By Mike Nelson
Monday, May 04, 2026
When I attended SERE (survival, evasion, resistance,
escape) school, a course intended for service members at greater risk of
finding themselves behind enemy lines, the portion of the course that simulated
captivity in a prisoner of war camp included a metaphorical Whitman’s Sampler
of the kind of sadism and punishment one might expect if one fell into the
hands of America’s enemies.
These covered various kinds of discomfort and
displeasure, usually exposing the student to each different punishment
once—that is, unless the student showed obvious fear, pain, or dislike of one
of these or another. In other words, if you let your captors know the specific
thing they could do to you to elicit an adverse reaction, they are more likely
to do it if they wish to pressure you. No matter how bad something is, do not
let the enemy know what bothers you most.
Most Americans will never experience anything like SERE
training, but the lesson is broadly applicable: It’s best not to demonstrate in
either words or actions that your adversary has you over a barrel, unless you
want that adversary to continue to use that leverage. This obvious lesson seems
to have escaped the grasp of the man who has labeled himself a master
dealmaker, as he, in both words and actions, lets the Iranians know that, to
use a phrase of which he is so fond, the one card they do hold is the one that
elicits the pain and discomfort that may motivate him to agree to a wholly
unsatisfactory ending to the conflict: threatening shipping through the Strait
of Hormuz.
Operation Epic Fury, initiated over nine weeks ago via
nocturnal social media announcement, has ground to an odd pause. Our forces
remain in theater, the combatants’ respective navies restrict passage through a
critical waterway, and we are not making progress toward bringing about any of
the various conditions that the Trump administration claimed would exist at the
end of it. A war that started muddled in its purpose has now become muddled in
its progress.
Just over a month into the conflict, and seemingly
frustrated with Iranian resistance in general and blocking the Strait of Hormuz
in specific, President Donald Trump had issued a series of escalatory threats,
declaring that he would order the destruction of everything from power
infrastructure to Iranian civilization as a whole, and that this level of
wholesale carnage might be accomplished in as little as four hours if the
Iranian regime did not accede to his demand to open the strait. His original deadline
of 48 hours was extended for five days, then that deadline was extended for 10
days, then that deadline was extended for an additional day, then, two hours
short of the final final—for real this time final—deadline, the president
announced a Pakistani brokered, two-week ceasefire to allow for talks and
negotiations. All these extensions came with no substantive concessions from
the Iranians.
More than three weeks into the two-week ceasefire, which
began April 8, the two sides are at an impasse. An initial attempt at in-person
talks in Islamabad that weekend proved largely performative and half-hearted,
as the two parties each showed up with a list of non-negotiables that would be
difficult to overcome through weeks of negotiations and therefore impossible
with an effort wherein Vice President J.D. Vance spent more time in transit to
and from the meeting site than in Islamabad itself.
After the failed Islamabad meeting, the Iranians
demonstrated no earnest desire for negotiations. In the face of this Iranian
intransigence, the administration could have allowed the April 22 deadline, and
with it the ceasefire, to expire. Instead, it showed an amateurish eagerness,
making contradictory statements
about Vance’s imminent departure the day before the deadline for follow-up
negotiations. One could imagine Vance moving to and from his motorcade like he
was doing the hokey pokey with each new pronouncement. Ultimately, he stayed in
Washington, and Trump extended the ceasefire.
Even the alternate plan of special envoy Steve Witkoff
and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner leading negotiations last weekend was
halted at the last minute, potentially as a face-saving measure when Iranian
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi departed Pakistan without any interest in meeting with the
American representatives.
While we should not trust any public pronouncements made
by the Iranians (nor should our government take private ones at face value
either), the regime has effectively acted in keeping with the perception it
wishes to create: Iran’s leaders are not impatient for negotiations, nor do
they seem willing to make accommodations in advance of any, while
simultaneously demanding preconditions from the United States. The only
indications of Iranian eagerness to seek peaceful resolution come from Trump—who has a less than firm relationship with the
truth—claiming that the Iranians have told him privately they are desperate to
give in to each of our demands.
That would strain credulity under any circumstances, but
especially after the president has made many, many claims of Iranian surrender
or concession over the course of the nine-week conflict, all of which have
proven to be demonstrably false. From promising a complete surrender of
retained nuclear material, to saying the Iranians would halt executions that
have continued, to assurances that the Strait of Hormuz was open as
international ships came under attack, the sad truth is the American people can
put no stock in anything the White House claims about Iranian compromise and,
in fact, should probably assume the opposite is true in most cases.
Trump is obviously aware that the Iranians, whom he is
supposed to be pressuring to create a satisfactory resolution, know he is
lying. But these statements aren’t meant to influence the Iranian regime; they
are meant to try, just one more time, to pull the wool over the eyes of the
American people, to whom he never made the case for war, upon whom the
increased economic burdens fall, and from whom a growing disapproval is making
urgent the president’s desire to move past a conflict he believed would be simple.
It is true that the United States has done exponentially
more damage to the Iranian military than it has done to ours. And it is true
that the recently imposed American reciprocal blockade is far more deleterious
to the Iranians than their original one is to the U.S. But neither of those may
matter in adjudicating an end to the war. The Iranians seem willing to endure
more military damage than our president is willing to inflict and more economic
pain that our president is willing to absorb—and this is far more likely to be
the determining factor.
With each new over-the-top proclamation of pending
violence, every deadline extension rewarded with nothing in return from the
Iranians, and all the false claims of Iranian backchannel surrender, the
Iranians’ belief that they can outlast the president is reinforced.
It’s worth remembering any of the myriad reasons for war
that Trump and his acolytes have articulated and vacillated between. In
January, we were going to stand up for the Iranian people, yet now there is no
discussion of their fate. In February, we were going to end Iranian support to
their proxy networks, yet the president has pressured Israel to stop striking
Hezbollah. In March, we needed to degrade the Iranian missile and drone systems
so they would number fewer than our interceptors in theater, yet the Iranians retain more of these capabilities than previously
thought—while we have depleted key stocks of our interceptors and precision
guided missiles.
Meanwhile, the Iranians are not publicly backing down
from their maximalist demands, having submitted a new 14-point proposal that includes many of the
unreasonable conditions they had previously submitted in Pakistan, including
withdrawal of American forces in theater, significant financial reparations,
protection for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and some recognition of Iranian control
over the strait. This Iranian proposal would also separate discussions about
reopening the strait from those regarding the disposition of its nuclear
weapons program. While the president originally seemed to reject this proposal
outright on Friday, by the next day he seemed to be softening to the idea of
entertaining portions of the Iranian language. It does not seem likely the
White House would agree to all, or even most, of the Iranian demands, but any
of these should be viewed as unacceptable—and even entertaining them as a basis
for negotiation plays into Iran’s game plan.
We have gone from grand proclamations of “unconditional surrender” and telling the Iranian people
“the hour of (their) liberation is at hand” to now sheepishly looking for any
agreement, including one that does not liberate the Iranian people, does
nothing to diminish Iranian support for its proxies, likely will not not end
the Iranian ballistic missile program, may not secure the remaining highly
enriched uranium, and at best, reopens the strait to a condition less
advantageous for the U.S. and international community than status quo ante.
The president is now dealing with the realities of
neither explaining to the American people why the war was necessary and what
its goals were, nor focusing on those goals himself. The former has created a
domestic reaction that pressures the president to make a hasty deal. The latter
means he may be willing to give away the farm to secure that deal.
Regardless of the timing of or forethought put into the
conflict, America is currently engaged in a war, and it is better for us, our
allies, and the world as a whole that it is resolved with an American victory
rather than the perception of an Iranian one. As of yet, the means Trump
thought would be adequate to bring about this victory have proven insufficient,
and he should adjust accordingly—generally speaking, this would likely require
a long-term imposition of the mutually painful blockade or an escalation of
combat operations, potentially including ground-based
options. However, escalation or resumption of combat operations may now be
complicated by the president’s attestation to Congress that the war has “terminated”—his short-term cute trick to skirt the War
Powers Act potentially hindering his options over the longer term.
Either one of these requires him to do two things he has,
as of yet, been unwilling or unable to do—explain to the American people the
sacrifices and difficulty to come, and why those sacrifices are worth it, and
demonstrate to the Iranian regime that he is willing to endure them.
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