Diplomacy can’t deliver the quick wins Trump craves. But neither can war

The tumultuous ’20s get ever more tumultuous. After the pandemic in 2020, the storming of the US Capitol in 2021, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Hamas’s attacks on Israel in 2023 and the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, now, at the midpoint of 2025, comes the US entry into the war against Iran.

Wearing a crimson “Make America Great Again” cap in the Situation Room of the White House, the US commander-in-chief oversaw his country’s most significant military intervention in more than 20 years. Not since George W. Bush gave the go-ahead in 2003 for US forces to invade Iraq has a president made such a potentially consequential decision.

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The chaos of what happened after the fall of Saddam Hussein – which the brutal theocracy in Tehran revelled in fomenting – now hangs over America’s latest Middle East adventure. But there is also the possibility that Trump could achieve a feat that eluded his predecessors: elimination of Iran’s nuclear threat without heavy American loss of life. With so many unknown unknowns, it is too early to say.

Already, the crisis has put on display so many hallmarks of Trump’s leadership. The utter unpredictability of a president who signalled last week that a window had opened up for diplomacy. His readiness to gamble. His impatience with the slow pace of negotiated solutions – it took the Obama administration and its European Union, Chinese and Russian partners two years to conclude the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal which Trump withdrew from in his first term.

There was the ritualistic trashing of European allies, who conducted talks with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Geneva on Friday. “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us,” he said as those talks came to an inconclusive end, even though the UK foreign secretary David Lammy had flown direct from Washington to Geneva carrying a message from the Trump administration to Iran’s leadership. Lengthy diplomacy seems to bore this fabled dealmaker who boasted of ending the Ukraine war in a single day.

The crisis has demonstrated Trump’s penchant for the dramatisation of world affairs. Always, he is centre stage. Each unfolding day is vested with the suspense of an episodic cliffhanger. Even when blood is about to be shed, a factor in his decision-making seems to be the sheer entertainment value of his actions. The flourishes he used in his speech to the nation following the B2 stealth bomber mission was classic Trump. “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before,” he boasted of his collaboration with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The “great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines” had carried out “an operation the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades”, he added, using the patois of a carnival barker rather than a statesman.

Ahead of the US strikes, we were also reminded of his fixation with winning a Nobel Peace Prize, something his nemesis, Barack Obama, achieved, rather undeservedly, early on in his first term. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan,” he moaned on Truth Social, as he cited five conflicts in which his administration had purportedly played a mediating role. In full victim mode, Trump complained he would be overlooked for the prize “no matter what” he accomplished. Hours after this self-pitying diatribe, he took America to war.

Winning is so central to his thinking. Israel, after days of strikes on Tehran and the nuclear sites, clearly had the upper hand. In joining Netanyahu – who stroked Trump’s ego afterwards by praising him for “courageously leading the free world” – he felt he was joining the winning side.

In the Middle East, however, notions of victory are never simplistic, which brings us to the pathologies of conflicts past. Iraq is a bloody reminder that military operations intended to be relatively short and uncomplicated can turn into forever wars. Mission creep, which has haunted America since the quagmire of Vietnam, is a clear and present danger.

Trump surely knows this, despite his bluster on social media, which explains why the Americans have indicated to Iran they are not pushing for regime change. Part of the reason for his shock victory in 2016 was his promise of extricating America from foreign entanglements. But 10 years ago, when he came down the golden escalator to launch his bid for the White House, he also warned: “I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” Though he taps into a 250-year-old strain of American isolationism, it has always been a mistake to regard him as a traditional American isolationist.

The scale of US involvement will depend on how Iran retaliates. And here, Tehran’s capabilities have been massively degraded. Israel has decapitated two key proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has been deposed and replaced by Ahmed al-Sharaa, who met Trump this year in Saudi Arabia – the first high-level Syria meeting in a quarter-century. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are closely allied with Iran, have targeted Israel with missiles and disrupted international shipping in the Red Sea, but their capacity to mount reprisal attacks has also been degraded by a series of US airstrikes since Trump took office.

When, in January 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, the response from Tehran was unexpectedly feeble. Its militia groups fired missiles at bases hosting US forces in Iraq, wounding dozens of US troops, but the attack appeared deliberately calibrated not to provoke a massive American response. That recent history has emboldened Trump. And Iran was a more formidable foe in January 2020 than it is in June 2025.

Still, tens of thousands of US troops are stationed in the broader Middle East, and Iran has a potential target list of 20 US bases in the region. It could mine the Strait of Hormuz and drive up oil prices.

Credit: Matt Golding

There is also the fear of an unconventional attack, such as swarm drone assaults on US warships, or terror strikes. Ukraine’s drone strike on Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet, and Israel’s exploding pager operation on Hezbollah, demonstrated it is not just ballistic missiles which are devastating.

Unpredictability is the watchword of Trump 2.0. There is, though, a known known. Wars are a lot easier to start than they are to end.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.