Mr. Trump asked the same question in the opening weeks of the war. He declared that the only outcome acceptable to him would be an Iranian “unconditional surrender.”

None of that happened. When I asked Mr. Trump, on his flight back home from China in the middle of May, why he thought resuming military action would bring him any closer to his political goals than the first round of strikes had, he erupted with a list of targets hit by the military, and pointed to a devastated Iranian air force and navy, but never answered the question of why Iran never gave up its enriched uranium or its missile program. He called the Times, and me, “treasonous.”

That was two weeks ago. **Now Mr. Trump is trying a mix of incentives, threats and revised demands to force the country into the kind of negotiation that was underway in February, when he and Mr. Netanyahu initiated the war.**