Seven months into a war with Iran, the United States still has no clear political end state, despite decades of confrontation stretching back to the hostage crisis of the 1979.
President Trump told the United Nations that Iran must make a deal or face destruction, but the ultimatum has produced fighting rather than negotiation, and military pressure has not translated into a durable settlement.
The difficulty is structural. Successive administrations have treated Iranian behaviour as a function of the regime's weakness, a calculation repeatedly disproven over five decades.
With no clear off-ramp, officials are now working through a narrower set of questions: how to avoid a wider regional war, how to secure the freedom of navigation that disruption to shipping threatens, and what would actually count as a negotiated end.
