President Trump made clear at the White House Monday that his must-haves in the Iran negotiations remain non-negotiable, speaking in unusually absolute terms about his core demand: Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and the enriched uranium stockpile from last June’s strikes will be retrieved one way or another. Trump told reporters there will be no deal without full agreement on the nuclear question, and that he is nearly certain the Iranians will eventually sign on, but that if they do not, there is simply no deal.
Daniel DePetris, fellow at Defense Priorities and syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer a more cautious assessment than those suggesting the naval blockade will quickly force Iranian capitulation.
DePetris said the economic damage a fully enforced blockade would inflict on Iran is real and significant, and he does not dispute the numbers circulating from Foundation for Defense of Democracies analyst Mead Malecki showing four hundred and thirty-five million dollars a day in combined economic damage and Iranian oil storage filling within approximately thirteen days. His skepticism is not about the economics but about whether economic pain translates into the specific political concessions Trump is demanding, which are sweeping even by historical standards: no nuclear capability whatsoever or at minimum a long-term freeze on enrichment, an end to material support for all regional proxy forces, and surrender of the existing enriched uranium stockpile. He said signing on to those terms is a really tall order for any Iranian government to accept because it amounts to a comprehensive dismantling of the strategic posture the regime has spent four decades constructing.
Trump’s bet, DePetris acknowledged, is that the Iranians will have no alternative but to sign. The question he keeps returning to is whether that bet is correct or whether the regime decides it can survive whatever additional military and economic pain the United States brings to bear, gambling that American domestic political pressure or oil market disruption will eventually force Trump to soften his position. He drew a parallel to the period before the conflict began, when Trump issued similar ultimatums and demands that Iran refused before the military campaign started. He said the cautious read is not that the strategy will fail but that assuming it will succeed is premature.
Proft pointed to a CBS YouGov poll showing a majority of Americans supporting the campaign until regime change is achieved, with a supermajority backing the specific demands Trump has made on nuclear capability, the enriched uranium, the strait, and the proxy financing. DePetris said Trump does not need to worry much about Republican support at this stage, with the party firmly behind him and Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly representing a loud but numerically limited dissenting faction. His caution is more about the longer timeline. Support for the Iraq War hit seventy-five percent in its early months before it collapsed, and public opinion on extended military campaigns is inherently unstable when economic pain is visible and casualties accumulate. The fact that Iran is, as DePetris put it, sort of like the poster child of evil helps Trump sustain support even among people who do not like him personally, but that dynamic has limits if energy prices remain elevated through the planting season and into the midterm political calendar.
He framed the current moment as both sides sitting at a crossroads trying to determine long-term strategy. Iran’s most effective remaining weapon is the energy card, using control of the strait to impose economic costs globally and build political pressure on Trump to back down rather than escalate. The administration is signaling through the blockade and continued military posture that it intends to escalate rather than retreat. The question of who blinks first, DePetris said, is what everyone is watching, and whoever does loses the war.
On Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian parliamentary election, Proft shared Walter Russell Mead’s Wall Street Journal assessment that Orbán was neither the Churchillian defender of Western civilization his American admirers believed nor the Putinist autocrat his critics described, but rather a hypernationalist impresario who genuinely won and lost elections without rigging the process. DePetris said he views Orbán similarly, as an illiberal nationalist who resisted European Union dictates on Hungary’s domestic and foreign policy rather than a Russian proxy, and whose most consequential role was using Hungary’s EU veto to block various aid packages to Ukraine. With Orbán out and his government dissolving, DePetris said that veto disappears quickly and the ninety-billion-euro European support package for Ukraine that Orbán blocked will likely move through the EU institutions in short order. For the United States the effect is marginal, he said. The primary impact is on European foreign policy and on Ukraine, where European consolidation behind the war effort will now proceed without the friction Orbán’s vetoes provided.