Is Trump Prepared to Dig In on Economic War Against Iran?

The headline question is fair, but it's also the wrong one to be asking after four years of watching what happens when a president doesn't dig in. Maximum pressure worked once. It ground Iran's economy down, starved the regime's proxies of cash, and it got abandoned halfway through for a nuclear deal that gave Tehran a lifeline instead of a surrender. The lesson from that isn't complicated: sanctions regimes only work if you're willing to eat the short-term pain and ignore the people telling you it's not working yet, because it never looks like it's working yet.

Months or years to bear fruit isn't a bug in this strategy, it's the whole design. Iran's economy is not going to collapse because of one tanker seizure or one round of Treasury designations. It collapses, if it collapses, because the regime can't find buyers for its oil, can't move money through the banking system, and can't fund Hezbollah and the Houthis without bleeding out domestically. That takes sustained enforcement, not a headline-driven sanctions announcement followed by quiet backsliding once oil prices spike or some ally starts complaining.

The real test isn't whether Trump wants to sound tough. He's shown he does. It's whether the people around him actually enforce secondary sanctions on the Chinese refineries and shadow fleet operators keeping Iranian oil moving, even when it annoys Beijing or nudges gas prices at home. Every past administration, including his own first term at times, has flinched on that enforcement the moment it got politically inconvenient.

So dig in on what, exactly, is the question worth asking. Rhetoric is cheap. Sustained enforcement against buyers who don't want to stop buying is where these campaigns usually die.