President Donald Trump has tried everything from negotiations to military force to blunt Tehran's nuclear, missile, and regional aspirations. He has now settled on economic pressure. The president deserves significant credit for his willingness to tackle this challenge, including his decision to strike the Islamic Republic with the aid of the Israelis earlier this year.
However, Iran has responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking U.S. bases, and saturating the skies of our regional allies. Iranian escalation has created other problems for Washington, such as depleted munitions stockpiles and a spike in oil prices. This could imperil Republican prospects in the November midterm elections — something the regime seems keen to exploit.
Trump's challenges are compounded further by Obama-era officials who declare his war a failure. But these figures have zero self-awareness. Former chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman called the U.S. war "superpower suicide," saying it benefits Russia, China, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Obama's energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, called Trump's war on Iran a "big mistake" that placed the U.S. in a "cul-de-sac" that is hard to escape. Former U.S. negotiator Jake Sullivan said Trump's efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would yield "a massive financial windfall to Iran, and . . . a set of nuclear issues that at present are completely unresolved." President Barack Obama himself declared, "We've now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, put an enormous strain on our military, a lot of people have died and it feels like we are . . . maybe a little worse off."
But what none of these figures cede is that the Obama administration's 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), granted the Islamic Republic a "patient pathway" to nuclear weapons. The deal placed fleeting constraints on Iran's nuclear activities while Washington eased sanctions and transferred billions of dollars to the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism. This ill-advised approach from Team Obama (and later Team Biden) allowed Tehran to build a vast arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, and to fund terror proxies across the Arab world.
Tellingly, only four months after inking the JCPOA, the IRGC revealed its first underground missile base. These underground missile depots continue to plague the U.S. military as it battles Iranian aggression.
Obama-era figures try to tout the restrictions the JCPOA placed on the regime. But the "sunset provisions" of their deal began to expire in 2020, with more expiring in 2023 and 2025. The result: Iran emerged as a threshold nuclear power with the region's biggest ballistic missile arsenal; access to advanced conventional weaponry; greater regional proxy power; and an economy immunized against sanctions. In short, the JCPOA kicked the can down the road, deferring the hard decisions.
President Trump's Iran policy may not be perfect, but it has encumbered the regime's malign efforts. His first step was to exit the accord in 2018 after exhorting America's transatlantic partners to negotiate an alternative and levy strong sanctions, all to no avail. He then imposed "maximum pressure" sanctions on the regime to compel the Iranians to engage in good faith. They refused.
When Trump left office and many Obama-era officials who brokered the JCPOA returned to power under the Biden administration, the regime spurned the Additional Protocol, a cornerstone of international nuclear monitoring. The regime's stockpile of advanced centrifuges and enriched uranium also grew. This included uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, putting the regime on the precipice of weapons-grade uranium.
When Donald Trump returned to the presidency, the Islamic Republic was on the brink of completing three dangerous projects. The first was its nuclear program, bringing Tehran perilously close to nukes with a fast-growing stockpile of fissile material. Since Trump dropped bunker busters and Tomahawks on nuclear sites last year, Iran is no longer enriching uranium on its soil, and its fissile material is entombed.
The second was Tehran's missile infrastructure. With industrial-scale production capacity, its stockpiles reached critical levels, granting the regime the ability to saturate the airspace of its enemies — which we have seen in recent months. And third, the regime armed and empowered its proxies around the region to punish and deter the responses of its neighbors when faced with regime aggression.
Thanks to Donald Trump's actions, Iran is unable to advance these strategies in any meaningful way.
This doesn't mean America is winning. If anything, it seems that Washington has fought Tehran to a stalemate. We may have hammered their military, but their willingness to fight an asymmetric war that depletes our munitions and squeezes global energy cannot be ignored.
The stalemate can still be broken, however. The president can heap more financial pressure on the regime and maintain the maritime blockade. Our military also continues to ferry vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, easing the energy crunch.
Iran's currency, the rial, just hit another historic low — trading now at 2 million to a single U.S. dollar. The regime's inability to pay salaries or provide basic services could portend domestic upheaval. The president must now do more to support the Iranian people, who are pro-America and truly loathe their regime. They have been brutalized and slaughtered, but they have not given up. Intelligence, financial support, secure communications, and arms are what they need.
The president now understands that, just as the 2015 nuclear deal defined Obama's foreign policy, the war with the regime will define his. He was right to conclude, "This situation has been going on for 47 years and should have been handled long before I arrived in office." Seen in this light, Team Obama's efforts to snipe him should be ignored. Whereas they never derailed Iran's nuclear and regional ambitions, Donald Trump still can.
Jonathan Schanzer is executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington D.C., where Behnam Ben Taleblu is Iran Program senior director and a senior fellow.