Hussein Banai writes:

When President Donald Trump takes to the airwaves to threaten to bomb a nation of 90 million people “back to the Stone Ages” and follows that threat — in less than 48 hours — with strikes on civilian infrastructure, the destruction of a major bridge between two populous cities and a warning, in an expletive-laden post (on Easter Sunday, no less), that the assault on the targeted country’s power grid has “not even started,” it is worth pausing to ask where this ends. On Monday, standing at a White House podium, he supplied his own answer: “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” This morning, he doubled down in a post on Truth Social, writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These are the utterances of a man casting about for an act of sufficient magnitude to substitute for the coherent strategy he never bothered to contemplate. The trajectory they trace — from rhetorical escalation to intensified bombardment to potentially something indiscriminate or far worse — deserves a degree of serious examination that major media outlets are just beginning to realize. Understanding that trajectory requires grasping, above all, the particular trap into which American power has sleepwalked.

That trap is understood best through the central insight in “The Strategy of Conflict,” a 1960 book by the Nobel Prize-winning scholar Thomas Schelling: that coercive bargaining is fundamentally about the manipulation of shared risk rather than the direct application of force. The Trump administration appears to have believed that sufficiently severe military punishment would produce Iranian capitulation, yet what severe punishment actually produces, when it does not produce capitulation, is a bargaining environment in which both sides are looking for a way out that does not humiliate them fatally. Iran, operating from a position of strategic weakness but tactical asymmetric leverage, has every incentive to make that exit as costly and as visible as possible. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a shipping lane; in Schelling’s terms, it functions as a hostage whose value rises as American desperation increases.

The exit ramp that is currently available — some version of a negotiated freeze accompanied by American military de-escalation — is precisely the kind of deal that Trump cannot accept, and the weight of that constraint is arguably the most dangerous structural feature of the present situation. A president who has staked his political identity on the narrative of strength, who entered this confrontation promising a different outcome than President Barack Obama achieved with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that restricted Iran’s nuclear program, and who has cultivated an image as the one leader capable of doing what his predecessors lacked the will to do, cannot emerge from Iran having visibly retreated.

Any deal that can be made looks, from his perspective, like a deal that mockers will spend the next decade calling a face-saving exit ramp. He knows this. His opponents know this. And the Iranians know this, which is why they have calibrated their pressure to produce exactly this dilemma.

What the historian Alex Hobson has described, in a New Lines essay, as the logic of the “humiliation entrepreneur” is directly relevant here. Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have built their political brands around the principle that every insult and humiliation demands an equal or greater counter-humiliation, and the performance of dominance is central to their authority. In that framework, a negotiated exit is not merely a strategic setback but a form of emasculation, one that their entire political identity is organized to prevent, and one that Iran, with considerable sophistication, is now deploying as leverage.

Trump’s first prime-time public address on the war, on April 1, made it plain that he has no theory of how this war ends, only a compulsion to narrate it as already won. The speech contained four claims, recycled from weeks of prior statements: that the war was necessary, that it had succeeded, that it would continue and that it would soon be over. The logical incoherence of holding all four simultaneously did not appear to trouble him, which is itself the most important thing the speech communicated.

A president capable of strategic thought would have used the address to reframe the conflict’s objectives around what is actually achievable, to prepare the public for the kind of negotiated outcome that the situation now demands. Trump instead reached for something grander and vaguer, measuring the duration of the war with Iran against every major American military campaign from World War I through Iraq, casting the ongoing war — and himself — as qualitatively superior to historical precedents. This is the psychology of a man who experiences the gap between ambition and outcome not as a prompt for recalibration but as an affront to his self-understanding, and who will go to considerable lengths to close it by other means.

The campaign is extracting a toll in lives and equipment from the United States with which the official narrative has struggled to keep pace, and the gap between the administration’s repeated assurances that Iran’s military capacity has been largely destroyed and the observable reality of a war that continues to exact a price from the U.S. grows wider with each passing week. Each casualty, each piece of evidence that the war is not proceeding as advertised, each morning that gas prices remain elevated and public support continues to erode, adds another increment of pressure to a president whose self-image is organized around the appearance of invincibility. [Continue reading…]