Does he have no word? Everyone is laughing at Donald Trump - and missing the strategic move | Dr. Liraz Margalit

Donald Trump looks like someone who has lost it: threatening destruction, canceling an attack overnight, announcing a deal that Iran denies, setting a deadline and changing it. The prevailing criticism is that he has no word, that he is unable to close, and that people are laughing at him. But when you stop analyzing his behavior toward Iran and start analyzing it against his own hourglass, a completely rational logic is revealed.

At the moment, Donald Trump is trapped between three goals that cannot be achieved together: to be the leader who brought Iran to its knees and did not fold; not to be dragged into a long, expensive, and unpopular war; and to open the Strait of Hormuz and lower the price of fuel before the elections in November. Each of the goals is reasonable in itself, but the problem is that they not only collide, they block each other.

A real attack, especially on Iranian energy infrastructure, spikes oil prices right before the vote. A real deal is interpreted as surrender — a repeat of the nuclear agreement that Donald Trump himself tore up and called a "disgrace" — which demoralizes the hawks and his voter base. The status quo, meaning keeping the situation as it is, keeps the strait closed and prices high. There is no winning move, only different degrees of loss.

This is exactly the situation where a strategy called "minimax" enters. It is a decision-making strategy that does not look for the greatest profit, but the smallest loss among the possible losses. You do not choose the move that will bring you the best result, you choose the move whose worst-case scenario is less destructive than the worst-case scenario of all the others. This is the logic of someone who is already in a bad position and knows it. Minimax is not a strategy of victory, it is a strategy of damage limitation. What looks from the outside like inconsistency is from the inside a consistent choice, again and again, of the same option that is the least bad: to hold the middle.

The war has already cost the USA at least 37.5 billion dollars. It is unpopular, it hurts Donald Trump in the polls, and it erodes his base specifically. The real clock that is ticking is not the Iranian nuclear clock, but the clock until the midterm elections in November. Once you place the behavior on this axis, it stops looking random.

When Donald Trump threatens an attack, he reassures Israel and the hawkish wing of the party, momentarily returns pressure on Iran, and prevents himself from looking like someone who has lost deterrence. But as soon as the threat starts to raise the price of oil, scare Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and alarm the American voter, he stops and announces that progress has been made. This week it happened almost in real time: the threat of an attack was replaced by an announcement of rapid contacts to open Hormuz, and the price of oil dropped by more than 5%.

Therefore, his goal right now is not to achieve a comprehensive agreement with Iran, which requires months of concessions and supervision. The immediate goal is much more modest: to extract enough concessions from Iran to return oil to the market, lower the price at gas stations, and present to the American public a picture of a president who forced them to ask for a deal, even if in practice it is only a temporary arrangement on the movement of tankers.

Don't shoot — deny

Here enters the part that turns the zigzag from an embarrassment into a mechanism. Donald Trump cannot say that the war did not achieve what he promised, that it is too expensive, and that the Gulf states asked him to stop. Therefore, he needs a different story: "We were about to attack, they got scared, they called, I stopped because we got something from them." Without the threat, stopping the attacks looks like folding. After a dramatic threat, the exact same stop is marketed as the mercy of a winner: "I could have destroyed them, but they asked for a deal."

These zigzags serve four audiences simultaneously. To Israel and the hawks, he says that the attack is still on the table. To Iran, he says: "Give me something I can present as an achievement." To the Gulf states, he says that he is listening and not dragging them into a regional war. And to the American voter, he says that he is both strong and the one who ends wars.

However, these four audiences are not opaque to each other, they watch each other, and here lies the failure that the mechanism carries within it. The translation of a retreat into the mercy of a winner works only as long as the other side is silent. One sentence from Iran — "we never asked him to stop" — returns the narrative of "I could have destroyed them and they begged" back to "he threatened and backed down."

Iran has learned that it holds a cheap and repeatable tool: don't shoot, just deny. They are not arguing about a fact, they are dismantling a narrative. Everyone is laughing at Donald Trump that he is threatening again and folding again, but his goal is to maintain the threat. He is not trying to win the war; he is trying to buy time to come out well in the elections. The bottom line is that every day that passes, the Iranian economy is closer to collapse. There is a limit to how much they can hold out. He can afford to sit in the middle, because the other side is bleeding faster.