CAN IRAN BREAK TRUMP?
The 60-day MOU is now over. It did not produce peace. It opened the next phase of the Iran war.
For six months, Tehran’s strategy was to survive the U.S.-Israeli campaign. It did. Now Iran is moving from survival to leverage—rebuilding missiles and drones, expanding its regional network, and tightening its ability to pressure the Persian Gulf.
But that raises a question Washington has barely begun to confront:
What happens when Iran stops trying merely to defeat the U.S. military—and starts trying to defeat the Trump presidency politically?
The battlefield for that strategy will be the Gulf. The target will be American voters.
Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy or permanently close the Strait of Hormuz to achieve that objective. It needs to make the economic consequences of the war—energy prices, shipping costs, inflation, and uncertainty—painful enough, and persistent enough, to change the political calculation in Washington before the November midterms.
That creates a very different kind of escalation trap.
How would Tehran do it? What pressure points would it target? And how could Trump respond without making Iran’s strategy more effective?
Those are the questions that will determine whether Iran’s greatest gains from this war occur in the Persian Gulf—or inside the United States.
The key question is therefore not whether Iran can hurt Trump. It is whether Tehran can make the political cost of continuing the war rise faster than Trump can produce a military victory.
Below are my answers.