iranian leaders into concessions, the U.S. president has repeatedly ceded leverage in negotiation.
Trump is notoriously unpredictable on a lot of subjects, but he’s been quite consistent on Iran throughout his presidency. His objective is clear: to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all had a similar policy, even if they adopted different strategies for getting there. The difference is Trump’s unwillingness to adapt, his propensity to wield the stick without the carrot, and most of all, his unwarranted confidence in his assumptions.
Trump’s blunders have made the goal harder. The first occurred in 2018, when he withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. Trump, who said JCPOA offered too much relief from sanctions while imposing too few limits on Tehran’s nuclear activity, launched a “maximum-pressure” strategy on Iran’s leaders that sought to prevent Iranian oil from reaching the global market and to cut off Iranian-linked banks from the international financial system. The hope was that Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader at the time, would come back to the table on U.S. terms.
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