When a US president resorts to public expletives and the threat of war crimes to get his way in war, it takes a heroic effort to discern a strategy amid the disgrace. But to the extent Donald Trump is executing a plan, it is a version of the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine attributed to Russian nuclear planners, in which they’d threaten the ultimate step to persuade an opponent to back down.

This tactic very rarely works, either in the real world or war-gaming exercises. According to a 2024 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, that’s because de-escalating under duress requires both trust, or at least a belief in the credibility of the threats being made, and a willingness to endure public capitulation. The risks involved in retaliation tend to seem preferable.

Nothing we know about the regime in charge of the Islamic Republic of Iran suggests it would prove an exception to this rule. On the contrary, Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back into the stone age by an ever-shifting deadline are merely confirming Tehran’s long-standing belief that US cannot be trusted in general, and that Trump in particular is too erratic to be taken at his word.

It is Trump who now needs to find a way out of what’s best renamed “Operation Epic Mistake,” because if there is one certainty in conflict it is that every new day brings the risk of new unwanted consequences. And in this case, the victims include not just the protagonists themselves but the entire world economy.

Without a clear and viable path to military success, it would be unforgivable to invite those risks by the scale of escalation Trump has proposed for Tuesday evening.

This dynamic is unfolding in real time. Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz and attack US allies in the Persian Gulf were widely foreseen, if unintended, consequences of the US-Israeli air campaign for which Trump and his equally inexperienced and unconventional secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, failed to plan. Trump can rail at European allies as “cowards” for refusing to fix the problem for him by forcing the strait open again, but it will be fruitless. The US Navy has proved no less cautious about the prospects for using force to make such a narrow strait safe for commercial shipping.

In the same way, Trump’s claim that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been defeated, destroyed, obliterated — or whatever the adjective of the day may be — has not stopped it firing the missiles and air defenses he says the Iranians no longer have. These are hitting vital Gulf infrastructure, as well as US bases, radars and now combat aircraft. It is solely thanks to the skill and firepower of US special forces that an American airman downed over Iranian territory was retrieved after a two-day drama, avoiding Trump’s very own Iranian hostage crisis.

The lesson here is that there will be more unwanted surprises for as long as this war continues, and with very little to gain by risking them. It is time to de-escalate and find other ways of achieving US goals in Iran, now that shock and awe appears to have failed. This will be politically unpleasant to do, which is the reason mission creep is so common in wars of choice. But the alternative would make for a far worse decision.

Trump is still assembling a ground force and threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian power generation and water infrastructure, unless the regime accepts a ceasefire and opens Hormuz. (It rejected the latest effort on Monday.) I have yet to hear a current or former member of the US military explain what these troops could achieve if thrown into the fight, other than to seize an island or other small piece of territory and turn themselves into targets for Iranian drones and missiles.

In the same way, it is not clear what the US could gain by destroying Iran’s civilian power generation and water provision. It would certainly draw retaliation against energy facilities and water desalination plants across the gulf. It would also make the US guilty of war crimes against a population that Trump was supposedly trying to liberate. To what end?

The president now finds himself in the position of all gamblers: forced to choose whether to cut their losses or risk still more in the hope that — against all odds — they win a jackpot. In Trump’s case, this would be regime change or a capitulation to his terms. The difference is that this is war, not a casino or property deal, and how he ends it also matters. He could still pile untold losses onto the damage already done.

This conflict remains salvageable. As the UK-based scholar of war Lawrence Freedman wrote in a Substack post on Monday, this is not a territorial war, making it more susceptible to resolution. Iran now has leverage over international shipping that cannot be ignored, but it is also isolated and in a precarious economic situation, meaning that the most likely path out of this war is an internationally led negotiation over what would amount to a bribe to reopen the strait.

The attempt at such a deal seems to be underway, mediated by regional powers, but it can only be made more difficult by the kind of escalation Trump has threatened. He needs to drop the deadline and stop threatening the IRGC with escalation in the hope that it will capitulate. That only makes it harder for Tehran to accept a deal. It also pushes Trump ever deeper into a corner where he would at last be forced to choose between losing face or expanding the war by following through on his threats.

The reality is that for the US and the rest of the world (bar Israel), this conflict is no longer about the issues that that were used to justify it, and they should not be allowed to get in the way of a negotiated solution. It is now about Hormuz, which has become a long-term problem that will take allied help to manage once a ceasefire is reached. It’s already clear that there are plenty of countries willing to do so, despite Trump’s insults, but that can only happen once a deal is reached.

Nobody can foretell the future. A less ideological, more rational Iranian leadership could yet emerge from the messy aftermath of a confrontation that was caused in large part by its own miscalculations and misdeeds. The IRGC will declare victory just because it survived, but will emerge damaged. So will Trump, both domestically and internationally, and hence the profanities. Mistakes in war have consequences.

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