The Economist: Trump must soon choose whether to attack Iran or beat a humiliating retreat

Key topics:Trump orders massive US military build-up in the Middle East.Diplomacy with Iran stalls; no breakthrough in nuclear talks.Attack risks uncertain; regime may absorb strikes without yielding..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.A bit of sabre-rattling can be useful in foreign policy. Too much of it, though, and the sabre is liable to end up pointing back at you. That is where America finds itself after a two-month standoff with Iran. Donald Trump, the president, has ordered an enormous military build-up in the Middle East—by some measures the biggest in two decades. Yet he has seemed unwilling to order a risky strike. Nor have his threats yet compelled Iran to negotiate a deal that would prevent one. Now he is left with a difficult choice: order an attack anyway, or beat an embarrassing retreat.This crisis, the latest of many in America’s tortured history with the Islamic Republic, began in late December when a wave of protests erupted in Iran. Mr Trump warned the regime not to kill protesters. If it did, he said, America would come to their rescue. The regime ignored him and murdered at least 7,000 people, probably many thousands more. America was in no place to attack, though: it did not even have an aircraft-carrier in the region..It is no longer so constrained. The USS Abraham Lincoln reached the Arabian Sea in late January. A second carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was ordered to the region last week. It passed through the Strait of Gibraltar on February 17th and should arrive within days. Meanwhile, dozens of warplanes flew across the Atlantic this week—from F-35s, the newest fighter jet in America’s arsenal, to the E-3s used for airborne surveillance. Accompanying them were a number of aerial-refuelling tankers..Read more:.Israel’s military triumphs reshape Middle East, sows seeds of global backlash and future risks.Not since it invaded Iraq in 2003 has America deployed such an airborne arsenal to the Middle East. When it bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer, it was a one-and-done affair: seven B-2 bombers flew around the world from Missouri, and a submarine launched cruise missiles from near Iran. The current deployment suggests it is planning a bigger and more sustained attack.The build-up has continued even as diplomats try to negotiate a deal. Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s all-purpose envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have held two rounds of indirect talks with Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister. Their second meeting took place in Geneva on February 17th. It ended without a breakthrough. Mr Araghchi said the negotiators reached “a general agreement on some guiding principles”.In an interview with Fox News later that day, J.D. Vance sounded gloomy. “The president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through,” he said. Such pessimism was notable coming from the vice-president, who hails from the isolationist wing of the MAGA movement and has generally been upbeat about diplomacy with Iran.It is still unclear exactly what sort of deal the administration wants. At a minimum, a new agreement would have to limit Iran’s nuclear programme, which before last summer’s strikes had enriched more than 400kg of near-weapons-grade uranium. Some of Mr Trump’s Republican allies want diplomacy to go much further: they think Iran should also agree to strict limits on its ballistic-missile arsenal and end its support for militias across the Arab world. That is Israel’s preference as well.As ever, Mr Trump’s own statements are hard to parse. In the space of one week he said he wanted a deal that would halt Iran’s missile programme; that he could settle for a nuclear-only deal; and that it might be better just to overthrow the regime.Negotiators have not fixed a date for a third meeting. The Americans say they are waiting for the Iranians to present a detailed proposal within the next two weeks. The State Department says that Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is expected to visit Israel on February 28th. Those timelines would suggest that an American strike is not imminent. Yet they could be feints. In June Mr Trump suggested that he would allow two weeks for diplomacy before deciding whether to attack Iran. The B-2s arrived two days later.Planners at the Pentagon have presented him with a number of options. One is to try and assassinate Iran’s political and military leadership. It is hard to overthrow a regime from the air—but America could certainly destabilise one, especially as it is already reeling from protests and economic crisis. This might include trying to attack sites associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard. A more limited campaign would focus air strikes against Iran’s remaining nuclear facilities and its ballistic-missile sites.None of this is likely to be decisive, however. The Iranian opposition is disorganised and divided; there is no guarantee strikes on the regime would lead to a better government. Indeed, Mr Trump no longer mentions the protests—which ended more than a month ago—as a justification for a strike. Any damage to Iran’s nuclear or missile programmes, meanwhile, may only be temporary. The lack of clarity around long-term goals seems to be one reason why Mr Trump has hesitated to order an attack.Yet Iran has not seized the opportunity to find a diplomatic solution. Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, may wager that it is better to try and absorb an American attack than to make significant concessions. The goal is not to strike a deal but rather to use diplomacy to delay a strike..Read more:.Trump's "madman" diplomacy backfires as talks with Iran falter.Time is probably running out, though. Mr Trump is not known for his patience. Last month’s successful raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela may have emboldened him, even though an attack on Iran would be a very different affair. He also cannot sustain America’s massive military build-up indefinitely. The Ford, for example, has already been deployed for almost eight months (a typical deployment lasts around nine). On February 19th Mr Trump said the world would find out “over the next, probably, ten days” how the standoff will end. The moment of reckoning may come sooner.

The Economist: Trump must soon choose whether to attack Iran or beat a humiliating retreat

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