By Mike Nelson
Monday, June 08, 2026
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. President Donald
Trump is growing increasingly frustrated by a conflict with no clear end in
sight. Despite initial overwhelming success and ongoing tactical victories
against an enemy outmatched in skill and technological prowess, the war’s
continuation has not brought the U.S. any closer to victory. His heart really
isn’t in it, and he sees it as a distraction from the things he’d rather be
focusing on.
Growing concerned about the costs of the conflict, Trump
seeks a negotiated settlement to bring the fighting to a close. While this does
seem like the most likely resolution to the war, our adversary proves to be a
difficult and duplicitous negotiating counterpart. We find ourselves constantly
offering concessions to our enemy—not as part of the final settlement, but just
to convince its leaders to continue talks that they seem more than willing to
walk away from. Our desperation to continue discussions is in part because,
since the start of the negotiations, the enemy has avoided targeting American
troops directly, instead continuing attacks on partners, allies, and their
civilian infrastructure.
This constant pattern of concessions pulls America
further and further from what we actually hoped to achieve in a settlement, and
the act of negotiating becomes the goal in itself in hopes of getting a
deal—any deal—that allows us to walk away from the war. Our nominal friends,
Qatar and Pakistan, are offering questionable advice while pretending to act as
honest brokers between the warring parties.
The situation above encapsulates the president’s current
predicament as he seeks to end the war with Iran. But it is also a description
of the first Trump administration’s approach to the Doha negotiations with the
Taliban—a disastrous agreement that, while not the final conclusion to our
longest war, almost guaranteed our embarrassing defeat.
First, let me concede there are obvious distinctions
between the two conflicts. The duration and human toll of the war in
Afghanistan both significantly outpace those of the war with Iran. Trump
initiated the Iran war and will (hopefully) be the president who is ultimately
responsible for its conclusion, whereas in Afghanistan, Trump inherited the
ongoing conflict from two previous administrations, and he was not the
commander in chief who oversaw the catastrophic end. His government, however,
signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that began the NATO
withdrawal later that year and promised its completion by 2021. This timeline
neither attributes sole responsibility to nor absolves Trump or Joe Biden of
the disaster that followed with the 2021 fall of Kabul; as fellow Dispatch
contributor Paul Miller has pointed out in his excellent book, there is plenty of shared blame among the
four administrations that conducted the war.
But while there are distinctions between the two
conflicts, there are also similarities specific to the Trump administration’s
negotiating philosophy.
In 2017, President Trump announced his South Asia strategy—a plan for dealing with
the war that had dragged on too long, with various shifting goals, nebulous end
states, distracting mission creep, and too little focus on creating conditions
for lasting stability in Afghanistan. Among other things, the strategy
confronted a truth that many U.S. officials had been unwilling to face: We had
not succeeded in ending the Taliban’s operations through military force, and
were not likely to do so in the future. Therefore, there needed to be some plan
for their reintegration into a post-conflict Afghanistan. The strategy
envisioned reconciliation and the eventual political integration of the Taliban
into the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
Yet to achieve this goal, American negotiators agreed to
Taliban demands that planted the seeds of future disaster. The Taliban refused
to allow the Afghan government to participate in the talks and made promises
(that were never honored) to later negotiate directly with then-President
Ashraf Ghani’s government only after a deal with Washington had been reached.
In 2020, the U.S. agreed to the release of Taliban fighters in Afghan
government custody—something Afghan officials were neither aware of prior to the
deal nor supportive of, only doing so eventually, and begrudgingly, following
U.S. arm-twisting. Their concerns proved legitimate: A large number of the
thousands of fighters released then returned to the battlefield and
participated in the final assault on Kabul in August 2021.
Today, the president seems to be walking down that same
path, one where his need and desperation to keep negotiations going could lead
him to agree to otherwise unacceptable terms—not even as part of a final
settlement, but just for the potential for the other side to show up to the
table.
Last week, the Iranians announced they were walking away from negotiations because
of continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in response to rocket and drone
attacks from the latter. Rather than take issue with this Iranian
recalcitrance, Trump once again threw his ally under the bus. During an
adversarial phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu, the president reportedly called the Israeli prime minister “crazy” for
jeopardizing negotiations with Tehran. He then publicly claimed that he had
gotten Israel to agree to the Iranian demands to halt hostilities in Lebanon,
despite the fact that Hezbollah
had given no such assurances.
If one of the White House’s stated goals for the war with
Iran was severing the links between the Islamic Republic and its regional
proxies, Tehran’s ability to demand protection for these militias, and the
administration jumping to comply, do exactly the opposite—it codifies that
connection.
Any extended protection over Hezbollah or other proxies
in the final settlement would be unacceptable, as would any other conditions
that run contrary to our stated goals. But rather than haggle over them in the
process of diplomatic horse-trading, Iran is all but guaranteeing these
conditions will be included by baking them in before the real negotiations
happen. By making such demands preconditions for even talking, Iran
preemptively weights the outcome, having notched a series of wins before we
establish what is on the table regarding starting positions. It’s galling that
a man who sold himself as a master dealmaker does not see or does not care how
much he is willing to give away in advance.
The president is apparently spooked—both by the whispers
that a settlement would be viewed as too sweet a deal for Iran and by the
prospects of continued human costs, economic disruption, and depletion of
critical military weapons if he were to reinitiate hostilities. So he commits
to neither—doing anything to continue negotiations or maintain the appearance
of negotiations and making repeated and increasingly far-fetched claims of a
forthcoming deal. Perhaps he views this as Schrödinger’s negotiation, where all
potential outcomes are possible and exist within the theoretical box as long as
he never commits to one, keeping alive the hope of a glorious and undisputed
victory.
But today, thanks to Trump’s missteps during the war,
there are only outcomes with significant downsides within the box—and the
drawbacks grow in number and severity the longer he dithers. In addition to
waning public support for a military campaign that never enjoyed popular
backing (primarily because the president never
attempted to rally it), the president now faces growing congressional
pushback, most recently in the form of a House measure to restrain the executive branch’s war
powers. While the vote will prove largely symbolic, the fact that four
Republicans joined Democrats is a sign of brewing bipartisan resistance to the
president.
As the president faces the headwinds of domestic
opposition, he further narrows his range of options through public statements
meant to calm markets spooked by the prospect of full-scale renewed
hostilities. Not only is he conceding Iranian demands for extended protections
for Hezbollah, but he is also casting off much of America’s leverage by
implying he would not reinitiate offensive operations unless Iran kills more
U.S. service members and signaling possible accommodations in nuclear
negotiations. While there may be wiggle room to reach an agreement on these and
other issues in a final deal, conceding them in advance removes them as levers
to gain Iranian concessions.
Rather than continue his desperate overtures for
diplomacy, Trump should take an approach similar to the one currently working
in Iran’s favor and back away from talks until such a time as the Islamic
Republic is willing to comply by engaging in good-faith negotiations and
refraining from attacks on international shipping or civilian infrastructure.
As Nick
Catoggio notes, many observers continue to encourage the president to
“finish the job,” including some who think regime change is still within the
U.S. grasp. But ultimately, the burden, effort, and cost of overthrowing the
Islamic Republic are well beyond the already demonstrated fleeting level of
presidential interest. Insofar as Trump put any thought into the war’s outcome,
the only real effort was his wishful and unrealistic plan that initial
decapitation strikes in the first 24 to 48 hours would solve everything.
There are others, including
me, who encouraged the president earlier in the conflict to at least
achieve some quantifiable goal based on any of the objectives he enumerated at
the start of the fighting. But since I made that case, America’s position has
grown weaker through a combination of concessions, desperation, disinterest,
naïveté, and neophyte bumbling from a president who never learned why the
conflict with Iran has simmered for 47 years. So now, “finishing the job” may
mean avoiding a truly disastrous deal and instead working to bring about a
merely bad one. In his desire to avoid any blame or criticism for a negative
outcome, Trump makes one in which there are conditions worthy of blame more
likely—and fails to recognize the hard reality that the possibility of dodging
well-deserved blame stopped existing long ago.
Ultimately, this war is going to end in a settlement, and
sadly, because of the president’s decisions, it is likely to be a settlement
that’s favorable to Iran. At a minimum, the outcome of the conflict will come
with tacit recognition that the Iranians are the masters of a maritime
chokepoint, with the ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz at any time
they choose, and that they got away with murdering tens of thousands of their
own citizens—a grim signal to the Iranian people the next time they get notions
about liberty, democracy, and human rights.
There will always be war between nations, and military
force is a necessary tool in any president’s toolkit. Sometimes wars result in
failure, despite the best planning and intentions of the governments that start
them, or the incredible valor and skill of the soldiers who fight them. In this
case, we have an abundance of the latter and a dearth of the former. For there
are few things less forgivable than deciding to go to war without any
willingness to invest the personal effort or political capital to win it.
In the end, whatever the specifics of the deal, this
conflict will not prove to be the conclusion of a 47-year conflict, as the
White House claimed in its ham-fisted communications at the war’s start.
Rather, it will be just one chapter in the enduring clash between the U.S. and
the Islamic Republic—one which makes the coming chapters more difficult than
they needed to be.
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