Six weeks into what the Trump administration has branded “Operation Epic Fury,” it is worth pausing to ask the question that Washington’s war managers seem constitutionally incapable of posing to themselves: what exactly did we think was going to happen next?
The opening salvo killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggered a torrent of hundreds of retaliatory missiles and thousands of drones from Iran across the region, leaving enormous damage, thousands dead in Iran and Lebanon, dozens dead in Israel and the Gulf Arab states, and millions of people displaced.
The Strait of Hormuz — through which, as every schoolchild in a petroleum-dependent economy now knows, roughly a fifth of global oil and gas flows — has become a theater of war.
And after 21 hours of marathon talks in Islamabad — the highest-level direct engagement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — the two sides departed without an agreement.
This is where we find ourselves on day 44. So let us, with the cold sobriety the moment demands, survey the options before the United States.
Option one: blockade and maximum pressure, doubled down
The US military’s Central Command announced that a naval blockade of Iranian ports would begin at 10 a.m. ET on Monday. This is the maximalist path — the logic that what has failed must simply be applied with greater force.
I have heard this argument before. I heard it in 2003 when the architects of Iraq’s liberation assured us that Saddam’s removal would trigger democratic dominoes across the Arab world.
I heard it again in the Afghanistan endgame, when another administration convinced itself that one more surge, one more deadline, would produce the capitulation that had eluded us for two decades. Maximum pressure has a stubborn empirical record: it maximizes suffering and minimizes strategic results.
Oil prices have already gained over 31% since the war began, and a global energy expert warned that elevated prices could persist through the end of 2026 even after hostilities cease — because the damage to infrastructure and the disruption of shipping lanes will not be repaired overnight.
A naval blockade does not merely squeeze Tehran; it squeezes Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, and New Delhi. It squeezes the American consumer at the pump. It hands Beijing, which has been quietly positioning itself as the indispensable mediator, a geopolitical gift wrapped in an oil drum.
And what of Iran itself? The regime, for all the genuine grievances of its people — and those grievances are real and deep — has now been handed the most powerful gift any authoritarian government can receive: a foreign enemy.
Ask yourself the question that seems to have eluded our war planners: when foreign powers bomb your cities, assassinate your supreme leader, and blockade your ports, do you rally against your government or against the foreigners doing the bombing?
Option two: military escalation toward regime change
The US and Israel launched the strikes saying they aimed to induce regime change in Iran and to target its nuclear and ballistic missile program. This, apparently, was the plan. Six weeks later, the regime, though badly battered, has not collapsed.
Iran’s AMAD nuclear project had been suspended pursuant to Khamenei’s own fatwa against nuclear weapons, a fatwa now rendered moot by the man who issued it being killed in an airstrike. The hardliners who remain do not carry the theological restraint of their predecessors.
The fantasy that American airpower can produce a “pliant regime eager to accept American terms” — to borrow the phrasing I used in a February analysis — has now been tested in the most direct way possible, and the answer is no.
Iran has not capitulated. It has retaliated. It has disrupted global commerce. It has rallied what remains of its proxy network. Hezbollah joined the war within days, and the Houthis resumed missile and drone attacks on US and Israeli-flagged ships in the Red Sea.
Escalating further, including any ground operation to “reopen” the strait by force, would constitute one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations in modern American history — and given our recent track record, that is saying something.
Option three: a negotiated exit that requires realism about American terms
Talks collapsed after Iran did not agree to several “red lines” set by the Trump administration, including an end to all uranium enrichment, the dismantling of all major enrichment facilities, the retrieval of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, an end to funding for allied militant groups, and the full opening of the Strait of Hormuz without any toll for passage.
This is the list of a maximalist power demanding the complete capitulation of an adversary that has not been defeated. Tehran, whatever its many failures, has survived eight years of war with Iraq in the 1980s, decades of sanctions, the assassination of its generals and scientists and now six weeks of the most intense aerial bombardment it has endured in modern history.
Iran is demanding control of the Strait of Hormuz, war reparations and a regional ceasefire, including Lebanon. The two lists are not yet reconcilable. But that is not evidence that negotiation is impossible — it is evidence that neither side has yet absorbed enough pain to make compromise politically survivable at home.
The third option — a negotiated settlement — remains the only path that does not end in either a prolonged quagmire or a broader regional catastrophe drawing in Russia and China. But it requires Washington to do something it has shown little appetite for: distinguish between its core security interests and its maximalist wish list.
Preventing Iran from acquiring a functional nuclear weapon is a legitimate American interest. Demanding that Tehran dismantle every centrifuge and pay reparations and surrender control of the strait and end all regional influence — that is not a negotiating position. That is a demand for surrender by a country that has not been defeated.
Vice President Vance left open the possibility that an agreement could still be reached, saying: “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.” That is, charitably, not a diplomatic overture. Pakistan, which has become a key mediator and said it would continue to play a role in peace efforts, and Oman, which has historically served as the quiet back channel between Washington and Tehran, remain available.
The question is whether this administration has the strategic patience to use them.
A word on what history tells us
I have spent the better part of my career studying American policy failure in the Middle East — two books’ worth of it, in fact. The recurring pathology is not a lack of military power. The US possesses, and has now amply demonstrated, an extraordinary capacity to destroy. What it consistently lacks is a theory of the day after.
What comes after the blockade? What comes after the regime, if it falls? Who fills the vacuum in a country of 93 million people, with borders touching Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and the Caucasus?
Iran’s counter-strikes on Gulf Arab states — who had sought to deepen relations with Tehran in recent years — may leave Iran further isolated, but isolation is not stability. A collapsed Iran would be a humanitarian catastrophe and a geopolitical black hole that would absorb American resources and attention for a generation.
Washington has a choices menu before it: escalate, negotiate, or accept a prolonged stalemate that bleeds the global economy and American credibility simultaneously. None of these options is good.
But the least bad remains the one our saber-rattlers find most humiliating: a deal that falls short of total Iranian capitulation, that allows both sides to declare some version of victory, and that returns the world’s shipping lanes to functionality before the economic damage becomes irreversible.
Realism has never been fashionable in this town. But it has the distinct advantage, compared to its alternatives, of occasionally being right.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.