Blog Alan Eyre is Trying to Think, 28.08.2026 Alan E. Eyre, embajador ® y analista internacional norteamericano
- American writer Mark Twain famously said “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning, and if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
When it comes to the Iran War, President Trump has at least one very distasteful frog to eat, but instead of reaching for the utensils, he keeps desperately scanning the menu for other options. There aren’t any, and it is well past time for this U.S. administration to eat the frog.
We should be grateful the U.S. administration finally realized, six months into this ill-conceived war, that superior U.S. military might hasn’t translated into strategic success. But while President Trump is to be commended for putting aside one failed policy (at least until after the mid-terms), it is unfortunate he has replaced it with an equally flawed one, one announced on an August 24 press conference by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As with so much else relating to the administration’s Iran policy, the unveiling of “Operation Economic Outcast", was to quote Shakespeare “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” more sound bite than sound policy.
According to Secretary Bessent, the newest administration strategy is tightening secondary sanctions against countries doing business with Iran, in the hopes of ‘collapsing Iran’s economy,’ or ‘severing Iran’s economic lifelines.’ Recycling President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 talking point (”Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists“), Bessent warned “Those who stand with the United States will reap the rewards of our partnership. Those who tether themselves to Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime.”
First, let’s note it is hard to say this policy will fail, when the Secretary was so unclear as to its ultimate goal. If it is to ‘collapse Iran’s economy,’ let’s assume the improbable and say we do so. Then what? Is the administration goal really creating a failed state of 95 million people in the heart of the Middle East?
If the administration goal is instead to force Iran to capitulate and ease its negotiating red lines, for example forfeiting its putative right of enriching uranium on Iranian soil, giving its 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to the US, or allowing intrusive inspections of its nuclear and military facilities, such a goal is wildly improbable. Even the admittedly much more modest goal of Iran allowing the Strait of Hormuz to return to its pre-war status is highly unlikely. It is far more likely this newest U.S. stab at ending the war, like its innumerable predecessors, will fail, i.e. while it will indeed make the lives of ordinary Iranians much worse, it will not compel the Iranian regime to abandon its key redlines. Here is why:
REASON ONE: The theory behind Operation Economic Outcast is that if the U.S. makes life miserable enough for ordinary Iranians, they will put effective pressure on their leaders to compromise with the U.S. That premise is deeply flawed. The Iranian regime, unlike President Trump, isn’t facing mid-term elections shortly that could weaken its power. Over the decades it has built a vast and effective apparatus for suppressing its own citizens, and as recently as January of this year has shown it is quite willing to slaughter thousands of its own citizens to stay in power. Breathless U.S. government recitals of Iran’s increasing economic woes are largely irrelevant, as immiseration of the Iranian people doesn’t lead to forcing its leaders to soften their strategic priorities. It should also be noted the regime elites running Iran – called ‘sanctions merchants’ by ordinary Iranians - actually profit financially from US sanctions, as they control the means to circumvent them. So not only will they be the last people economically hurt by any U.S. economic tightening, they’re also the first to profit.
REASON TWO: The current Iranian regime, more hardline, more militaristic, and less risk-averse than the Iranian leadership we killed at the start of the war, assumes it is in an existential battle with the U.S. It takes as a given the US will continue seeking to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran, using a combination of military means, economic warfare, cyberattacks, and fomenting internal insurrection. For the ageing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers currently running Iran, any compromise in the face of unremitting U.S. pressure will only increase, not decrease, the pressure. And, as Reid Pauly and Matthew Cebul argued in their excellent essay, The Lost Art of Coercion: Why Trump’s Belligerence is a Sign of Weakness:
“…threats alone are insufficient for successful coercion because even highly credible threats fail if they are not conditional. For coercion to work, the target must trust that it will be able to avoid pain through compliance.”
So U.S. economic pressure is unlikely to bring a softening of Iran’s position, since the IRGC assume future unremitting U.S. hostility, and as such any compromise will only hasten its fall.
REASON THREE: As the famous military maxim goes, “The enemy gets a vote.” As such, the likely Iranian response to Operation Economic Outcast won’t be whimpering capitulation but rather aggressive escalation. If the U.S. is successful in ratcheting up economic pressure on Iran, at some point it will bring about Iranian military retaliation, not just against U.S. bases in the region, but also U.S. and Gulf economic and energy targets in the region. As such, this latest U.S. initiative is inherently escalatory, since either it won’t work in causing palpable economic pain for Iran’s leadership, or it will work and provoke Iranian aggression to make it stop.
REASON FOUR: For this policy to work it requires three factors the U.S. doesn’t have: 1) the full cooperation of Iran’s key economic trading partners, to include China, the UAE and Turkey; 2) a competent U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy to implement it; 3) time. For the first, despite UAE’s recent announcement of ending trade with Iran, the whole ball game for this initiative is with China, Iran’s most important trading partner, and history has shown China doesn’t take well to U.S. economic bullying. Apart from China’s stated reluctance to cooperate, it takes a functioning U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy to implement sanctions, and this administration has gutted this bureaucracy. The Obama administration worked intensively with allies in a serious and sustained manner to implement multilateral sanctions against Iran that helped bring it to the diplomatic table, leading to the 2015 JCPOA. This administration, unable or unwilling to do the hard slog of multilateral diplomacy, has chosen instead to threaten the rest of the world in the hopes of forcing universal compliance with its diktats. Finally, it takes time for such sanctions to work, and given the ongoing Iranian closure, or at least significant constraint of the Strait of Hormuz, we don’t have that time. The U.S. administration’s jawboning of the markets is failing, U.S. prices are starting to rise, the bond markets are starting to push back, and no administration talking points, regardless of whether THEY ARE IN ALL CAPS or how often they’re repeated, are going to convince people that success is just around the corner.
So, given the Trump administration is now taking an off-ramp to a dead end, what exactly is the best (or more accurately, least bad) frog it needs to eat? The frog is accepting defeat (while of course CLAIMING VICTORY), and seeking a deal with Iran allowing it quasi-control of the Strait of Hormoz, in exchange for Iran increasing maritime traffic through it as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
There are problems even with this minimal goal. Firstly, Tehran’s current thinking is the U.S. administration hasn’t suffered enough to optimize deterrence of future attacks, and so the Strait should stay closed for the time being. Secondly, it could well be too late for U.S. diplomacy, even if this administration were willing and able to give it a try. After launching two wars in a little over a year, killing Iran’s leadership and over 3,000 ordinary Iranian citizens, and causing hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, the grounds from which a diplomatic solution could spring are far less fertile, if not totally fallow. Additionally, Iran wants money, lots of money, and now, not in the indeterminate future. So the U.S. might have to toss in a ‘sweetener’ of unblocked Iranian assets at a minimum, which would be a hard sell domestically for the U.S. Finally, such appeasement would not go down well with our Gulf allies, whose U.S. security umbrella has left them wet, neglected, and looking for security patches to supplement their unreliable U.S. protector. At a minimum, they will be left to make their separate peace with Iran, given the Trump administration’s demonstrated indifference to their security.
Likewise, none of this ‘least bad’ solution will go down easily in the U.S., but it is likely the unavoidable price of avoiding a far more distasteful diet in the future. Yes, maritime passage through the Strait is higher than war-time lows. But the current workarounds, even if they manage to keep maritime traffic higher than before, requires active U.S. military presence and overwatch, and at a certain point, given Iranian determination to exercise control over the Strait, will engender increased Iranian attempts to attack maritime traffic. A more durable solution is needed, and for the administration, taking the political hit now, two months before mid-terms, is better than two months of a steady stream of dire economic news springing from the ongoing conflict.
President Trump’s ill-advised war has broken something integral in the Middle East that cannot be restored, but at best he should try to fix what he can. Forget about a nuclear deal “better than Obama’s” or even '“as good as Obama’s”: at this point all the US should be trying to get out of this war is to get out of this war. The administration highest achievable goal now is to take the loss and just get maritime circulation in the Strait back up as much as it can as quickly as it can.
