The impasse in U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against Iran has now lasted for so long that even jokes about Groundhog Day have grown stale. Recent months have seen rounds of punishing airstrikes, followed by announcements that peace talks are resuming. None of this has moved the needle.

Now the administration has returned to another dated strategy: maximum economic pressure, or as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put it, an “economic D-Day” against which Iran cannot hope to stand. The administration seems to believe time is on its side, and that the ongoing blockade and sanctions on Iran’s trading partners will succeed where bombing has not.

The impasse in U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against Iran has now lasted for so long that even jokes about Groundhog Day have grown stale. Recent months have seen rounds of punishing airstrikes, followed by announcements that peace talks are resuming. None of this has moved the needle.

Now the administration has returned to another dated strategy: maximum economic pressure, or as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put it, an “economic D-Day” against which Iran cannot hope to stand. The administration seems to believe time is on its side, and that the ongoing blockade and sanctions on Iran’s trading partners will succeed where bombing has not.

But this is a dangerous game. And the fact that escalation and dire global consequences have been largely managed up to now makes that danger greater, not smaller. The war has dragged on in part because its economic consequences have remained manageable, yielding misplaced confidence that they will stay that way.

During the Cold War, strategists identified what became known as the “stability-instability paradox.” Once the United States and Soviet Union possessed the ability to destroy each other with nuclear weapons, direct superpower war became almost unthinkable. Yet the ironic result was not a stable........

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