Trump Has a Way Out of the War

 

Opinion

Thomas L. Friedman

Trump Has a Way Out of the War

 

March 31, 2026

Thomas L. Friedman

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/trump-iran-war-nuclear-regime-change-peace.html

 

If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in the world.

 

This is imposing serious harm on the global economy, including the U.S. stock market, and Trump has no clue how to get out of the mess that he has created by starting a war without thinking through the implications.

 

It is actually embarrassing to watch the American president flip-flopping around, from telling us that the surviving Iranian leaders have pretty much agreed to his every demand, that the war is close to being over and Trump won, to admitting that he has no idea how to get the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane out of Iran’s grip. If America’s Western allies, whom Trump never consulted before the war, won’t send their armies and navies to do the job for Trump, then it’s too bad for them, he says: We have all the oil we need. That is, unless Trump decides to “obliterate” — his favorite word — Iran’s industrial base and desalination plants until Iran says uncle.

 

In short, we are watching what happens when you put into the Oval Office an impulsive, unstable man who ran for president largely to get revenge on his political foes. Then he surrounded himself with a cabinet chosen for its handsome looks and its willingness to put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. Add to that Republican majorities in the House and Senate willing to write him blank checks, and it all eventually leads to sloppy, undisciplined decision-making, including starting a huge war in the Middle East with no plan for the morning after.

 

Trump is a man-child playing with matches — the world’s most powerful military — in a gas-filled room.

 

If all of that were not bad enough, we have a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who holds extreme Christian nationalist beliefs and, last week, reportedly held a prayer session at the Pentagon in which he prayed for U.S. troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

 

In other words, it’s now our religious warriors against Iran’s.

 

If this were not the leadership of my own country — and if Iran were not, indeed, the most destabilizing force in the Middle East and its transformation not a worthy goal for its own people and its neighbors — I’d just sit back and watch the show, savoring the spectacle of Trump getting what he deserves.

 

But it is my country. Iran going nuclear is a threat that could unleash nuclear proliferation all across the Middle East. And we are all going to get what Trump deserves.

 

What to do? Trump should set aside his 15-point peace plan — which would be ridiculously complicated to implement — and reduce it to two points: Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on regime change. Both sides would then agree to end all hostilities. That is, no more American and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no more Strait of Hormuz blockade and, for darn sure, no U.S. ground troops landing in Iran.

 

“We have to realize that what the Iranian regime wants most is to stay in power, and what the United States and Israel want most is for Iran not to have a bomb,” said John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming book “The Troubled American Way of War.” “Both sides can get what they want most if they are ready to give up what they want second most.”

 

For America and Israel, second prize after eliminating Iran’s highly enriched uranium would be regime change. That doesn’t appear to be in the offing anymore, and Trump has already begun laying the groundwork for abandoning that objective. He told reporters on Sunday that given how the United States and Israel have now killed several dozen of Iran’s senior leaders, “it truly is regime change.” Iran’s leaders were “a whole different group of people,” who he said have “been very reasonable.”

 

Of course, this is ludicrous and a cover for the fact that the United States and Israel vastly overestimated their ability to topple Iran’s regime using air power alone.

 

The Trump team has reportedly been negotiating through Pakistan with the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has strong ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to be the real power behind the scenes. The rump Iranian regime may well be ready to consider giving up its uranium in return for its survival.

 

Yes, a million problems would remain unresolved, but that’s what happens when you try to use force without any long-term planning to solve a wicked problem.

 

Broadly speaking, a wicked problem is defined as a problem that resists quick fixes or permanent solutions. It involves numerous interdependent variables. Outcomes are never final, just better or worse, or good enough. Every wicked problem is essentially one of a kind, meaning there is no perfect, pre-existing template for solving one. And solutions often have irreversible consequences, meaning that you cannot easily undo a decision.

 

That is about the best definition of the Iran problem that I can think of.

 

While he may have never spelled it out in so many words, if you look at President Barack Obama’s actions vis-à-vis Iran, he clearly understood that it was a wicked problem and therefore the wisest course of action was to focus on the core American interest, try to secure that and learn to live with the other features of the problem, mitigating them as best as possible.

 

That was the logic of Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put internationally verifiable limits on the country’s uranium enrichment program, and his decision to live with its growing ballistic missile arsenal and its cultivation of proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — which did not threaten America.

 

Obama’s Iran deal worked as designed. When Obama left office, the curbs on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacities — verified by international inspectors — meant that Iran, if it broke out of the deal, would require at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, providing plenty of time for the world to react.

 

Nevertheless, Trump, at the urging of Netanyahu, unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018. But Trump never forged an effective alternative strategy to prevent Iran from securing enough uranium for a bomb. The Biden administration tried to clean up Trump’s mess, but could not get Iran to agree.

 

When Trump came back to power, he again neglected to forge an alternative. So Iran went from being a year away from a bomb under Obama’s nuclear deal to weeks away thanks to Trump’s reckless withdrawal from Obama’s strategy without an effective replacement strategy. And now with this war Trump has made it a really, really wicked problem.

 

It’s why we need to keep this as simple as possible. America should extend assurances that we will end the war, leave the regime in place, stop destroying Iran’s infrastructure and even offer some relief from oil sanctions, if Iran turns over all its near weapons-grade fissile material and halts all hostilities from its side. Everything else gets postponed for another day. (Meanwhile a much-weakened Iranian regime would have to be more responsive to its people.)

 

Trump will be a very lucky man if the surviving leaders of the Iranian regime say yes. It’s a measure of Trump’s incompetence that they now hold his fate in their hands.