Peloni: Jennifer offers important insights into Trump’s Iran policy, which, as she notes, offers a more optimistic perspective.
Trump plays his own game.
J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative, May 18, 2025
An update is due on Trump’s pathbreaking movements in divers places over the past couple of weeks. As noted in the previous article on Trump and Qatar, the “Trump and Qatar” dynamic is coming in for heavy criticism. It isn’t my project to talk through what others are very competently treating from the complaints side, so I’ll confine this discussion, which I hope to keep abbreviated, to laying out more optimistic considerations.
The overall topic sits at the juncture of elements in diplomacy that we’ve all but forgotten how to talk about, after eighty years of what has essentially been stasis since World War II. The stasis has been characterized by international mechanisms enforced by U.S. dominance. Most Americans don’t even recognize today that the international mechanisms, including the UN and all its subsidiary bodies, were backed and instituted by the United States after the war, and have persisted in quiescent use because of our investment in them.
Take a moment to recall that we didn’t have to be dragged into the UN because of some momentum it had from other energies – momentum that was going to leave us behind. We started the blamed thing. It wouldn’t exist without us.
Indeed, if you actually read the UN Charter, you discover that its language says about member-states what Americans would say, about sovereignty, responsibility, order, and the prerogatives of nations. The U.S. wrote the Charter on principles that enabled us to be the body’s chief patron. It was later that the UN began wandering away from what Americans could approve.
I make this point to put thing in perspective, as a reminder that there has always been a putative center of the road as regards U.S. participation in international mechanisms, from UN agencies to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), which 30 years ago subsumed its forerunner the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the NATO alliance, the ASEAN group, which organizes Southeast Asian nations as a trading bloc to negotiate with economic powerhouses like the United States, and international cooperative instruments like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the Chemical Weapons Convention, or OPCW.
The U.S. has not only participated with a fairly stable legacy of national policies in these instruments of international “norms”; we’ve been a standards-writer and primary presence in most of them, at least some of the time. It’s necessary to recall this history to understand that the recent condition of a number of them – radicalized, embittered, brittle – is a migration away from the mindsets of their founding, which came largely from a centrist old-consensus thread in U.S. politics.
The migration of the international institutions away from that thread, and toward radical leftism, is what has made it increasingly untenable for America to remain in what conventional readers of foreign policy regard as the “normal” U.S. posture. The international mechanisms have wandered away. Centrism in the U.S. has moved to the left, but American voters today are clearly indicating they won’t go any further left.
There are U.S. factions that sympathize with the direction of the international institutions’ migration. They’re what today’s Trump voters consider the out-of-touch, dysfunctional “elite.” Trump voters see the elite’s members and people as burrowed into the “deep state,” into government, media, academia, NGOs, consulting and lobbying firms, international business leadership, etc.
The point of surveying these matters is that even conservatives are apt to see the foreign policy and national security landscape in the terms of this 80-year-old framework. U.S. conservatives, almost all Republicans, have worked within the framework for decades, and carry a set of assumptions that colors the view of every current condition cultivated within that framework.
And the problem with Trump is that he’s out there running circles around it, shaking it up, and refusing to be restrained or constrained by it. The framework now comes with a whole parasite body of protocols and expectations that the cognoscenti assume cannot be violated, but must kick in, willy-nilly, as they have before. Trump is acting as if the embedded network of expectations doesn’t actually have to govern today’s negotiations. And that’s got everyone in a regular tizzy.
That’s all the introduction I really want to put in this article. What I append below are three excerpts from my musings in another forum, which discuss why I’m not as alarmed and pessimistic as many are about Trump’s recent foray into the Middle East, or what we hear at this fast-moving moment about talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
Besides the point that everything keeps moving very fast, there is the point that Trump isn’t either of the previous two Democratic presidents. The outcome of negotiations involving Trump simply isn’t fated by outside forces to produce the same things produced (or not) by Biden and Obama, and their largely misguided teams.
Events don’t just fall helplessly into patterns when levers are moved. The actions, intentions, and will of the specific individual humans involved determine where talks go.
Trump is not his predecessors. He isn’t inherently selling out by talking specifics with any of the parties he’s engaging with.
One of the things he’s demonstrated is that he doesn’t leave agreements to administer themselves. That can’t be a basis for any “deal” made with Iran’s regime, for example. Such a deal must not trust Iran, or rely on an easily frightened UN inspection team, under limited-access protocols to begin with.
But if Trump is making the deal, there’s no reason to assume those poorly-founded conditions will attend the deal in the first place.
The 747
The first excerpt addresses Qatar’s donation of a 747 to the U.S. to be refurbished as an interim Air Force One while we await the delivery of a new one from Boeing (a process in frustrating delay at this point).
For the record, I think we should just buy the aircraft. Also for the record, Senator Mullin of Oklahoma pointed out on Thursday that the negotiations for the donation of Qatar’s 747 began in 2024 under Joe Biden. So this isn’t a “Trump sell-out,” if we want to call it a sell-out. It’s either a Biden-Trump sell-out, or it’s something else in which both Biden and Trump have played the same role.

I think the optics are unnecessary and we should have just bought the aircraft. If there’s a good enough reason to have it, there’s a good enough reason to buy it.
Nothing Trump has done since 2017 gives me any reason to believe he’s selling out to Qatar, nor has anything done since January had that sell-out effect. So far, the potential for such material effects hasn’t condemned Israel to undesirable consequences.
There’s just been, as [a forum associate] says, a whole lot of noise. But Israel keeps having the latitude needed to win the war in Gaza and get rid of Hamas, instead of being jacked around by someone else’s idea of a great settlement. That’s what I want: Israel able to get the job done to its best advantage, without having to fend off carpetbaggers making headway with premature post-war plans. Witkoff makes alarming noises every time he opens his mouth, but they don’t turn into disaster for Israel. The reason is that Trump never signals a willingness to force Israel to compromise itself into disaster.
Negative takes on Trump and the Middle East (Part 1)
The second excerpt responds to a Substack article in the Cosmopolitan Globalist collection by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, with the disheartening title “Why Trump Has Turned Against Israel.” I reject the characterization of the title proposition. Discussion:
This is being viewed the wrong way. My take is a bit different [from another forum participant’s].
It’s understandable to view it the wrong way given the egregious behavior of Qatar, but I think that focus creates a mis-orientation to clues that don’t apply when there’s a strong US administration as opposed to a weak one.
Here’s what Trump is achieving. He’s surrounding Iran and cutting off all its previous avenues for power projection. Syria: Iran can’t regain its position there. It’s gone. It’s not coming back.
The GCC and Gulf: Trump is retaining the most geographically advantaged territorial perch in the region by keeping the US in Qatar, while shifting the dynamic to the US being the strong horse and Iran being the weak horse. Qatar wants to have a foot in both camps. US: Make sure our hand is stronger. Especially since Turkey also has a minor but symbolic military presence in Qatar. US presence there is basically THE stabilizing factor in the region. Qatar’s antics would worry everyone in the region more if the US weren’t there.
Click to enlarge for legibility (all images). Google map; author annotation.
Iran doesn’t see Trump’s headway in Qatar with the slightest optimism. But the GCC nations are fans. The US would be colossally stupid to abandon Qatar’s geographic position. It’s the cheapest, most efficient, effective way to dominate the Persian Gulf. The same CANNOT be done from Bahrain, UAE, or Oman. US abandoning Qatar creates a void Iran would try to move into. For optimum positioning in case of an air campaign in Iran, having the US dominate the Central Gulf from Qatar is essential, even if Qatar wants to limit the kinds of sorties we can fly from Al-Udeid. We still keep Iran from disturbing equilibrium inside the Gulf. We’re too big for Iran to take on in Qatar.
[Insert: Others may not remember the period 2015-2018 when the Saudis were working on cutting off the marshland border between KSA and Qatar by making it a canal. It was an esoteric development. The Saudis’ concern was that marshy terrain would leave the border open to military breach by ground-force vehicles coming from Qatar. Their plan was to just interrupt that with a water barrier.]
Map re-upped from Liberty Unyilding post in 2019; link in text. A VERY basic sketch of strategic dimensions and considerations. Arrow placement does not imply specific starting points, waypoints, or end points. Google map; author annotation.
[A lot of regional developments were going badly for the Saudis at the time, including a ramp-up of the Houthi missile campaign against KSA territory.] But the Saudis see Trump today as a POTUS who wants to “occupy strong” in Qatar, not pay through the nose to get kicked around there.
Witkoff is probably the worst-messaging diplomat in the modern age. He’s awful. But he’s been awful since the middle of January and the worst predictions keep not coming true.
The bottom line, however, is that Trump’s object is to squeeze Iran until the mullahs are a gelatinous muck. He doesn’t want to go to guns unless he absolutely has to. That’s evident from his overall pattern. He’s dissatisfying everyone with where he doesn’t want to shoot. But he’s got the biggest deterrent force in CENTCOM since the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. He’s clearly serious.
There’s a lot more that could be laid out, but it’s abundantly clear to me that Trump’s strategy is to corral Iran. I think he foresees doing that as a means of stabilizing and empowering the rest of the region. Perhaps it will result in Iran achieving its own regime change. Perhaps not. My take is that at the least, Trump thinks he can get a better, more verifiable and enforceable nuclear deal by backing the Iranian regime into a corner. Meanwhile, demonstrating Iran’s inability to escape Trump’s surround-and-restrain strategy would encourage better behavior from Iraq, Kuwait, and others. Everything from Turkey to Lebanon, Kurds to the Horn of Africa, Yemen to the Northern Indian Ocean will become a different problem if all the steam goes out of Iran’s choo-choo train.
I’m not going to write for hours about the Asian interior, and Russia, and China, and the back door to Iran. But yes, I’m taking that into account. Also the Houthis and Yemen (which are containable by European NATO + the GCC if they’ll get on the stick), and Iran’s channels to Central America and the potential for threatening the US directly from there. There are multiple considerations, but just one is that the increased US Navy presence in the waterway formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico is substantially more than necessary to patrol our southern coast for border-protection purposes. It looks more like something to prepare for blue-water naval threats with, such as from China, and even China seeking to act in loose concert with a missile-slinging Iran in Venezuela, or Cuba.
Trump doesn’t message in the systematic terms of the post-1945 consensus. That makes it harder to see what he’s doing. He just blew up the WTO, for example. He got China to make a temporary agreement on a bilat basis outside of WTO-standard benchmark criteria, which China has relied on for advantage it wouldn’t otherwise have. “WTO” has gone from compulsory to optional in the span of less than a week. The US can reap advantage from that from the strong side whenever we want. China can’t, nor can anyone else. Even the EU will lose cohesion in that condition, rather than reliably coming together to try and enforce it.
But Trump’s not pointing that out. People can decide for themselves why that would be.
I don’t expect to change minds on this, but there are real reasons to not read Trump’s current diplomacy as a gigantic, weak-hand sellout to Qatar. He’s resetting conditions so that nothing means the same thing it meant under Biden or Obama. His objective is to hem in Iran and weaken the regime’s will decisively. Regarding Israel, one of his smartest moves is NOT allowing anyone to put mandates about Israel in the US negotiations with 3rd parties. They’d all do it if they could, but Trump is consistently saying no. Clauses about heaping requirements on Israel are for other negotiations; not these.
Negative takes on Trump and the Middle East (Part 2)
The third excerpt is in response to a Washington Post story from 16 May, “Israel ramps up attacks on Gaza as Trump leaves region without a deal.”
WaPo had an unusually restrained stance on this development in the subtitle slug: “The withering Israeli aerial campaign appeared to presage the ground operation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to launch if no ceasefire and hostage deal were struck by the time Trump returned to the U.S.” (Read: “Trump is failing to get deals and Bibi is taking advantage of that, but we can’t think of a really defamatory way to spin that because we can’t keep up with all this and our brains are fried.”)
This is a good thing. There is no solution for Gaza other than completely eliminating the status quo ante, so that there’s nothing to revert to. (I want to lay out the case for why it’s legitimate to not sink into despair over the course of events. That takes longer than using all the preexisting assumptions that apply less and less now, if at all. [These sentences explain why this is another lengthy passage. The perspective has to change, by being laid out in different terms, to show bona fides behind greater optimism about what Trump is doing. – J.E.])
In the absence of some very unusual settlement brokered by Trump – something no one could have prevision for – Israel’s destruction of Hamas-Gaza has to happen. Israel is getting to do it, without effective collusion by Arab and European actors to intervene. UAE actually agrees formally that Hamas must be defeated and removed.
Israel also has a free hand to smash and annihilate the Houthis. There might be a limit to what other nations want to tolerate, but all they’d be doing by proposing to intervene against Israel’s interests is making themselves responsible for what comes next. None of them wants to do that if it’s not part of a Trump-sponsored proposal. Not even Saudi Arabia and UAE. And Qatar is now busy paying to preserve Boeing as a national security asset for the US. [That refers to the deal for a big aircraft sale to Qatar – J.E.]
Trump’s diplomacy continues to not restrain Israel where Israel needs to act. The Western media are disappointed that Israel isn’t being either restrained or constrained (e.g., constrained to retreat into a disastrous 2SS). But they’re not quite sure they can even tell what’s going on. They call that chaos, inconsistency, a reversal of course by Trump.
Probably the most significant effect Trump is having is precisely that Israel’s restraints and constraints aren’t subject to the narrative burgeoning in Tucker Carlson’s brain. “America First” (a slogan I’ve never liked, because of its prior connotations from 80 years ago; but there it is) does NOT mean giving up on Israel, with punitive sound effects from a juvenile Greek chorus. So far It has meant the region being stabilized against plots to corner Israel. Israel instead retains freedom of action. That’s even better than Israel being America’s veto-restrained client, in Israel’s sovereign security actions.
The legacy media are determined not to make that clear. They don’t want Israel to retain freedom of action, so they bad-mouth everything that’s happening, and try to fan the flames of division between the Tucker Carlson niche and other Trump voters, playing up an internecine conflict in “MAGA.” The conflict is there. That’s not in dispute. But effects from Trump’s policies aren’t going Carlson’s way. (The detachment of effects from the informational themes people on all sides are navigating by is the darnedest thing I’ve ever seen.)
Meanwhile, perspective on Iran has to take into account that the shibboleths of the old prevailing conditions are falling as I type this. Nothing going forward will happen in Biden’s or Obama’s world. I want to offer encouragement that that has meaning. If the old conditions were set in stone, Trump wouldn’t punt them aside so easily. But they’re not. There are other things to consider besides our old-consensus certainties.
I wouldn’t do everything the way Trump does (just call Witkoff Agent 86 and excuse him from the diplomatic drama, though of course not from life itself), but Trump isn’t driving the Titanic into the iceberg.
Trumpschlacht and its pedigree
Finally: the term “Trumpschlacht” from the article title. German speakers will understand it means “Trump-battle,” or, more literally, “Trump-slaughter.”
“Battle” is the right word. The allusion in the lexicon of military expressions is to the term Kesselschlacht, used by Helmut von Moltke the Elder (Bismarck’s military genius in unifying modern Germany in the 19th century) to refer to his campaign practice of “surrounding and annihilating” an opponent. Kesselschlacht is typically translated “cauldron battle,” to evoke the effect of the surrounded enemy being heated up in a cauldron and dispatched.
Some years ago, studying Ronald Reagan’s comprehensive approach to reducing the Soviet Union for its date with the ash heap of history, I came up with the term “Reaganschlacht.” Reagan had a distinctive campaign strategy using all forms of U.S. national power to surround and put unbearable pressure on the USSR. (Those who think Reagan’s role in taking down the Soviet Union is overblown haven’t fully studied the matter. His approach was genuinely different from his predecessors, and far from merely benefiting from their exertions, he reversed much of what they had been doing to achieve the effects he did.)
It can be summarized as involving, first, a messaging campaign that unabashedly predicted doom for collectivism in all its forms, and proclaimed communism immoral and destined to expire of its internal corruption, weakness, and evil. Collectivism, including supranationalism (e.g., borderless worldwide socialism), was not the future. Collectivism, not freedom and nationhood, was in retreat.
Contrary to the faulty memories of today, this was not the message the U.S. had been sending before Reagan. Most American rhetoric, including that of presidents, lacked the courage to prophesy victory over communism, settling instead for defiant words of retreat before it. The two modes of speech are not the same thing.
Reagan established credibility for his determined speech early on, with measures like his uncompromising correction (as governor) of California’s public universities when they were giving in to student riots, and his stare-down of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. Soviet leaders even said later that these measures had particularly impressed them in giving Reagan credibility.
Reagan recruited increased cohesion from our allies to deny the Soviet Union its economic umbilical chord to the West. He deregulated oil and gas and sparked such a production surge in the West that the USSR couldn’t reap a windfall from its energy resources, even where Europeans failed to unite against buying from Moscow. Global prices were falling too much. Reagan also clamped down on dual-use sales to the Soviets, among multiple measures that steadily increased disadvantage for the communist regime.
At the same time, of course, he shifted regulatory and tax conditions in the U.S. favorably for our own economy, encouraging a surge that only Trump has equaled or exceeded. In those optimistic conditions, Reagan was able to restore military procurement and spending – but even more importantly, he deployed military force where it would have the most impact on Soviet perceptions of their strategic environment and their declining options.
There is far too much in this underappreciated aspect of Reaganschlacht to go into in detail, but we can mention two standouts. One was the surroundedness Reagan’s policy on naval deployments created for the Soviet Union. (A partial resource for what I refer to is an earlier article here.) Reagan didn’t just surge our forces for scheduled exercises. He kept them in Moscow’s face, in the “near abroad” waters surrounding an already maritime-limited Russia, 24/365. This was such a significant concern for the Soviets that Mikhail Gorbachev, in a summit with George H.W. Bush in 1989, presented Bush with a map that basically complained about how surrounded we were keeping them. (See the link above for the reference and the nature of the map.)
The other deployment measure was actually deploying theater missiles, including the Pershing-II ballistic missiles, in Europe, rather than continuing mere threats to do so. Reagan went beyond that to deploy ground-launched cruise missiles as well, and the new Tomahawk cruise missiles being rolled out in the Navy. His missile deployment policy significantly complicated Soviet/Warsaw Pact strategic planning: immediately, with real deterrent threats, and not just as a theoretical possibility to goose arms talks.
The Soviets had no similarly-capable counter to the missiles deployed under Reagan. Moscow’s previous aggression, since the 1970s, with other classes of missiles in the European theater had been effective because NATO didn’t have a realistic and effective way to deter their use. But Reagan established exactly that with his counter-deployments. His move was technologically tailored and usable in a way Moscow’s had not been. The Soviets became the ones who didn’t have a realistic deterrent.
Along with a “forward” and intimidating military posture, Reagan materially supported independence movements and insurgencies against Soviet-sponsored autocracies, the practice that became known as the Reagan Doctrine. In 1983, he also achieved the first reversal since 1917 of a Soviet-backed foreign takeover, kicking Soviet clients out of the Caribbean island of Grenada. This seemingly minor event was a turning of the tide. After 1983 – also, notably, the year of the missile deployments in Europe – the USSR was in retreat, never again to expand the creep of its signature red across the map of the globe.
Two other Reagan policies made a significant difference to the faltering career of the Soviet Union. One was Reagan’s passion for freeing dissidents from communist nations. He famously went about his daily business with a list of dissidents to be freed folded up in his breast pocket. Dissidents in Soviet-dominated countries took heart from the priority Reagan set on this, a practice as meaningful as his open, unfiltered ridicule and repudiation of totalitarian collectivism. So did ordinary citizens.
The other policy was his pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” In conjunction with the other vectors of his comprehensive Reaganschlacht strategy, Reagan’s idea of missile defense was a game-changer. Western critics mocked it, but the Soviets regarded it with real alarm, and did everything they could think of to knock Reagan off-stride with it.
From 1983, when Reagan announced the SDI, to 1987, when he and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to remove all the theater missiles from Europe, Moscow tried to get an agreement with the U.S. that included our repudiation of SDI. SDI threatened Moscow’s last-ditch deterrent: the “strategic,” intercontinental threat of nuclear response.
The Soviets regarded “mutual assured destruction” as inherently advantageous for them, largely because they didn’t owe their public any truthful accounting of how well they honored arms agreements, or the justification of their intentions with nuclear weapons. They could cheat without consequence (and did, throughout the history of arms agreements); neither the U.S. nor a disempowered Soviet public would realistically do much about it.
It’s possible that in security policy, history will consider Reagan’s rejection of an amazingly sweet arms deal offered by Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 as the most important act of his presidency. Reagan rejected it because it required him to give up SDI. Even Reagan’s own staff had serious doubters about that decision.
But Reagan stood fast, holding to his SDI vision of a world in which the answer for nuclear attack was not more nuclear attack. The following year, he and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, which for the first time eliminated an entire class of weapons. In the years after it, three presidents turned Reagan’s vision for nuclear arms reduction – laid out in 1981 in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev – into the reality of the Strategic Arms Reduction (START) treaties.
Today, we know that the INF effect didn’t last forever, nor have the START treaties continued with their original momentum. On the other hand, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union are gone: a counter, from reality, to the pessimistic axiom of conventional thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s that they were the future, and were here to stay.
And SDI is still with us, possibly the least likely factor of all from the 1980s perspective. Reaganschlacht changed the game, in exactly the ways the naysayers were wrong about.
That’s the perspective to come at Trumpschlacht with. I don’t know that it’s necessary to enumerate one by one the ways in which Trump has a game-changing effect similar to Reagan’s. We can say in general that Trump makes even less use than Reagan did of international mechanisms, and that Trump’s emphasis is more on enthusiasm for specific economic deals than Reagan’s was. But Trump, like Reagan, uses the whole “DIME” of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.
Like Reagan, Trump is more reluctant than other presidents to involve the U.S. in combat abroad. To a greater extent than Reagan, Trump uses negotiation as an ongoing form of engagement, rather than being in play until there’s a finished product that at some point requires only monitoring. (I attribute that in part to Trump’s nature as an entrepreneur, who is always looking for opportunities in emerging conditions. You don’t sit around satisfied with done deals. Reagan, on the other hand, had his meaningful and important experience with negotiations – at which he was very good – from his years as a union boss. Achieving and defending done deals for your labor clients is the nature of that beast.)
Coining the term “Trumpschlacht” is acknowledging that Trump is not a Mark 1, Mod 0 American president in the post-1945 model. That means he won’t trigger the same old generic-foreign-policy consequences other presidents do, with his brand of diplomacy. It’s really important to shift perspective on that.
Trump’s approach to Iran’s radical regime, in particular, is a surround-and-annihilate campaign. He’s getting inside the regime’s strategy and defenses, using America’s DIME of national power – for one obvious tactic, incentivizing Qatar away from its overbalance toward Tehran. Trump sees the necessity of shaping conditions to shape Iran’s responses, rather than trying to get a new response out of old, unchanged conditions.
The U.S. is way bigger than either Iran or Qatar, and Trump isn’t stupid. He inherently has the upper hand in this dynamic, and he knows it. It’s not about how much Qatar and the U.S. need each other. It’s about how much Iran needs Qatar to be overbalanced in Iran’s favor – and Trump is driving a wedge (in the military maneuver sense!) right down the center of that calculation.
Feature image: Trump, Destroyer of Worlds. (Social media.)
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