He added that a final deal is close and he doesn’t want it blown up by what’s happening right now.

We are now in the 10th week of a two-week ceasefire. Iran has suspended negotiations, fired on Kuwait, Bahrain, and now Israel, and it is demanding $36 billion in unfrozen assets as the price of talking. The administration’s answer is to restrain its most capable ally and wait for a deal that Tehran’s own military commander has spent months making impossible.

The question nobody in Washington seems willing to ask is the one that demands an answer: Did anyone think this through before we started it? Wars against resilient adversaries such as Iran require not just military strikes but a clear, sustained explanation of why they matter to the public. That case was never made.

What Tehran knew 

Operation Epic Fury began in late February. The strikes were real. The damage was real. Senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders were killed. Infrastructure was degraded. By any conventional military measure, the opening campaign was effective.

And then nothing changed.

The reason was entirely predictable to anyone who had spent serious time studying the Guard, or who simply asked the Israelis, who have been watching this organization for 40 years. The Guard does not function like a conventional military. It runs on what its strategists call mosaic defense: authority and capability dispersed across semiautonomous units, each capable of operating independently if higher command is knocked out. Decisions are pushed downward. Logistics are built for self-reliance. The entire architecture rests on one assumption: Central command will not survive the opening of a serious war.

The February strikes tested that architecture. It held. A new Guard commander in chief, Ahmad Vahidi, was appointed in March, and he stepped in fast. Proxy operations continued across Lebanon, the Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz. The system did not collapse because it was not designed to collapse under the pressure we applied.

This is not a secret. The academic literature on leadership targeting has said for two decades that decapitation fails against organizations with bureaucratic depth and shared ideology. The Israelis have known it operationally since at least 2006. If the Trump administration launched a campaign against the Guard without fully accounting for mosaic doctrine, or without preparing the public for the long grind that would follow, that is not bad luck. That is a planning failure.

Ten weeks and counting

Vahidi’s appointment was the clearest signal of what kind of war Tehran intended to fight. He is a founding member of the Quds Force and more its institutional memory than a frontman. His selection said one thing plainly: We are not negotiating our way out of this — we are outlasting it.

Since the Guard-affiliated Tasnim News Agency announced the suspension of negotiations on June 1, Vahidi’s inner circle has dominated every decision, overruling more pragmatic voices at every turn. The maximalist demands are not opening bids: Hezbollah included in any ceasefire, $36 billion in assets released, sanctions lifted. They are designed to be unacceptable, and that is the point. Iran does not want a deal on Washington’s terms. It wants Washington to get tired.

And Washington is showing every sign of getting tired. Deadlines slipped. Pauses extended. The public, never fully sold on the mission, has grown skeptical. We weakened Iran — nuclear sites damaged, leadership thinned, proxies strained. But not enough to force meaningful negotiations.

Tehran is not coming to the table in good faith. It is playing for time, betting that American fatigue will do what our initial strikes could not. We are kidding ourselves if we pretend otherwise.

The strategic choice

Geopolitics does not wait for domestic consensus, and threats from Iran’s nuclear program, proxy network, and stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz do not pause for polls. But that reality cuts both ways. If we lack the will to finish what we started, we should not have begun. The current path is strategic drift: Restraining Israel while Iran fires missiles, extending a broken ceasefire, and chasing a deal that keeps receding. It rewards Iranian extortion and erodes American credibility with every passing week.

Trump told an Israeli reporter he doesn’t want the deal blown up by what’s happening right now. What is happening right now is that Iran is firing missiles at Israel, and the American president is calling the Israeli prime minister to tell him to absorb it. That is not deal-making. That is appeasement with extra steps.

Finish what we started

The United States retains overwhelming conventional superiority. The naval blockade is real. Congressional backing holds. And Israel, the partner Trump is restraining, possesses the most precise targeting intelligence on Iran of any actor on earth. The Israelis know which nodes, which networks, and which financial structures actually make the regime function. They know what will bring the Iranians to the table, so let’s bring them to the table.

Four things need to happen now.

• 1. Stop rewarding Iranian extortion at the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is threatening the world’s most critical waterway while collecting oil revenue through it. Allowing that to continue funds the war we are trying to end and tells Tehran that blackmail works.
• 2. Hit the coordination nodes, not just the hardware. The places and moments where dispersed units must link up to produce large effects are the system’s real vulnerability. Those nodes have been rebuilt during the pause. They need to be found and hit.
• 3. Maintain maximum financial pressure without pause. Shadow fleet operators, sanctions middlemen, and financial brokers used the ceasefire to adapt. Every network keeping the machine running needs relentless attention.
• 4. Turn Israel loose. Trump said Sunday that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept the U.S.-Iran deal and that “I call the shots.” That posture does not intimidate Tehran. What intimidates Tehran is Israeli operational latitude: strikes on their timeline, against targets Iran cannot anticipate, by an intelligence apparatus that has spent four decades mapping the regime’s most sensitive pressure points. Keeping Israel on a diplomatic leash while Iran fires missiles at Haifa is not restraint. It is self-imposed blindness.

Put Isfahan on the table, openly. The enriched uranium stockpile stored there is the reason this war started. Trump has said publicly that the U.S. could retrieve it without a deal. Israel and the U.S. together possess the capability to eliminate it. That option should be stated clearly, not whispered in background briefings, as the direct consequence of continued Iranian refusal to negotiate seriously. Tehran needs to understand that running out the clock has a cost it cannot rebuild from. A radar installation can be replaced. A uranium stockpile destroyed is a decade of work gone.

TRUMP VOWS US RESPONSE AFTER CONFIRMING IRAN SHOT DOWN APACHE HELICOPTER

The Guard was built to survive leadership losses. It was not built to sustain a war against an adversary willing to use every instrument available, including its most capable ally. We are not that adversary. Not yet.

That is the only question that matters now. Not whether a deal is close, not whether the Iranian strikes hurt anybody, but whether we are willing to be what this moment requires before Tehran finishes the negotiation it is already winning.

Ron MacCammon is a retired Army Special Forces Colonel and former State Department political-military officer with more than 30 years of operational experience across Afghanistan, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He taught International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.