A crude dialectic is unfolding between Washington and Tehran, but the synthesis it invites is not diplomacy. It’s a disaster. In his second term, Trump has made a virtue of contradiction: denouncing the findings of his own intelligence agencies while intensifying a sanctions regime so severe it has left over half the Iranian population below the poverty line. Iran is cast as an imminent nuclear threat and, at the same time, a regime too broken to resist foreign pressure—a contradiction that underpins Washington’s theatre of urgency, not a coherent strategy. The logic is not coherent, but then coherence has never been the point. The point is pressure, and the spectacle of it.
It’s not the return of diplomacy but the theatre of domination. Every olive branch is dipped in blood.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence and one of the few high-profile figures in his administration not entirely handpicked from the television set or MAGA donor list, told Congress in March that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb. The programme, she testified, remained mothballed. Khamenei, she said, had issued a renewed fatwa against nuclear weapons development, and uranium enrichment. Though advancing, remained well short of weapons-grade thresholds. It was the kind of sober, technocratic briefing that used to form the basis for diplomacy. Trump dismissed it live on air. “I don’t care what she said,” he told Fox. “Iran’s lying. Everyone knows they want the bomb.”
The facts themselves are becoming less important than the architecture of narrative being assembled around them. Israel has escalated strikes, targeting not just facilities but the symbolic heart of Iran’s sovereignty—Tehran itself. Civilian casualties are mounting. Evacuations are underway. Markets are jittery. Iran has withdrawn from further rounds of talks in Muscat. The narrative is clear: the diplomatic window is closing, and if the Islamic Republic will not yield, it will be made to.
We’ve been here before. But this time, the liars no longer bother to conceal the lie. They broadcast it, unfiltered, as spectacle. And the victims are more thoroughly strangled before the shooting starts.
The economic assault on Iran has rarely been so severe. In February, Trump reinstated full-spectrum sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, targeting not just official trade but the smuggling networks that had become vital to Iran’s survival. That’s not hyperbole—roughly 20% of Iran’s oil revenue now comes from these grey channels, most controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds force. Fuel scarcity has led to rolling blackouts, even in Tehran. In some provinces, more than half the population is living in poverty; in others, it’s closer to two-thirds. Hospitals ration electricity and medicine. The sanctions regime does not merely cripple Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, it disables its ability to build anything at all.
One lesson Iran has learned from Iraq, Libya, and Syria is that economic weakness makes you vulnerable to bombs. To survive, you must endure, not yield.
And yet, this isn’t working. Or rather, it’s not working as the architects of “maximum pressure” might have hoped. Iran has not returned to the table offering capitulation. Instead, it has deepened ties with Russia and China, leaned into smuggling, tightened domestic repression, and issued occasional threats of retaliation. This is a regime under siege, yes, but it is not a regime in collapse. One lesson Iran has learned from Iraq, Libya, and Syria is that economic weakness makes you vulnerable to bombs. To survive, you must endure, not yield.
There is a dangerous delusion, circulating now through Washington briefings and Tel Aviv think tanks, that regime change in Iran would follow the neat choreography of Iraq in 2003. The idea that Ayatollah Khamenei could be tried for war crimes, as some officials have recently suggested, rests on a fantasy projection of historical symmetry: another Middle Eastern autocrat, another moment of righteous reckoning. But trying Khamenei is not the same as trying and hanging Saddam Hussein. The IRGC is not the Republican Guard. It is more disciplined, more ideologically entrenched, and far better prepared for asymmetric warfare. The Islamic Republic, for all its contradictions and brutalities, has not been hollowed out in the same way Ba’athist Iraq was after a decade of no-fly zones and corruption. The fantasy of a swift collapse reveals more about the imperial imagination than it does about the actual architecture of power in Iran.
But the demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” Screamed on Truth Social and amplified in Netanyahu-aligned forums, reveals its own incoherence. Trump doesn’t even seem to grasp what such a demand entails. Historically, an unconditional surrender means the vanquished cede all control, with no guarantees left on the table. Is he expecting Tehran to disarm entirely? Accept direct U.S. oversight, dismantle its entire governance, and submit to foreign occupation? Or is this just saber-rattling, dressed up as a Hobbesian ultimatum? The ambiguity is maddening. Worse, it leaves Iran no exit. Without defined terms, “surrender”bcomes not the theatre of diplomacy but domination. An open-ended siren call for further violence.
What’s perhaps most chilling about the current configuration is how little space remains for any countervailing force. The Democrats—those still visible, those still not arrested or censored or too fearful to speak—are largely mute1 on Iran. Their language, where it exists, is procedural, bloodless. The old anti-war movement that once marched against Iraq has fragmented, exhausted itself on domestic fronts, or simply disappeared. The media, for the most part, repeats the language of inevitability. “Escalation.” “Pre-emption.” “Regime instability.” “Crisis management.” One can almost hear the same talking heads arguing for restraint as they polish their arguments for war. So it is 2003.
Iran is to be punished less for its actions than for the threat it poses—symbolic, ideological, and geopolitical—to the established imperial order: resistance, in whatever compromised and reactionary form, to the imperial order.
The Islamic Republic is far removed from any socialist project—it jails trade unionists, executes protesters, suppresses women’s rights and brutally enforces its theocratic vision. Recognising this, however, does not render US aggression any less reactionary; on the contrary, it compounds the repression, not relieves it. It simply doubles the repression. Trump’s Christian nationalist base cheers the idea of bombing a Muslim nation back to the Stone Age. Some of them would call that Biblical retribution. Others would call it strategic clarity.
But there’s something more dangerous emerging: a strategy of unknowing. Where previous administrations at least gestured toward facts. Cooked-up or cherry-picked though they may have been. Trumpism 2.0 revels in ambiguity. Gabbard says Iran has no bomb? Good. That means the strike can be framed as pre-emptive. Netanyahu says Iran is weeks away from testing? Better. Then we can call it defence. The target remains the same. The truth is a matter of aesthetic choice.
This is what makes the current moment so volatile. This is no reprise of 2003, but its grim afterimage—distorted, unravelled, and more perilous in its incoherence. We are watching its degradation. No grand coalition. No speeches at the UN. Just threats, silence, bombardment, and a slowly disintegrating region. Iran will not fall easily. But neither will it be allowed to thrive. Trump has created a zone of unrelenting pressure, with no clear objective but the preservation of US-Israeli strategic dominance. Diplomacy, when it shows up at all, is theatre—its gestures empty, its outcomes prewritten. Sanctions drag on not because they work, but because they signal resolve. Violence, meanwhile, waits in the wings, always ready to be cast as defence, retaliation, or salvation—whatever the script demands.
There is no “final warning”. Only the next strike, the next headline, the next fire in the distance.
Footnotes
- Bernie Sanders and Tim Kane notable exceptions. ↩︎
