Six months on, Trump’s Iran strategy is starting to pay off

Republican political strategist, foreign policy analyst and former surrogate for Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns.

Six months into the conflict between the United States and Iran, the situation is not the humiliating quagmire that critics of the Trump administration insist upon. Instead, President Trump has charted a new and far more patient strategy that is making steady progress towards his objectives. The quick victory that some initially envisioned by destroying the regime’s military power has given way to a slow and consistent tightening of the noose aimed at denying the Iranian regime the economic oxygen it needs to survive. Although the conflict is far from over, the evidence is that this new focus is working and will continue. The reflexive opposition of critics at home and abroad has not dissuaded the Trump administration. Instead, what we are witnessing is a grinding contest of attrition in which the pressure is compounding over time, steadily narrowing the Iranian regime’s resources and options. To be clear, the Iranian regime has not yet reached its end, and it has demonstrated that it will not hesitate to slaughter unarmed men, women and even children for daring to peacefully protest against its decades of repression and failed policies. But even the most brutal of regimes cannot forever survive a crumbling economy and desperate population.

Start with what the Trump administration’s critics refuse to credit: Iran’s grip on the one asset it was counting on to make this war unwinnable for Washington is visibly slipping. For most of the six-month conflict, Tehran has treated the Strait of Hormuz as a hostage, mining it, attacking tankers, forcing insurers to flee and shippers to reroute, in the belief that it could hold the global economy at gunpoint indefinitely. That leverage is eroding. Kpler data now show that Iran’s declared northern route accounts for only a minority of tanker traffic, with more than 80 percent of crossings classified as dark or unknown and some vessels using alternative routes, including the US-backed Omani southern corridor. Iran’s own oil exports through the Strait have collapsed as a consequence of the US naval blockade, and Tehran can no longer reliably hope to collect the transit tolls it wants to sustain the regime. This is not a closed strait reopened by decree; it is a chokepoint being pried loose finger by finger, under US naval pressure, while Iran postures that it still commands a waterway it can no longer fully police. That distinction, between total victory and a steadily tightening vice, is the honest and still-impressive story of the last two months, and it is a story the Trump administration has failed to tell.

The more important test, the one this war was actually fought over, is Iran’s nuclear programme, and here the record is genuinely mixed, regardless of the Trump administration’s claims. The June 2025 strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, and the sustained pressure since, appear to have caused genuine damage: Iran’s main capacity to convert enriched uranium into the metallic form needed for weaponisation has been destroyed, while its centrifuge manufacturing base has been substantially degraded. That is not insignificant; in fact, it is the central military achievement of the entire campaign. But it is not the whole story, and the Trump administration should stop pretending it is. Iran has meanwhile continued construction and hardening work at Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried complex that analysts say could eventually be used to reconstitute elements of its centrifuge or enrichment programme. That activity raises serious questions about Tehran’s compliance with its commitment under the June memorandum to maintain the nuclear status quo. This is the unfinished business of the war, and it is the reason “mission accomplished” rhetoric would be not just premature but dangerous.

Which brings us to the point critics have got wrong. The collapse of the June Memorandum of Understanding is being read by the Trump administration’s opponents as an admission of failure: A deal Washington couldn’t hold. For Washington, Iran’s continued activity at Pickaxe Mountain, alongside its attacks on shipping, confirmed that Tehran was not honouring the bargain. On that reading, the only intelligent response is to say so publicly and treat the document as worthless, which is what the Trump administration has done.

At six months, it would be foolish to recast this conflict as a victory for the Trump administration; it has clearly not yet accomplished its original goals. The economic toll on the rest of the world has been real, including a major disruption to global oil supply along with Iranian military assaults on 11 countries across the region, including US allies in the Gulf. Iran’s own economy has been devastated: Poverty has risen sharply, its currency is nearly worthless, natural gas output has been severely reduced by military strikes, and trade with China, its largest remaining customer, has cratered. Yet despite these dire realities, the regime has demonstrated once again that it will not trim its fanatical ambitions. In fact, its hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now threaten weapons “completely different” from anything used to date should the fighting resume. An extremist regime ready to sacrifice its population’s wellbeing without remorse cannot easily be persuaded to negotiate honestly or to comply with agreed terms until it concludes that the risk to its continued rule is too great. The Trump administration would be wise to say that plainly rather than promise the public a finish line that has not yet arrived.

That is precisely why President Trump’s recent shift, deliberately stepping back from further military strikes in favour of sustained economic strangulation, should be read as strategic patience rather than drift. Two prior attempts at a negotiated pause, in April and in June, collapsed because Iran demonstrated once again that it would not negotiate in good faith. A renewed attempt to negotiate an end to the conflict, backed by a tightening naval chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a dramatically expanded sanctions campaign and the credible threat of a strike on Pickaxe Mountain if construction continues, would give Washington a fundamentally stronger hand than it had during either of the first two attempts. The lesson of the past six months is not that pressure has failed to produce capitulation. It is that pressure takes longer than a news cycle to produce capitulation from a radical theocratic regime that is willing to reduce its populace to bare subsistence rather than compromise.

The Trump administration’s path forward is neither the swift, decisive victory some envisioned nor the endless morass critics predicted. It is the harder, less satisfying work of turning wartime cooperation with Gulf partners into a more durable security architecture, establishing the Omani corridor as a viable alternative to Iran’s northern route and making unmistakably clear that continued construction at Pickaxe Mountain will be met with the same resolve that devastated Iran’s enrichment programme a year ago.