(This piece was originally published online by New Lines Magazine. Find the original article here : https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-last-temptation-of-trump-at-the-end-of-a-failed-war/)
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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.
A leader of steadier temperament, focused on the preservation of American national interests, might find in this accumulation of costs a reason to move toward the negotiating table. In Trump, the mounting pressure is more likely to produce the opposite impulse, a search for some action dramatic enough to recast the entire narrative at a stroke.
That search is already visible in the escalatory texture of his public statements. Each threshold crossed makes the next one easier to contemplate, and a president who has already ordered strikes on power plants and oil facilities — framing each escalation as a demonstration of will rather than a means to a defined end — has established a psychological and rhetorical pattern whose terminus is worth examining honestly. Targeting civilian infrastructure on this scale would constitute, under even a cursory reading of international humanitarian law, a war crime (a judgment now formally registered by more than 100 American international law scholars, military law experts and former judge advocates general in an open letter published by the journal Just Security in April) — and the administration’s willingness to threaten it openly signals how far the logic of escalatory improvisation has already traveled.
It is within this psychological and political nexus that the nuclear dimension enters as an ominous possibility. A president unable to achieve a decisive political conclusion through conventional means may begin to contemplate options that more conventional strategists would treat as categorically foreclosed. The comparison that would animate his self-understanding is with Harry S. Truman: the one American president who took the decision to use the bomb and, in doing so, in his own telling and that of his defenders, ended a war and imposed an American order on the wreckage.
That narrative — long since contested by historians who have argued that Japan was already seeking surrender and that the bomb served as much to signal American power to Moscow as to end the war in the Pacific — provides a template that is available to a president searching for a decisive act capable of cutting through the fog of a failing campaign. And to be the first American president since Truman to cross that threshold would be, in Trump’s own terms, to place himself beyond the reach of historical diminishment. In his imagination, moreover — organized around the display of will rather than the management of multilateral constraints — a nuclear demonstration against Iran would send a message to Beijing and Moscow with a clarity no conventional military action could match. It would establish, in terms no adversary could misread, that the U.S. is willing to cross any threshold necessary to prevail, a wager against the entire architecture of arms control built over more than six decades on the assumption of mutual constraint.
A nuclear strike on Iran is not probable. The institutional constraints within the American military and national security apparatus (yes, even as denuded as they are now), the likely resistance of senior commanders, the reactions of allies whose cooperation remains essential to American global posture, and the scale of the international response that would follow all constitute real friction. Yet friction is not impossibility, and the argument here concerns the structure of a crisis in which the range of possible outcomes has expanded to include what previous generations of strategists treated as foreclosed by a normative consensus — a so-called “nuclear taboo.”
It is worth recalling that Trump’s attitude toward nuclear weapons has never been one of categorical restraint. During the 2016 campaign, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported that a foreign policy expert who had briefed Trump came away alarmed after the candidate asked three times why the U.S. could not use its nuclear arsenal. In a town hall with Chris Matthews that same year, when pressed on whether he would rule out nuclear use, Trump’s response was simply: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” A few weeks later, he told NBC’s Today show that while nuclear weapons were a “horror,” he would “never, ever rule them out.” And once in office, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s account of his tumultuous first term in their book “The Divider,” Trump suggested to his then chief of staff John Kelly that he wanted to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and blame it on someone else.
Taken together, these are not the passing provocations of a man who has internalized the logic of nuclear abstinence that has governed every American presidency since Truman. They are a pattern, and they belong to the same psychological disposition that is now operating under conditions of mounting strategic failure and wounded pride. The pathway to the unthinkable runs not through a single dramatic decision but through the incremental normalization of the unacceptable: civilian infrastructure targeted, international law dismissed, each escalation framed as strength rather than desperation, until the next step seems less like a crossing of civilizational boundaries and more like a continuation of what has already begun.
A leader who entered a war he did not understand, in pursuit of objectives he had not reconciled, and who now confronts a situation in which every available exit diminishes the political narrative he has staked his identity on, is a genuinely dangerous figure to place at the apex of nuclear decision-making. He has made a catastrophic mess of this confrontation and appears to care only about his own self-image. That is, in the end, what makes this moment different from other moments of great-power recklessness: not the structural pressures, which are real enough, but the character of the man they are bearing down upon.
