When confronted with a firm United States, Iran has remained largely restrained to avoid provoking direct military confrontation.
President Trump has drawn a line in the sand. In a May 4 interview, he said he would accept only the “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program as the end point of any future deal with Tehran. To be sure, dismantlement is a tough demand for the clerical regime. Yet, seeking dismantlement is not only the correct course but also the only viable strategy if President Trump hopes to achieve a durable diplomatic resolution to the nuclear crisis. Half-measures won’t cut it, and pursuing dismantlement won’t inevitably lead to war.
To build the necessary bargaining power for this outcome, the administration is rightly continuing its maximum pressure campaign, launched in 2018 to slash Tehran’s oil revenue and sever Iranian banks from the global financial network.
Since February, the Trump administration has imposed more than seven rounds of sanctions targeting Iran’s shadow fleet and Chinese entities importing illicit Iranian crude oil and other petroleum products. These actions have already had an impact. Iranians, disillusioned and resentful by the rial’s historic plunge to over one million per dollar in March, now face inflation rising over 3 percent month-on-month, with the annual rate nearing 40 percent.
Meanwhile, Israel’s 2024 campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah, the collapse of the Assad regime, and U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis have significantly reduced the Islamic Republic’s regional influence.
Tehran’s consequent weakness gives the United States unprecedented leverage in nuclear negotiations. But many in Washington have sounded the alarm, arguing that dismantlement is an unrealistic goal that Tehran would reject, thereby provoking war if the Trump administration follows through with its threats. However, similar dire warnings proved unfounded during the first Trump administration. These critics routinely framed Trump’s Middle East policies as harbingers of a major regional conflict, yet time and again, those predictions failed to materialize.
The starkest example of this phenomenon came in 2020 when the United States eliminated Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) external arm for executing terror operations abroad.
Alarmists swiftly stoked panic, with fearmongering coverage dominating the media. Online searches and social media hashtags related to “WWIII” and “Franz Ferdinand”—the Austro-Hungarian archduke whose assassination triggered World War I—surged. The panic reached such heights that the U.S. Selective Service System’s website crashed from a wave of Americans afraid that Washington would draft them.
Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 capitalized on this panic. Joe Biden warned that the U.S. stood “on the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren likewise claimed the strike would lead to a “disastrous war” and “more deaths” in the region. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta went as far as asserting that America was “closer to war with Iran than at any time in the last 40 years.”
No doubt, the Islamic Republic’s actual response—launching dozens of ballistic missiles against the US military’s al-Assad Airbase in Iraq—was historic and reportedly the largest ballistic missile attack on American forces to date. But it was still tempered. The IRGC preemptively informed Washington via Iraqi intermediaries of its retaliatory strike. At the same time, Iran’s Foreign Ministry conveyed the message through the Swiss embassy, allowing American personnel to take shelter and move equipment.
In fact, the attack aimed only to save face and signal that US bases lie within Tehran’s missile reach.
This pattern of overstating Iran’s potential retaliation also emerged during the run-up to the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Proponents of the agreement repeatedly framed it as the sole alternative to large-scale escalation. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress in 2015, “It is either this deal or war.”
Yet, war never materialized after Trump’s 2018 exit from the JCPOA. While Iran did begin to expand its nuclear program following the withdrawal, the program’s rapid acceleration occurred only after Biden’s electoral victory in November 2020. It was under Biden that the regime began deploying advanced centrifuges and enriching uranium to levels of 60 percent in 2021 and even briefly 84 percent in 2023—which are just short of weapons-grade, or 90 percent.
Another contested Iran policy under Trump was the April 2019 designation of the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). In 2017, former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that fears of “blowback” from Tehran had prevented the Obama administration from taking that step. Many in the national security establishment also shared concerns that the FTO designation would endanger U.S. personnel in Iraq.
The aftermath of the designation failed to validate those concerns. While Iranian provocations did increase in May 2019, including attacks on oil tankers and resumed strikes on U.S. positions in Iraq, Tehran’s response proved restrained, failing to exert significant damage on its targets. Likewise, these actions coincided with—and were more plausibly a response to—Washington’s escalated economic campaign targeting Iranian oil and industrial metal exports. These measures inflicted tangible economic damage, while the FTO designation, though symbolically potent, was not the primary driver of Iran’s behavior.
Likewise, the alarmism over Trump’s policies focused not only on Iran’s regime but also on its proxies. When Trump promised in 2016 to relocate the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Obama warned that the move would yield “explosive” consequences.
After the White House announced the embassy move in 2017, the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas called for an intifada, urging violence against Jews. While the call raised fears of a large-scale uprising akin to the First and Second Intifadas, which resulted in hundreds of deaths, the unrest that followed was significantly more limited in scope.
Tragically, four Palestinians were killed in Gaza and the West Bank during the ensuing protests. However, far from igniting broader conflict, the embassy move was followed two years later by a diplomatic breakthrough. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalized relations with Israel under the historic Abraham Accords.
The United States must always prepare for contingencies when confronting adversaries like Iran. The most self-defeating strategy is to allow Washington to be deterred—not by Tehran but by its own hesitation. The Islamic Republic’s responses have remained largely restrained to avoid crossing thresholds that provoke direct military confrontation. Critics who frame Trump’s demand for dismantlement as an unacceptably risky provocation ignore this reality. The outcomes of previous high-stakes moves show that a firm posture can extract concessions without spiraling into conflict.
That is precisely why dismantlement is not only desirable but achievable and why settling for less would squander a rare moment of American leverage.
About the Author: Janatan Sayeh
Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he focuses on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s malign regional influence. Follow Janatan on X @JanatanSayeh.
Image: Saeediex / Shutterstock.com.
