WhatsappAny agreement must be designed with reality at its center, meaning it represents a temporary lull. Such an adversary calculates in years, even decades, while the West does so in news cycles.
For years, the Middle East has been interpreted through the wrong lens. Analysts and statesmen speak in the dialect of ideology and narrative, of diplomatic choreography and endless “process.”
Yet to understand how U.S. President Donald Trump is engaging Iran at this moment, one must begin with a simpler and more decisive premise. Trump does not operate as an ideologue. He operates as a dealmaker.
Foreign reports suggest that the framework being advanced by the Trump administration is stark in its demands and spare in its form. It calls for a complete end to Iran’s military nuclear program, including a prohibition on enrichment and the surrender of already enriched material. It proposes severe limits on Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities, particularly those that could place Israel within reach. It insists upon a total halt to the funding of terror and the management of regional proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iraqi militias.
To Western diplomats trained in gradualism, ambiguity, and incremental “confidence building,” such terms can appear maximalist. To Trump, they reflect basic negotiating logic. He does not begin with a roadmap, nor does he disguise the destination in procedural language meant to gratify every party at once. He states the outcome he intends to achieve, places it plainly on the table and makes equally plain that refusal will be expensive.
This is the method that has long characterized Trump’s transactional realism in both business and geopolitics. He defines the end state. He offers a path to reach it through agreement. He underscores that the alternative entails serious pain, whether imposed through isolation, force or both. Most crucially, he seeks to ensure that the threat is believed. In a region shaped by deterrence, credibility is the currency that buys restraint.
By inclination, Trump prefers that the other side accept the deal. War is costly, unruly and unpredictable. If the same strategic goals can be secured without bloodshed, the rational preference is to pursue that outcome. Yet Trump also grasps what many architects of diplomacy pretend not to see: A deal unmoored from credible consequences is not diplomacy, it is begging.
Iran’s regime has never been a conventional state actor. It speaks the language of survival and force, and it organizes its priorities accordingly. Its leadership has long pursued two supreme aims. The first is the export of its jihadist revolution through terror networks, proxies, regional subversion and the encirclement of Israel. The second is internal survival, the maintenance of regime control over Iran itself.
A deal that eliminates the nuclear path, constrains long-range missile capacity and dismantles the proxy empire would not necessarily topple the regime by direct assault. It would, however, amputate the governing purpose that has animated Tehran’s external policy since 1979. The regime has not devoted its national wealth to the flourishing of the Iranian people. It has poured resources into nuclear development, ballistic programs and the cultivation of armed clients across the region. The animating logic has never been the welfare of Iran’s citizens, but the expansion of revolutionary power.
Trump’s wager may be that if forced to choose between ideological expansion and regime survival, Iran’s leadership will choose survival. Yet he does not appear naive about what is more likely. Refusal, whether explicit or artfully delayed, remains the most probable response. And here is where many observers misread the architecture of his approach. They see the presentation of “a deal” and assume weakness or worse, sentimental faith in good intentions. In Trump’s framework, the offer itself is part of the pressure.
It serves several functions at once. It defines, for the international community, what a reasonable end state would look like. It exposes the regime’s priorities should it reject terms that would end regional destabilization. And it builds legitimacy—at home and abroad—for what follows if rejection occurs. It is structured escalation instead of appeasement.
Trump’s creed is blunt: Peace through strength is not a slogan, but a mechanism. One offers a path that avoids war, while ensuring that rejection carries consequences, and then one follows through if rejection comes. The credibility of the first step depends entirely on the willingness to execute the second.
From Israel’s perspective, this logic aligns with lessons learned in blood. Jihadist regimes are not restrained by goodwill gestures or diplomatic atmospherics; they are restrained when the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of stopping. The strategic objective, therefore, is to engineer precisely that equation.
Trump’s reported thinking about Gaza’s future can be understood as a parallel application of the same negotiating doctrine. The proposed end state is defined in uncompromising terms: a Gaza that is demilitarized, stripped of terror infrastructure, no longer ruled by jihadists and subject to firm Israeli security control to ensure that Oct. 7 can never be repeated. Alongside that security framework, a deal is extended to the civilian population—a path of rebuilding and economic life, but only within conditions that render renewed terror impossible.
Stability without further war is preferable. Yet the offer has meaning only if the alternative is credible. If terror reconstitutes, if the arrangement is exploited, if violence resumes, then control tightens and force is applied decisively until the threat is crushed. Such a posture is not principally punitive. It is structural. It is meant to create a reality in which the price of choosing terror is unmistakably higher than the price of choosing a different future.
And yet, in both the Iran and Gaza contexts, there is a danger that Trump and many others may underestimate the nature of the adversary. Both the Sunni jihadists in Gaza and Shi’ite jihadists in Iran belong to a long ideological movement rooted in an expansive historical and religious framework not constrained by institutional norms or a shared understanding of compromise. Within that framework, patience is a virtue; deception in pursuit of long-term aims is treated as legitimate; and tactical retreat is not failure, but strategy.
It is therefore possible that such actors might accept a deal not as an endpoint but as a pause. They may choose survival today to wait out a second Trump term, lower the pressure, rebuild quietly and resume the same objectives when the political landscape shifts. Choosing an agreement with the United States would not internally be viewed as surrender, only strategic breathing room.
Therefore, it is vital that any “deal” include permanent structural constraints, robust enforcement and enduring deterrence. The most consequential question is what prevents them from returning to the same objectives when conditions grow more favorable. A deal must have an enforceable architecture to prevent a temporary lull that conceals the approach of a more dangerous future.
Any agreement offered to such adversaries must be designed with that reality at its center. Ignoring it does not eliminate the threat. It only postpones it. It grants time for regrouping, rearmament and renewed aggression under less favorable conditions. The leaders of these regimes and movements understand that Trump will not be president forever. They may calculate in years, even decades, while the West calculates in news cycles.
The dealmaker’s approach may clarify the immediate choice before Iran and Gaza. But the enduring test will not be what is promised in ink. It will be what is enforced in reality.
