Trump’s ‘Maximum-Pressure’ Strategy Is Destined to Fail
The combined might of punishing sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and even the threat of war won’t compel surrender from North Korea and Iran.

It’s increasingly clear that what Trump hopes to achieve through a maximum-pressure campaign does not align with the vision of his national-security team: Judging by his behavior with Kim Jong Un and his statement on Iran, his goal is to bring North Korea and Iran into diplomatic talks. Members of his team speak as if they’d rather force the countries’ surrender. Pyongyang and Tehran understand this very well.
North Korea and Iran may deem the cost of not talking to Trump too high, which implies that they would engage him—but resisting surrender is their priority. This means that maximum pressure as a guiding strategy will have diminishing value over time. Indeed, if the president’s national-security team continues with maximum pressure in pursuit of surrender, they’ll encounter resistance from Iran and North Korea. Waiting out the Trump presidency or hoping for the policy to implode could become the two countries’ preferred option.
Iran is not reaping any economic benefits inside the deal, but it is unlikely to get any outside the deal either, even if it were to talk with Washington. But if Iran did abandon the deal, it would give up the hard-won right to a nuclear program, which is enshrined in the accord. That is likely why Iran’s President Rouhani said last week that the United States must rejoin the deal before he would talk with President Trump. His thinking: If the Trump administration brought the United States back into the deal, it could no longer look to the Libya model as the goal, and would have to negotiate from the existing baseline of the 2015 deal.
Of course, it’s not only North Korea and Iran that bear the brunt of maximum pressure. This is a policy levied at the entire international community, which will likely resist the policy, potentially leading to its implosion. Indeed, if America’s isolation at last week’s United Nations Security Council special session, in which it tried to rally support for its policy on Iran, is any indication, maximum pressure has little international backing. While the maximum-pressure strategy received initial support in China and South Korea, that support began to wane after Pyongyang agreed to the Singapore summit. The United States is also threatening its European allies with punishment if they facilitate business with Iran, and India is being forced to forego its investment in the port of Chabahar in Southeast Iran, a gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia that allows India to balance China’s regional influence. U.S. pressure, meanwhile, has already led Europe, China, and Russia to explore ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
What all this means: The wanton use of maximum pressure by Washington is likely to create a world in which the United States is unable to exercise much pressure at all.