After months in which military force dominated its Iran policy, the Trump administration has returned to an old strategy under radically new circumstances: “Maximum Pressure 2.0.”
Rather than seek an agreement to end the exchange of fire in the Strait of Hormuz, the administration now aims to use sweeping economic pressure to force Iran to accept American terms on the strait and its nuclear program. Critics argue that the regime will not compromise and note that Trump’s original maximum pressure campaign failed to produce the desired result. Their skepticism is justified. But whether by design or not, the administration is pursuing the strategy best suited to the challenge.
Critics may be right about what economic pressure cannot accomplish and wrong about what makes it valuable. Its real promise lies not in extracting concessions, but in intensifying pressure on the regime itself.
First, the bad news: It is naive to believe that the regime will yield to economic pressure after resisting sustained military pressure for months. At least in its rhetoric, it speaks the language of faith and eternity and appears convinced that time is on its side, while the Trump administration must contend with the U.S. midterm elections and the global economy.
Moreover, Iran’s leadership is increasingly dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its hardline allies. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is no longer there to authorize the “heroic flexibility” that made the 2015 nuclear agreement possible. His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has neither his father’s religious stature nor the authority his father accumulated over decades. More dependent on the IRGC and more constrained in his room to maneuver, he is far less capable of making concessions on the regime’s defining strategic issues.
Nor is Iran likely to relinquish its two most important remaining cards: its ability to disrupt the global economy through its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and its nuclear capabilities. The recent military campaign has sharply increased its incentive to acquire a nuclear weapon, which the regime sees as the ultimate insurance policy against attempts to overthrow it. The likelihood of meaningful concessions on either issue is therefore close to zero.
That bleak conclusion is precisely what makes the administration’s new course the right one. Whether by design or not, Washington is moving toward the only viable strategic objective left: creating conditions for political change inside Iran. A regime that will neither compromise on Hormuz nor relinquish its nuclear ambitions cannot be managed through more negotiations, while military pressure has failed to compel it to yield. If neither diplomacy nor force can produce concessions, American policy must shift from changing the regime’s behavior to increasing the pressure that could ultimately change the regime itself.
That does not mean another war, nor does it mean an American attempt to dictate Iran’s future. It means sustained economic pressure aimed at deepening internal fractures and creating conditions in which Iranians themselves can challenge the regime.
Tts real promise lies not in extracting concessions, but in intensifying pressure on the regime itself.
For all its rhetoric of faith and eternity, the Iranian regime knows that its gravest threat comes from within. It fears the streets of Tehran far more than America’s Fifth Fleet. The danger was evident last January, when mass protests swept all 31 provinces and posed the gravest existential threat to the Islamic Republic in nearly five decades. That was before the war dramatically deepened Iran’s economic damage and while the regime still had an authoritative and broadly recognized supreme leader.
The economic evidence is stark: Year-on-year inflation reached 84.4% in August, and the International Monetary Fund projects that Iran’s economy will contract by 5.4% in 2026. The rial has fallen to roughly 2 million to the dollar. Crude oil loadings fell from roughly two million barrels a day in the spring to about 240,000 in August. Iran is simultaneously suffering from recession, extreme inflation, collapsing real wages and a plunge in its most important source of revenue. The United Arab Emirates has also announced the suspension of trade and financial activity with Iran; a severe blow given that more than 30% of Iranian imports passed through the Emirates before the war.
The pressure is also exposing divisions within the leadership. President Masoud Pezeshkian rebuked officials who insist that sanctions are ineffective. He has described Iran as operating under wartime conditions; an acknowledgment of both the economy’s vulnerability and the debate within the regime over whether to admit it.
But economic pressure is not the only clock ticking.
A new race is unfolding in the background: One clock measures Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon; the other, the mounting pressure on the regime itself. Washington must assume that Tehran intends to assemble a bomb and may already be working covertly toward that goal, using the nuclear infrastructure and material that survived the war. The uncertainty surrounding Iran’s nuclear program makes the danger greater. With international inspectors unable to account reliably for the current size, location and condition of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and centrifuge inventory, Washington cannot assume that any covert effort toward a weapon will be detected in time.
That is why clear-eyed realism is essential. The Iranian regime will not collapse overnight under economic pressure, and no one can reliably predict when political change might come. Nor can Washington simply ignore the nuclear clock while waiting for the economic one to run out.
Economic pressure should remain the principal strategy while the United States preserves its ability to act if credible evidence emerges that Iran is approaching an imminent nuclear breakout. That uncertainty does not diminish this strategy. U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing the most effective—and arguably, the only—means available: not coaxing an unreformable regime into concessions, but creating the conditions for Iranians eventually to replace it.
This logic echoes James Carville’s famous formulation from former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” What Washington needs now is strategic patience; a quality democracies often struggle to sustain. If the United States can maintain the pressure without mistaking patience for passivity, Tehran may discover that time is not, after all, on its side.
