'Trump logic:' How Trump went from declaring victory over Iran to the cusp of a new war

The US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme in June, President Donald Trump boasted on Tuesday during his State of the Union address, just before adding that the Islamic Republic is now on the verge of starting it “all over again”.

Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was even more definitive. He told Fox News on Sunday that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material”.

Trump is in a bizarre position, experts say.

To rationalise a new war on Iran, his administration is contradicting the very military success it has been taking credit for.

“Both of the statements coming out of the Trump administration cannot be true,” Sina Azodi, director of the Middle East Studies programme at George Washington University, told Middle East Eye.

“Trump can’t have successfully destroyed Iran’s nuclear programme, or substantially set it back, and now, less than a year later, it’s a threat to the US,” Azodi said.

“Witkoff’s statement was true in June, right before the US attack, but it’s not true now.”

Does Israel have escalation dominance over Trump?

The US capped off an Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025, when it bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. At the time, Trump signalled that the operation, dubbed "Midnight Hammer", drew a curtain on the Iranian nuclear saga and that he was moving on.

“We may sign an agreement…I don't care if I have an agreement or not…We destroyed the nuclear… It’s blown up to kingdom come. I don’t care very strongly about it,” he said when asked if he planned to restart nuclear negotiations.

The battlefield damage assessment of the US strike was hotly debated over the summer.

Trump’s own Pentagon contradicted his claim that the programme had been annihilated, saying the US strikes on the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites set Iran back up to two years.

To be sure, the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is still unknown, but there are no signs Iran is enriching uranium again.

In general, analysts say that even if the US is concerned about the nuclear programme, it has ample time to negotiate.

For a while, Trump appeared to move on. He started discussing Iran’s nuclear file again at the end of December, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House.

“I hear that Iran is trying to rebuild its nuclear sites, and if they do, we will strike them again,” he said, adding a new justification for an attack: Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal.

“Why is a war back on the table? The only thing that comes to mind is lobbying by Benjamin Netanyahu,” Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told MEE.

“The fact that Netanyahu flew to the US when this started to escalate is significant,” Bandow added.

First nukes, now ballistic missiles

Israel decimated Iran’s air defences in June. Using American warplanes like the F-35, modified for long-range flights without refuelling, Israel targeted Iranian commanders, weapons installations, and ballistic missile launchers.

MEE has reported that Iran is rebuilding its air-defence with the help of China.

Two Arab officials also told MEE that Tehran is replenishing its stockpile of ballistic missiles. Iran was able to rain missiles down on Israel until the final minutes of a ceasefire in June, depleting Israel and the US’s stockpile of expensive interceptors.

“The ballistic missiles are very important to this because they worked quite well in the 12-day war. Iran’s proxies failed to deter Israel, and the nuclear programme failed. Iranians learned the only pillar of domestic defence that worked was their missile programme,” Azodi told MEE.

“The Israelis want the US to take care of the problem for them and make Iran a vassal state they can bomb without repercussions,” he added.

Unlike in June, when US officials rationalised their strikes solely on Iran’s nuclear programme, they are suggesting that Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is a casus belli, or justification for war.

“They (Iran) have already developed missiles that could threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said in his State of the Union address.

He appeared to be referring to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. In a report last year, the US Defence Intelligence Agency said Iran could develop a military viable ICBM by 2035, in nine years' time, if it wanted.

The Trump administration has since amplified that talking point.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran was not willing to negotiate with the US on its ballistic missile programme, which he called a “big problem”.

“Now they are talking about ballistic missiles reaching the US. This feels like a repetition of 2003 Iraq,” Azodi said.

'Trump logic'

But for Trump, so much is personal, experts say.

The chances of a US strike are even greater because Trump “boxed himself into a corner” after a months-long military build-up in the region, Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator at the State Department, told MEE.

The US has two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Middle East: the USS Abraham Lincoln is in the Arabian Sea, and the USS Gerald R Ford is in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In addition, there are guided missile destroyers, Thaad air defence systems and dozens of F-35, F-22, F-15 and F-16 warplanes. The US now has more military assets in the Middle East than at anytime since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Trump started the build-up in January when Iran was convulsed by protests over a spiralling cost-of-living crisis whose joint culprits are crippling US sanctions and the Islamic Republic's mismanagement of Iran’s economy.

'Trump has built his own justification. Everything begins and ends with him'

- Aaron David Miller, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

“This started when Trump encouraged demonstrators to ‘take over government institutions’ and said ‘help is on the way’,” Miller told MEE.

“None of Trump’s predecessors ever used that kind of language.”

The protest movement fizzled. Trump himself claimed credit for preventing the “killing” of demonstrators by assembling a military armada in the region to threaten Tehran. 

But Rosemary Kelanic, a Middle East expert at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, told MEE that the “build-up has taken on a life of its own”.

“Every time military assets move, there is coverage in the media. Every time there is coverage, Trump is getting pressure from hardliners and Israel to use that equipment,” she told MEE.

And for Trump, the optics matter.

He has been egged on by a mix of flattery and trolling from key advisors who want intervention. Advocates for a new war have drawn the parallel between Trump’s pledge to help protestors in Iran and former President Barack Obama’s “red line” in Syria.

“The one thing you can’t do as president: talk like Reagan and act like Obama,” US Senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox News after Trump promised to help the Iranian protesters.

A poll released by the University of Maryland earlier this month showed that just 21 percent of Americans want a war on Iran. Even among Trump’s Republican base, support hovers at just 40 percent.

“There are no domestic constituencies that would be angry with Trump if he walked back,” Miller, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told MEE.

“But this is a man who said ‘the only constraints are the ones in my mind and my own conception of morality’. Trump does not want to become Obama,” he said, referring to an interview Trump gave at the beginning of 2026.

“Trump has built his own justification. It’s Trump logic. Remember, everything begins and ends with him.”

Buoyed by empire

Although Trump pitched himself as an anti-war president, he has long revelled in what he sees as the fruits of his muscular foreign policy.

In 2018, he unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear deal with Iran, which the latter was in compliance with. The sanctions he has imposed on Iran since then have decimated its economy, which allies like Lindsey Graham and Republican Senator Ted Cruz have used as a data set to argue that Iran is collapsing.

Two years later, Trump ordered the execution of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force. “I did that during my first term. Had a huge impact,” Trump said in his State of the Union Address.

Trump’s third hit against Iran was Operation Midnight Hammer. Iran responded to the US bombing on its nuclear facilities with a carefully telegraphed strike on the US’s al-Udeid air base in Qatar.

'They don’t trust Iran and know they can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear knowledge'

- Rose Kelanic, Defence Priorities

“The so-called experts warned Trump three times, 'if you [mess] with the Iranians, bad things will happen'. And nothing happened,” Miller said. “That’s a very impressive set of data points” for a US leader considering a fourth round of escalation, he added.

Two former US officials familiar with discussions in the administration told MEE that “regime change” continues to be discussed as a feasible option for Iran.

Analysts say that Trump is tempted to replicate the US’s attack on oil-rich Venezuela. In January, the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a brazen nighttime raid and has since tightened its grip over Venezuelan oil assets.

“The Venezuela success buoys Trump into thinking he can take risks without consequences," she said. 

Trump would likely prefer a deal with Iran to a war, experts say, but his terms are likely so onerous that the Islamic Republic would be under intense pressure if it agreed.

Witkoff, who is conducting the negotiations alongside Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has no official position in the administration, betrayed some of the administration’s thinking when he told a reporter that Trump was wondering why Iran has not “capitulated” in the face of his military buildup.

While a deal with Iran would be welcomed by Trump's domestic base, he would also need to sell it as a success to Israel, experts say.

“I can imagine Netanyahu telling Trump, I am under domestic pressure to strike Iran again, with the knowledge it would be hard for the US to stay out," Bandow, at the Cato Institute, told MEE.

"Effectively, Israel knows that they can drag Trump into a war. So, by his thinking, far better that he initiate it and be in control."

In the end, instead of bluffing the Iranians into a deal, Trump may end up giving Israel and interventionists in Washington the war they have wanted all along, Kelanic said.

“They don’t trust Iran, and they know they can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear knowledge. That’s why they argue for regime change,” she said.

“The ruthless option is to just smash the state and totally cripple it,” she said.