Trump Doesn’t Have the Stomach for This

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

 

Those who predicted that Trump would slink away from the war he started had ample evidence in support of that conclusion. The president’s special brand of inconstancy, the public’s distaste for the war and its consequences, and the capabilities Iran held in reserve would conspire, they presumed, to force Trump to abandon his objectives and settle with his Iranian adversaries.

 

Even today, that scenario cannot be ruled out. Trump reserves the right to declare victory and retreat. But he hasn’t yet.

 

Trump did not allow the disastrous memorandum of understanding (MOU) to plod along, extending it indefinitely as its 60-day deadlines elapsed without signs of progress at the negotiating table. And the resumption of hostilities in the Middle East has not brought about the apocalyptic sequence of events that some feared Iran would inaugurate.

 

As of this writing, the United States has conducted five straight days of regular sorties, including daylight raids, over Iranian targets. The Iranians have responded in kind, but they are not striking critical civilian infrastructure in the Gulf region — power plants, desalination facilities, or the oil and gas infrastructure sites that it attacked during Operation Epic Fury. A spike in global energy prices has accompanied the renewed shooting, but Brent crude has not jumped as it did at the war’s outset. “Brent remains well below levels that previously triggered notable stress in equities and credit,” one industry analysis observed.

 

Iran’s reluctance to deploy all the means at its disposal is a telling development. It would be a mistake to conclude that the regime’s remnants are of one mind on how to confront the U.S. It’s obvious, for example, that the regime did not intend to force Trump to withdraw the waivers that allowed Iran to sell its oil and petroleum derivatives on the open market for U.S. dollars. Its farcical attempt to blame its attacks on commercial ships on rogue elements within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for example, is indicative of that.

 

Moreover, a full appraisal of the damage the regime absorbed during the high-tempo combat phase of this war might have clarified the thinking in Tehran. “Iran’s economy is severely weakened; its nuclear facilities are buried under rubble, and its top nuclear scientists are dead; its leadership appears divided over whether to do a deal with the United States,” read Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’s summary of Iran’s predicament.

 

And, from the Iranian perspective, there’s little light at the end of this tunnel. The resumption of the blockade in concert with the Treasury Department’s victorious prosecution of primary and secondary violations of the sanctions throttling the Iranian economy will continue to limit Iran’s freedom of action. Meanwhile, air strikes on Iran’s air defense, radar systems, fast boats, anti-ship missiles, and drone launch sites will gradually strip Iran of the tools it uses to hold the global economy hostage.

 

And yet, if Iran is pulling its punches, so, too, is the United States. While the U.S. has attacked some Iranian targets deep within the interior of the Islamic Republic, most of its strikes have been limited to the Strait of Hormuz and the surrounding coastline. That reflects the campaign’s limited objectives as well as the president’s efforts to use force as a signaling mechanism — negotiations by other means.

 

Unnervingly, the president still exhibits all the apprehension and self-doubt that produced the MOU in the first place.

 

The president wants the world to know that he is prepared to execute a “massive offensive” against Iran in the coming days. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges,” the president warned — a threat he’s issued many times before but never executed. “I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” Trump explained. “I don’t want to negotiate now,” Trump said, even as he stressed that U.S. strikes would get worse “unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

 

If the time for talk was over, Trump would be doing a lot less talking.

 

For three months, the president has done everything in his power to avoid a return to major combat operations against Iran. Perhaps inadvertently, Trump has now stumbled into a combination of tactics — the blockade, the sanctions, the selective strikes, and the prospect of tangible, irreplaceably vital rewards for the regime’s more cooperative elements — that could, with time, prove coercive. But we now have ample evidence to conclude that Trump does not have the patience for that.

 

Not only do we already know what Trump’s pain threshold is; the Iranians know it. He encounters it when Brent crude crosses the $110/barrel mark. The lack of resolve the president displayed leading up to and throughout the cease-fire provided the Iranian regime with every incentive to hold out. And Trump doesn’t have the stomach to make the case to the American public for a prolonged siege of the Islamic Republic. He won’t level with them about what that initiative would entail, the burdens it would impose on them, or the rewards America would derive from the neutering of this perennial threat to U.S. security and that of our allies.

 

When he addresses the nation in prime time on Thursday amid the resumption of hostilities in the Gulf, with all the attendant hardships, Trump will reportedly devote only some of that speech to the war with Iran. He also reportedly intends to talk up the SAVE Act, which his own party’s members have repeatedly told him is going nowhere. And, apparently, the only point of this digression is to reintroduce the lunatic notion that the 2020 election was marred by outcome-altering illegality.

 

Trump just cannot summon the single-minded steadfastness that is required to garrote the regime, liberate the Iranian people, and facilitate America’s pivot from the Middle East to other vital strategic theaters around the globe.

 

If Trump were committed to staying the long course he’s set for himself, there is a theory of victory at the end of it. But he’s probably not. And if he’s not — if this endeavor is destined to end in yet another de facto capitulation when energy prices spike and the GOP’s political standing degrades — Trump should spare the country another protracted humiliation and rip the Band-Aid off now.