Many see the current situation in the Iran war as merely a failure of clear strategy on the part of the United States. However, in any realistic estimate, the United States, if determined, has several ways to push the regime towards collapse. It can increase economic pressure to an unbearable point, move in militarily, continue its bombing campaign, or allow Israel to pursue its strategic objectives.

Yet whatever Trump does, he appears to be preserving the very condition he claims to want to end: a quagmire. Why?

There are, of course, some well-reported considerations: the midterm elections, the resupply of munitions, and pressure from allies all play a role. But Trump’s approach to Iran in the middle of August 2026 looks like a copy of the US approach to Yemen, combined with Trump’s gained confidence after Maduro’s removal: bomb, negotiate, push, pay off, find the right man to work with, and repeat.

Needless to say, Trump’s strategy is ultimately shaped by the instinct that has defined his professional life: winning, and, more importantly, being the only winner in the spotlight.

To understand this, we need to put the current conflict in context.

January 2026 saw an uprising in Iran unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic. Iran has experienced several waves of protest against the Islamic revolutionary order, but the January uprising represented something different. It clarified some of the confusion created by the symbolic horizons of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

During the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, the language of the movement was deliberately broad. This allowed foreign powers, diaspora organisations, and political actors to impose their own interpretations on the Iranian movement and promote whichever Iranian figure they preferred as its representative. Here in Australia, figures with little popular support, and in some cases little credibility, became frequent voices on the Iranian plight, while politicians and media outlets elevated them as representatives of the Iranian people.

What changed in January 2026 was that Iranians inside Iran corrected that vast scope for interpretation themselves, replacing the chant Woman, Life, Freedom with slogans such as Javid Shah (‘Long live the Shah’) and ‘Pahlavi will return’. The answer to why lies in a collective experience learned at enormous cost: if you want a particular social order, you have to call for it; and if you want someone to represent you, you have to say who that person is. Otherwise, you leave the field open for a Member of the European Parliament, for instance, to appoint herself the wiser-than-you expert, preaching from Brussels about how you should fight the regime – peacefully, of course – and, should you survive to see its fall, whom you should choose to lead you.

The January uprising, and the massacres of January 8 and 9, changed the perspective of many. Yes, the opposition did not succeed in toppling the Islamic Republic. But contrary to the commonly held view, it achieved something else: it prompted the outside world and, more importantly, the US Administration to confront the regime in Iran. The United States is now engaged in a war from which there is no simple way out but through. From a strategic point of view, this creates a context that favours the opposition to the regime in Iran.

Trump wants to win, and he wants to be the only winner. He is therefore searching for his own Delcy Rodríguez: someone inside the Islamic Republic who will abandon its revolutionary project in exchange for survival.

But it is difficult to believe that Trump cannot see the fundamental contradiction here. The forces of the Islamic Revolution are not going to abandon their ideological project and suddenly cooperate with him. They have spent nearly half a century defining themselves through resistance to ‘global arrogance’. They are far more likely to fight to the last drop of blood and gain martyrdom than surrender their revolutionary state to an ‘infidel’ American President.

Trump may also understand something else: if the United States succeeds in changing the regime and freeing the Iranian people, he cannot decide who will lead Iran afterwards. The Iranian people will; and they were clear in January about the scenario they want to see unfold.

Trump has already sent envoys to speak with Pahlavi. It is not difficult to imagine what Pahlavi has insisted upon: that Iran’s future must be determined by Iranians, not by Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or any other foreign power.

Sooner or later, Trump or the next American President will have to confront the reality that a free and stable Iran is likely to be an Iran in which Pahlavi plays a central political role. The Iranian people have made their preference increasingly clear. They have called for their Shah, and they are likely to do so again when the next wave of protest comes.

John Bolton appears to have pointed to this perception recently, arguing that the United States would not simply hand Iran to the opposition on a silver platter, and Iranians would have to shed blood for their own liberation.

From this perspective, Trump’s search for an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez is not a solution. It is another version of the same old American interference in the Middle East: finding a compliant figure, installing or empowering him, and hoping that a country can be rebuilt around an externally determined political arrangement. History suggests where that road leads.

For many Iranians, the pre-1979 Pahlavi era is increasingly being understood through the paradigm of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: as a period in which the Shah pursued Iran’s national interest as the model for the modern Iranian state. This stands in stark contrast to the fabricated historiography of the Pahlavi era produced by Marxists and Islamists.

Vast numbers of Iranians trust Pahlavi because he represents not only that era but also 50 years of public life that carry deep meaning: the prospect of a political future chosen by Iranians themselves.

And that is the central fact that Washington will eventually have to confront. That is the point at which the quagmire is no more

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