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If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in the world.
This is imposing serious harm on the global economy, including the U.S. stock market, and Trump has no clue how to get out of the mess that he has created by starting a war without thinking through the implications.
In short, we are watching what happens when you put into the Oval Office an impulsive, unstable man who ran for president largely to get revenge on his political foes.
Trump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.
If this were not the leadership of my own country — and if Iran were not, indeed, the most destabilizing force in the Middle East and its transformation not a worthy goal for its own people and its neighbors — I’d just sit back and watch the show, savoring the spectacle of Trump getting what he deserves.
But it is my country. Iran going nuclear is a threat that could unleash nuclear proliferation all across the Middle East. And we are all going to get what Trump deserves.
What to do? Trump should set aside his 15-point peace plan — which would be ridiculously complicated to implement — and reduce it to two points: Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on regime change. Both sides would then agree to end all hostilities. That is, no more American and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no more Strait of Hormuz blockade and, for darn sure, no U.S. ground troops landing in Iran.
The Trump team has reportedly been negotiating through Pakistan with the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has strong ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to be the real power behind the scenes. The rump Iranian regime may well be ready to consider giving up its uranium in return for its survival.
Yes, a million problems would remain unresolved, but that’s what happens when you try to use force without any long-term planning to solve a wicked problem.
Broadly speaking, a wicked problem is defined as a problem that resists quick fixes or permanent solutions. It involves numerous interdependent variables. Outcomes are never final, just better or worse, or good enough. Every wicked problem is essentially one of a kind, meaning there is no perfect, pre-existing template for solving one. And solutions often have irreversible consequences, meaning that you cannot easily undo a decision.
That was the logic of Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put internationally verifiable limits on the country’s uranium enrichment program, and his decision to live with its growing ballistic missile arsenal and its cultivation of proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — which did not threaten America.
Obama’s Iran deal worked as designed. When Obama left office, the curbs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacities — verified by international inspectors — meant that Iran, if it broke out of the deal, would require at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, providing plenty of time for the world to react.
Nevertheless, Trump, at the urging of Netanyahu, unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018. But Trump never forged an effective alternative strategy to prevent Iran from securing enough uranium for a bomb. The Biden administration tried to clean up Trump’s mess, but could not get Iran to agree.
When Trump came back to power, he again neglected to forge an alternative. So Iran went from being a year away from a bomb under Obama’s nuclear deal to weeks away thanks to Trump’s reckless withdrawal from Obama’s strategy without an effective replacement strategy. And now with this war Trump has made it a really, really wicked problem.
It’s why we need to keep this as simple as possible. America should extend assurances that we will end the war, leave the regime in place, stop destroying Iran’s infrastructure and even offer some relief from oil sanctions, if Iran turns over all its near weapons-grade fissile material and halts all hostilities from its side. Everything else gets postponed for another day.
Trump will be a very lucky man if the surviving leaders of the Iranian regime say yes. It’s a measure of Trump’s incompetence that they now hold his fate in their hands.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/trump-iran-war-nuclear-regime-change-peace.html