The Islamic Republic of Iran has consistently been a destabilizing force in Middle Eastern geopolitics. With Donald Trump resuming the presidency in January 2025, his administration will have to confront how to credibly restore deterrence against the regime in Tehran.

While the president-elect instinctually understands the art of deterrence—his recent threat of there being “all hell to pay” to Hamas over the hostages held in Gaza being a case in point—reverting to the maximum-pressure campaign in the early phases of his second term could create the right conditions for the United States to restore general deterrence against Iran.

In this article, I examine what made the maximum-pressure campaign so effective in isolating Iran and argue that the first step to restoring general deterrence with Iran is to once again implement the maximum-pressure campaign.

Iran’s belligerence has been a source of constant tension and concern among all the United States’ regional allies, within the Gulf Cooperation Council and Israel. The Islamic Republic’s funding of terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen plunged the region into disarray. Hamas rockets launched into Israel, for example, as stated by former Iranian Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, were made with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps expertise.

The threat that Iran poses to U.S. interests has been brought back into sharp focus ever since the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel since Oct. 7, 2023. The regime in Tehran is not only adamant to engineer the destruction of Israel and to violently threaten U.S. regional interests but has also resorted to obfuscation and subterfuge when engaged in diplomatic interactions in the past. This makes the clerical regime in Tehran particularly difficult to trust, and unamenable to good-faith diplomatic negotiations.

Indeed, the mercurial nature of the regime has manifested itself repeatedly throughout the last four and a half decades. During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, the Islamic Republic’s habit of flouting the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons began, first in 2002, and later again in 2003. And from 2006 to 2012, Iran refused to halt its uranium enrichment program, breaching six United........

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