President Trump appears to be shifting from direct military pressure on Iran to a longer-term strategy of economic coercion focused on maintaining sanctions, the naval blockade and frozen assets in an effort to extract concessions, particularly regarding the Strait of Hormuz. 

Academic research and historical cases (including comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s) indicate that even severe economic pressure often fails to force political capitulation, tends to rally populations around their governments, and loses effectiveness over time as targets develop evasion methods. 

The author argues that continued reliance on sanctions is unlikely to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or end the conflict and recommends that the administration instead cut losses and pursue the best available negotiated settlement with Tehran.

Although President Donald Trump is unable to publicly admit that “mistakes were made” in his war with Iran—as American leaders sometimes describe their own blunders—he seems to be implicitly acknowledging that the military strategy he pursued has failed. He’s moving to a new strategy of extracting concessions from Iran via economic coercion, rather than bombing.

Trump has described this as a “low-key” and longer-term approach to the conflict. He is concentrating on opening the Strait of Hormuz, downgrading the focus on negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, which he has insisted is now buried deeply underground and thus out of commission anyway.

It was probably no coincidence that Trump’s strategic shift coincided with two developments: 1)........

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