Iran Sticks to Its Guns as Trump's Threats Begin to Lose Power
Almost three months into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and nearly five weeks since President Donald Trump announced a blockade of the Islamic Republic, a defiant Tehran shows little sign of budging in the face of the White House’s fiery threats.
Rather, the conflict appears thus far to be emboldening Iranian leadership. Despite the loss of their supreme leader, the killing of other key commanders and decision-makers and the destruction of considerable firepower, Iranian officials have largely put domestic divisions aside and closed ranks to maintain a hefty set of demands to end the war on their own terms.
It’s a costly bet. Yet the price for the White House, the region and the world is adding up as well.
“Iran clearly prepared for this war and so far, it has outstrategized the Trump administration,” Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center and lecturer at George Washington University, told Newsweek. “It has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its Persian Gulf neighbors, the Emirates in particular, exacerbating divisions within the Gulf Cooperation Council and spreading the pain to consumers worldwide.”
“It has dispersed command and control and carefully husbanded its missile and drone arsenal to be able to continue to inflict pain and control the Strait,” Slavin said. “Because the war is perceived by the regime as existential, it will continue to bear the mounting domestic economic costs of the war, assuming that it can hold out longer than Trump can.”
Holding the Line
The latest demonstration of Iran’s refusal to back down took place Monday. Trump, after mounting another series of threats of sustained military action against the Islamic Republic, ultimately postponed the operation, citing appeals from the heads of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
The U.S. leader said the GCC leaders had convinced him “a Deal will be made,” one that would that would ensure Iran could never have access to a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials have always denied seeking despite their advanced uranium enrichment.
At the same time, Trump warned that he had instructed U.S. forces “to be prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment's notice, in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached.”
Yet the renewed rhetoric does not appear to be pushing Iran any closer to capitulation.
Senior military officials who have survived the U.S.-Israeli onslaught, including Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters commander Major General Ali Abdollahi and Iranian Army spokesperson Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia issued their own vows to answer any U.S. escalation in kind. Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s lead negotiators, have shown a similar resolve at the negotiating table, still vacant since failed talks hosted by Pakistan last month.
Tehran’s tall demands-the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, reparations for wartime damage and an end to hostilities playing out on another fronts, particularly Israel’s war against Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon-remain in place. Iran has also begun formalizing its desire to exert lasting control of the formerly free Strait of Hormuz through the establishment of a new toll-collecting authority on Monday.
While capitalizing on international market woes, Tehran’s strategy is also “extremely punishing to Iranians,” Slavin pointed out. An already debilitated economy is in free fall, living conditions have plummeted and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) security apparatus is on top alert.
At the same time, she saw little sign of the kind of internal fissures that U.S. and Israeli officials hoped may facilitate regime change.
“We have not seen high-level defections and frankly there is no obvious opposition leader to defect to,” Slavin said. “Internal unrest would be suicidal given the harsh repression faced by protestors in January including record numbers of executions.”
There are deep roots in Iran’s response to its most serious foreign intervention since the 1980s invasion from Iraq that sparked a devastating eight-year war.
“The Iranian Islamic system has been built on a combination of Shia theological and pragmatic resistance and defiance (a jihadi-ijtihadi paradigm) as well as the Iranian people's historical sense of civilizational identity and nationalism,” Amin Saikal, emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, told Newsweek.
“While it has not served many Iranians well, who have formed strong opposition to it in the past, most Iranians have historically united behind the government/regime of the day, irrespective of its nature, in the face of outside aggression for the love of their country,” Saikal said. “The U.S.-Israel war has now very much fed into this. The Islamic government has thrived on this, as well as the strategic advantage of controlling the Strait of Hormuz, and Russo-Sino political and logistic support, to remain resilient and defiant of its long-standing foes, the U.S. and Israel.”
An Air of Uncertainty
As for the White House’s objectives, Trump’s track of deliberately obscuring the scope of wartime in the name of strategic ambiguity also has its drawbacks.
“I think that the Trump administration has led itself into a very tight corner,” Saikal said. “It has kept changing its goalposts and doesn't really know how to end the war. President Trump has pathologically never been able to accept defeat. He has now narrowed his objective to ‘no nuclear weapons', despite the fact that Tehran has always said that it won't produce nuclear weapons.”
“He wants to have something better than Obama's July 2015 nuclear agreement,” Saikal added, “but he is now in a situation where he may not be able to achieve that.”
That deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and abandoned by Trump during his first term in 2018, vastly reduced Iran’s uranium stockpile and capped enrichment to 3.67 percent in exchange for international sanctions relief. Reports indicate that the current administration is pushing for a total ban on Iranian domestic enrichment, the timeline of which is at the center of disagreements between the two sides.
Other conditions previously mentioned by the administration include restrictions on Iran’s missile arsenal and an end to its support for its regional network of allies, known as the Axis of Resistance, which extend to Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and beyond.
While Iran’s nuclear program, missile arsenal and militia allies have suffered severe blows throughout the conflict, each factor remains in play.
“The U.S. administration has continuously shifted its demands and declared objectives. Yet despite this, I still do not see any of those objectives having been fully achieved,” Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, told Newsweek.
“Recent U.S. intelligence assessments, for example, suggest that Iran still retains access to most of its missile capabilities,” Azizi said. “Its nuclear program also appears to remain fundamentally where it was before the latest round of war, in the sense that Tehran still possesses both the stockpile and the technical capacity for enrichment.”
With “U.S. strategy and end goals unclear to virtually everyone, including the Iranian leadership,” the lesson for Tehran, according to Azizi, has been “that any flexibility or potential compromise they have put forward has been interpreted by Trump as a sign of weakness, leading Washington to escalate its demands even further.”
“As a result, the prevailing assumption on the Iranian side is that the only viable strategy is to adhere firmly to their red lines and core principles, while continuing to impose costs on the United States and avoiding any retreat from their key objectives until Trump himself takes the first step,” Azizi said. “From Tehran's perspective, that first step must be a declaration that the war is over.”
Only then in the eyes of Iran could further details be successfully hammered out. It’s a position Azizi described as “less as a case of ideological rigidity and more as a reaction to what Tehran perceives as the highly unpredictable U.S. approach to the war itself.”
The Home Front
While Iran remains vigilant in scouting out any domestic dissent, Trump also faces mounting challenges at home. The president’s branding of U.S. media coverage of the conflict as “treasonous” last week marked the latest manifestation of his growing frustration with a dearth of war support.
A New York Times/Sienna poll released Monday found that 64 percent of respondents disagreed with the decision to go to war with Iran, a figure roughly consistent with several other recent surveys on the issue. The same poll found that Trump’s approval rating hit a second-term-low of just 37 percent.
“The leaders of the Iranian regime undoubtedly see their strategy as successful, in that they are still in power without serious challenge to their rule, despite being battered militarily and economically by a hostile superpower,” Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who serves today as non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, told Newsweek.
“The final outcome of the current contest, in which both the regime and Trump administration seem to believe they can outlast the other amid costs of the current stalemate, remains to be seen,” Pillar said. “But the Iranian rulers have the advantage of having more at stake, in terms of their political survival, than the U.S. does, and thus more motivation to endure the pain. And they can read the same reports that we do about Trump’s domestic political and economic difficulties related to the war.”
Those difficulties are not easily dismissed, especially as analysts assess that the conflict could have permanent ramifications on the oil and gas trade long outlasting the war. The ensuing turmoil has done little to endear even traditional allies to the U.S. decision.
Given the fallout so far, Pillar predicted that “this war almost certainly will be remembered in history as a major blunder by Trump,” one that further runs the risk of incentivizing Tehran and its new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, toward seeking the kind of capabilities it has publicly disavowed.
“Iran still is not close to having a nuclear weapon and so far as we know has not decided to build one,” Pillar said. “But what is most likely to lead a regime to conclude that it needs a nuclear deterrent is to be the victim of foreign aggression, as Iran has been this year at the hands of the U.S. and Israel.”
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This story was originally published May 20, 2026 at 1:00 AM.