{"id":36632,"date":"2026-08-28T06:58:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T06:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=36632"},"modified":"2026-08-28T06:58:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T06:58:56","slug":"report-maximum-pressure-on-iran-will-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=36632","title":{"rendered":"Report: Maximum Pressure on Iran Will Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Trump\u2019s War Has Brought American Strategy to a Dead End<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

NATE SWANSON\u00a0is a Resident Senior Fellow and Director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council. He served as Director for Iran at the National Security Council from 2022 to 2025. In the spring and summer of 2025, he served on the Trump administration\u2019s Iran negotiating team.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has bedeviled U.S. presidents. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis helped doom Jimmy Carter\u2019s reelection bid. The Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s badly tarnished Ronald Reagan\u2019s foreign policy record. And Barack Obama\u2019s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), led to an unprecedented situation in which the U.S. Congress invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington to argue against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February, when he launched his war against Iran<\/a>, President Donald Trump declared that he intended to break this embarrassing pattern once and for all. By crushing Iran militarily and effecting regime change, he boasted that whereas other presidents had only talked about the Iranian threat, he was taking decisive action to end it. But six months later, Trump has become yet another U.S. president facing a dangerous humiliation related to Iran; the fallout from his excursion threatens his party\u2019s prospects in the midterm elections. Now, perhaps in desperation, Trump is attempting to squeeze Tehran with an economic noose. But as it is constructed, this economic-pressure operation poses a greater threat to U.S. credibility than it does to Iran\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In truth, the multifaceted war Trump<\/a> has launched is not a break with precedent but the apotheosis of the same flawed strategy that has undergirded U.S. policy toward Iran from the Islamic Republic\u2019s inception, in 1979. Iran\u2019s theocratic regime has continually flummoxed U.S. administrations in part because it contains profound contradictions. It is simultaneously ideological and transactional. Tehran continues to adhere to the core features of its revolutionary ideology, including its anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy, but can also act with pragmatism when circumstances demand it. Iran accepted meaningful limits on its nuclear program in 2015, for instance, and reversed decades of hostility toward Saudi Arabia by normalizing ties in 2023. Iran\u2019s relationship to the U.S. national interest is confusing, too. The regime does pose a direct threat to the United States because of its illicit nuclear program. And long before the current war began, the terrorism and proxy militias Iran funded were menacing U.S. citizens and shipping through the Red Sea. Yet for most Americans, Iran remains a distant afterthought. A war that has extensively destroyed Iranian infrastructure, distorted the country\u2019s economy, and killed an entire echelon of leaders, as well as thousands of soldiers and civilians, has had almost no impact on the United States other than driving up gas prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To address these dualities, Washington has often stripped nuance from policymaking and oriented U.S. strategy around pressure as the primary tool to contain Iran and compel it to behave differently. This pressure strategy has rested on two pillars: establishing a credible military threat and engaging in economic coercion. But instead of resolving the perplexing paradoxes posed by the Islamic Republic, this approach only deepened them\u2014especially as Trump has sought to intensify the pressure strategy. A wave of domestic protests in January showed that Iran is internally combustible, but the war proved that the Islamic Republic is resilient and will not capitulate. Airstrikes have weakened the regime militarily but strengthened its standing internally. Iran acknowledges that it needs sanctions relief, but it is also learning that time is on its side and that, by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, it can impose reciprocal consequences for pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/united-states\/maximum-pressure-iran-will-fail?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=Maximum%20Pressure%20on%20Iran%20Will%20Fail&utm_content=20260828&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week_Newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s War Has Brought American Strategy to a Dead End NATE SWANSON\u00a0is a Resident Senior Fellow and Director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council. He served as Director for Iran at the National Security Council from 2022 to 2025. In the spring and summer of 2025, he served on the Trump administration\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[512,33726,1990,34163,1510,34164,19127,349],"class_list":["post-36632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-america-2","tag-coercion-2","tag-iran-2","tag-iranian-regime","tag-israel-2","tag-pressure","tag-resilience-2","tag-us-2","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36634,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36632\/revisions\/36634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}