As American military strikes on Iran continue and President Donald Trump’s public statements grow more extreme, Hussein Banai sees a crisis shaped less by geopolitics than by the psychology of a leader who has backed himself into a corner. In a new analysis published April 7 in New Lines Magazine, Banai offers a sober, theoretically grounded dissection of where this conflict is heading—and why the most dangerous variable may be the character of the man at the center of it.
Drawing on Thomas Schelling’s classic framework of coercive bargaining, Banai explains that the Trump administration’s assumption—that severe military punishment would force Iranian capitulation—misunderstands how coercion actually works. When punishment fails to produce surrender, both sides find themselves locked in a negotiation where the goal becomes saving face rather than winning outright. Iran, operating from a position of strategic weakness but possessing significant asymmetric leverage, has every incentive to make any American exit as visible and costly as possible. The Strait of Hormuz, Banai writes, functions not merely as a shipping lane but as a hostage whose value rises with American desperation.
The deeper trap, Banai argues, is political and psychological. A negotiated de-escalation—the only realistic off-ramp available—is precisely the kind of deal Trump cannot accept. Having staked his political identity on projecting dominance and framing every outcome as a personal victory, a president who entered this confrontation promising to succeed where his predecessors failed cannot emerge from Iran having visibly retreated. Iran understands this, and has calibrated its pressure to produce exactly that dilemma.
The piece takes a particularly unsettling turn when Banai examines the nuclear dimension. He argues that the incremental normalization of escalation—civilian infrastructure targeted, international law dismissed, each threshold crossed framed as strength—creates a pathway toward the previously unthinkable. A president searching for an act of sufficient magnitude to recast a failing campaign may begin to contemplate options that previous generations treated as categorically foreclosed. Banai carefully notes this is not a prediction, but he marshals the historical record of Trump’s own statements about nuclear weapons to argue it cannot be dismissed.
Banai is an associate professor of international studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the departments of Political Science, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Central Eurasian Studies. His scholarship sits at the intersection of political thought and international relations, with a sustained focus on US-Iran relations, diplomatic theory, and Iran’s political development. He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).
The analysis reflects the Hamilton Lugar School’s commitment to bringing rigorous international scholarship to bear on some of the most consequential questions of the moment—and to ensuring that expert voices on Iran and US foreign policy inform public understanding at a time of acute global risk.
Read the full article: “The Last Temptation of Trump at the End of a Failed War,” New Lines Magazine, April 7, 2026.