By attacking Iran, Trump has cornered himself. Yet history offers a lesson – and a victory on his terms.
Foreign policy is the choice of the least ill among ills.
By attacking Iran at Israel’s behest, US President Donald Trump has maneuvered himself into an unenviable position between a rock and a hard place.
Donald’s rock: Escalation
If America’s commander-in-chief continues his war of choice against Iran, he is likely to lose by any meaningful measure. Caught in a spiral of violence, escalation instinctively seems to him the only way forward.
His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, captured the fatally flawed logic: “Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.” The phrase begs the question, reducing a highly uncertain gamble to a tidy formula; it mistakes a risky bet for a reliable principle. In a contest of will and endurance, Tehran may well prove the more resilient actor.
For Iran, this is an existential war, and a just one. Attacked while negotiating, mere survival already counts as victory. For the US, the bar is far higher. Trump began with the ambition of regime change, long a paramount aim of Israel, rendering anything short of it a failure.
If Trump continues down the path of escalation at Israel’s instigation, he risks wreaking havoc on his own country, his allies, and the wider world.
Should he order strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure – generally prohibited under international law – after having earlier set a deliberately unrealistic ultimatum to justify the move and subsequently offering an extended grace period, he would grant Tehran carte blanche to retaliate.
Iran would likely oblige, obliterating US assets and the broader economic foundations of Washington’s allies, with lasting damage to global confidence in them. That, one might say, is a costly definition of friendship.
Disrupting Gulf oil and gas flows would upend global energy markets – and the global economy at large – for years until the infrastructure is rebuilt, precipitating a severe and protracted global inflationary recession. In effect, Trump would punish not only his allies and other countries, but his own citizens as well.
Iran could also strike further afield, either directly or through proxies, including terrorist groups. And if US troops were to be deployed on Iranian soil, more American lives would be risked in a war of criminal purpose.
Trump, the cornered lone wolf in the White House, has already signaled through his ambassador that no option is off the table, including strikes on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, where Russian specialists are stationed.
Trump might even acquiesce to Israel using nuclear weapons against Iran, or even be the first to deploy them against Iran in pursuit of “fame” for decisiveness. A third world war could well ensue; all it would take is open intervention by Russia and China.
Replenishing US arms stocks, reliant on Chinese rare earths, would take even longer than it already does. Naturally, Beijing is unlikely to supply the materials for weapons that could ultimately be turned against it.
If disenchanted creditors pull the plug and dump American assets, the US dollar would collapse, US interest rates would surge, US debt burdens would soar, and inflation would accelerate sharply at home, spelling the end of America’s global financial dominance.
Already in the near term, Trump would likely lose large swathes of his remaining political base, see his party suffer defeat in the November 2026 midterm elections, face impeachment in a Congress controlled by Democrats, and possibly end up in prison for the rest of his life.
Donald’s hard place: Retreat
Were Trump to halt hostilities abruptly and resume business as usual elsewhere, he would be branded a loser. His detractors would portray him as subservient to Israel, driven by it into a costly war he could not win, while underscoring his failure to achieve his stated aim of regime change.
Worse still, Iran may not oblige and could press on until its maximalist demands are met, likely including comprehensive security guarantees, the closure of all US bases in the region, and complete reparations.
As in the first scenario, parts of Trump’s political base, especially Christian Zionists, would turn against him. Once the distraction of war fades, he would face the full brunt of the backlash. In a word: a classic Catch-22.
The fallout from a US-Israeli war on Iran was foreseeable: If you fail to stop in time, you discover your limits only after you have exceeded them.
A narcissist by temperament, Trump cannot admit defeat; both options, the rock and the hard place, are unpalatable to him. The million-dollar question, then, is how he can extricate himself from a seemingly inescapable impasse.
Moments of crisis carry not only dangers but rare opportunities. True leaders convert extraordinary crises into extraordinary gains. Trump may yet do likewise.
There is, in fact, a path forward, a genuine game-changer, that could produce a win-win outcome abroad while strengthening his base at home – all in one masterstroke.
Trump tends to fire before he aims. This time, he must first absorb a lesson from history and translate it into a strategy suited to the age of viral geopolitics.
A lesson from history: Imperial self-destruction
According to historian Niall Ferguson, known for his counterfactual analysis, Britain’s gravest strategic error was turning continental conflicts into total wars it neither needed nor could afford.
In 1914, Britain’s entry into World War I turned a limited European struggle into a protracted catastrophe, exhausting the empire financially and demographically while helping to produce a punitive peace that destabilized the continent. A short German victory, however unpalatable, might have produced a durable order without the revolutionary upheavals that followed.
By 1939, the legacy of that earlier intervention had narrowed Britain’s options: Commitments made in the wake of Versailles drew it into World War II before it was prepared, again converting a continental crisis into a global conflagration. In this view, even in 1939 Britain faced a strategic choice between immediate war and a continued policy of deterrence and rearmament that might have preserved its strength while Germany exhausted itself on the continent.
In Ferguson’s telling, non-intervention would not have guaranteed justice in Europe, but it might have spared Britain, and the world, a far more destructive trajectory. Trump should heed that lesson.
The US must stop behaving like a great empire, seeing that it can no longer afford to do so. The world has already incurred very heavy costs from Trump, a mercurial and imperial president beholden to Israel. Yet even graver damage can still be averted, as a viable offramp remains.
Stay tuned – the game changer will be delivered to you in time, before Trump’s grace period expires.
[Part 5 of a series on viral geopolitics. To be continued. Previous columns in the series:
Part 1, published on 10 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 45: The epoch of viral geopolitics – How the Kanzler sloganizes war;
Part 2, published on 12 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 46: Dirty work by proxy – The ethics of the Kanzler’s outsourced war;
Part 3, published on 14 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 47: Viral war for narrative primacy – The Kanzler’s rhetoric of war;
Part 4, published on 20 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 48: Fabricating the war story – Iran ploy patched into plausibility]
