It is a truth rarely acknowledged in Washington’s self-congratulatory memos that Barack Obama, for all his Nobel serenity, left Iran stronger, richer, and cheekier. His nuclear deal was a masterpiece of good intentions and catastrophic implementation. So when Donald Trump tore it up in 2018, the chattering classes predicted fire and brimstone.
Instead, he did something far more interesting: he swapped the velvet glove for a hydraulic press. A new Whitehall paper, leaked to the usual suspects, dissects exactly what Trump did differently. The answer is not subtle.
Obama treated Iran as a rational state to be coaxed into the community of nations, a Victorian missionary approach. Trump treated them as a hostile empire to be broken, a Roman proconsul approach. The former relied on sanctions relief as a carrot; the latter on maximum pressure as a sledgehammer.
The result? Iran’s oil exports collapsed from 2.5 million barrels a day to near zero.
Its currency imploded. Its proxies in Yemen and Syria began to wonder if Tehran could still pay them. Obama believed in concessions and trust.
Trump believed in leverage and fear. And for a brief, glorious moment, the mullahs were begging for talks on his terms. The paper notes that Trump’s strategy was not without cost: it alienated European allies, inflamed regional tensions, and required a constant escalation of threats.
But it worked. It worked because it abandoned the naive fiction that the Islamic Republic could be normalised. Obama saw a potential partner; Trump saw a rotting corpse.
The difference is instructive. Whitehall, ever the pragmatic student of power, now wonders whether the Biden restoration will revert to the old hymn sheet or learn from the new brutalist chorus. The paper’s conclusion is damning: Obama’s approach ‘may have prevented an immediate crisis but it also ceded strategic advantage’.
Trump’s approach ‘risked war but redefined the terms of engagement’. Put simply, one man gambled on hope. The other gambled on fear.
And while fear is a dangerous currency, it is one that Tehran understands.
