Throughout history, leaders have found that it is easier to start wars than to end them.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is reputed to have muttered that Hitler’s decision to invade Poland in 1939 would end badly, just as his own decision in 1914 to send German forces into France and Russia had done for the ex-emperor who spent his last two decades living in exile in the Netherlands.
While President Donald Trump faces no such threat of political banishment, he is also finding out the hard way that there are limits to what he can achieve through force or threat.
For the first time in his decade-long career in politics, Trump seems to be encountering pushback he cannot control that imposes real constraints on his ability to act.
Back in January 2016, when he was about to embark on his first presidential run, Trump famously said that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” and added that “It’s like, incredible”.
Over the intervening decade, the 45th and later the 47th president has indeed defied the laws of political gravity as he has weathered challenges that would likely have sunk any other politician seeking office.
These included the Access Hollywood tapes which were released in the runup to the 2016 election as well as the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill which led to Trump’s second impeachment.
True to form, Trump re-entered the Oval Office in January 2025 firing on all cylinders, unleashing a “shock-and-awe” approach to reshaping the federal government and acting with scant regard for the separation of powers.
Prices did not come down “on Day One”, affordability remained a key concern for voters that propelled Democrats to victories in the off-year elections in November 2025, and judges across the country began to issue rulings which undid some of the administration’s signature policies, especially on immigration.
The president’s approval ratings also began to slide, to the extent that by the Spring of 2026 they had dipped below the levels seen during Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021.
And yet, the foreign policy success of the administration’s daring intervention in Venezuela in early-January, which led to the capture of president Nicolas Maduro and the installation of an interim leader willing to work with the US, evidently fostered a belief in the White House that the same outcome could be replicated in Iran.
Advocates of US intervention may have played up the prospect that Trump could achieve a historic breakthrough that had eluded his seven most recent predecessors, going back to Jimmy Carter in 1979, by ridding the US of the clerical regime in Tehran.
Such arguments could also have appealed to the flattery around the president and his conviction that his efforts deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
The US and Israeli war against Iran which commenced on February 28 has, from an operational standpoint, certainly achieved notable outcomes, albeit at the cost of horrific errors, such as the missile strikes which destroyed an elementary school in Minab on the opening day of the war, killing 120 schoolchildren.
Near-total control of the airspace over Iran enabled the Americans and Israelis to strike at will against military and civilian targets, inflicting severe damage on Iranian infrastructure and eliminating senior leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the opening day of the war.
However, the military campaign did not lead to the political change desired by US and particularly Israeli officials, as the regime survived the onslaught and demonstrated the ability to hit back hard.
Iran’s attacks on the Gulf States and its de facto blockage of the Strait of Hormuz externalised the cost of the war onto critical US partners in the region and the global economy.
Trump has, at times, seemed indifferent to the costs being borne by others even as supply chain disruptions generated the biggest energy shock since the 1970s.
On June 17, Trump belatedly appeared to realise that shortages of oil products and a drawdown on reserves risked creating “bedlam” in four weeks if a deal with Iran was not reached.
This notwithstanding, the memorandum of understanding (MoU) that US and Iranian officials signed, following painstaking Qatari and Pakistani mediation, on June 14, has raised more questions than it has provided answers, and has exposed the White House to jeopardy going forward.
Details about the MoU were vague at first, and when they were released by the White House on June 17 it became apparent that the list of concessions on offer from the US exceeded those made by the Obama administration in the negotiations that produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015.
This could become a problem for Trump, because he spent years lambasting Barack Obama for what he saw as a deeply-flawed deal from which Trump withdrew the US two years into his first term, in 2018.
For a president who has built a reputation around the “art of the deal”, the terms of the 14-paragraph MoU were described by many in the US (and in Israel) as a “capitulation” to Iran.
The suspension of the US-Iran talks planned to begin in Switzerland on June 19, triggering the 60-day timeline set out in the MoU for a final deal, indicate the scale of the challenge that lies ahead.
Already, the vague provisions in the MoU have spurred competing interpretations of details and commitments, which risk adding to the lack of trust each party has in the other.
If the negotiations fall apart, it will be instructive to see how Trump responds and who he blames, especially as he associated himself with the process when he signed the MoU in Versailles on June 17.
Will Trump blame Vice-President JD Vance, thereby affecting the Republican campaign for the next presidential nominee, Israel, or Iran, and if the latter, will this be the prelude to a new round of war?
l The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.