Trump claimed to have cancelled the strikes because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. Whether this will happen remains to be seen. Trump has declared that a deal between the US and Iran is imminent on numerous occasions only for no agreement to be signed. And, even if it is signed, the agreement Trump is talking about is far from a final peace deal.

Rather than the supposed diplomatic progress, perhaps more significant in persuading Trump to pull back from renewing an all-out war with Iran was that a return to conflict simply would not have been in the interests of the US.

War, as Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his 1832 book, [On War](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691018546/on-war?srsltid=AfmBOopczMhM-owZ5KRmmoaoJiOkRlLJFKCMPMmYHlCALQgVdFfeNPFg), is the continuation of politics by other means. Its enormous costs can be justified only when they are tied to a coherent strategy and when there is a clearly defined political objective that there is a reasonable prospect of achieving.

Measured against this standard, there was no argument for returning to war with Iran. The difficulty begins with the absence of any discernible plan in Washington. Trump has articulated no strategy and no definition of victory beyond a vague aspiration to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He was drawn into prosecuting a war based on intelligence about the fragility of the regime in Tehran that proved flawed and on scenarios that were overconfident and have not come to pass. These scenarios suggested the decapitation of Iran’s leadership would lead to sudden regime collapse and a popular uprising that would see the country transition to democracy.

There is also very little a return to all-out war could have accomplished. The reason for this is that the Iranian regime is not a conventional state that can be brought down by overwhelming firepower. The regime, which is now dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, can best be described as a [militia with a state](https://dawnmena.org/america-is-bogged-down-against-a-militia-with-a-state/).

It is operating through a dispersed network of forces across air, land and sea, which were designed as an asymmetric instrument of power capable of absorbing, scattering and outlasting precisely the kind of concentrated military pressure the US military was built to deliver.

Weeks of intensive bombing earlier in the war did not shatter the regime’s centre of gravity. Rather, it consolidated the regime and has left it more cohesive and determined than it was before. In contrast to the more cautious regime of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which tended to wait and to respond, the new regime has become assertive.

It has been quick to retaliate against US and Israel attacks with severity and to set the pace of escalation. On June 8, for example, Iran launched [barrages of missiles](https://theconversation.com/irans-attacks-on-israel-were-an-attempt-to-shape-the-region-on-its-own-terms-and-it-might-just-do-so-284742) towards Israel in protest at the Israeli military’s escalating campaign in Lebanon.

Iran also retains the capacity to impose intolerable costs on everyone while retaining a high threshold of pain itself.

Faced with a closed Strait of Hormuz, the global economy in [decline](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5740355b-6f22-4c1f-a21f-015d5ff2192f/content) and a looming defeat for his Republican party in November’s [US midterm elections](https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/who-win-midterm-elections-2026-polls-predictions-odds-c8d9qnbk5), Trump is clinging to the hope that he can pressure Iran into accepting a deal. The chances of this strategy proving a success are slim.

Trump has backed away from renewed war with Iran – here’s why