Donald Trump has had success with this model inside the United States, to be sure. He is loved by a few, hated by many, and feared by all. Institutions routinely cave to his demands, including individuals, corporations, law firms, hospitals, and universities, even when those demands violate state or federal law.
Trump, however, does not have such leverage over people living in other countries, or their leaders. He is widely despised in educated, democratic countries, which even a year ago had no confidence in his leadership. Today, most people of the world express significantly higher approval of China’s despotic, genocidal regime than they do of U.S. leadership.
Now, even countries that had regarded him as a useful idiot, like Russia, are increasingly seeing diminishing value in courting him as an asset as the 2026 midterms approach. They sense that it’s going to be a drubbing, and Trump’s ability to throw his weight around will be constrained by a democratically held House, and perhaps Senate. Now, in places where Trump used to be popular (like Hungary), even Trump and JD Vance’s ham-handed attempts to influence elections fell flat.
This situation of being neither loved nor feared, but nearly universally hated and mocked, has direct implications for the war with Iran. Currently, Trump seems content to extend the ceasefire indefinitely, relying on the assumption that the blockade will eventually force Iran’s hand. This seems unlikely: Iran is not a democracy, and public opinion counts for very little. The IRGC has already proven it can kill its way out of civil unrest. What is evolving is a test between it and the United States to see who can absorb the most economic pain, and Iran’s government seems more likely to survive it than Republicans on Capitol Hill in November 2026.
Over time, the effects of the blockade will pile up on Trump, and he will be forced to either make peace on terms unfavorable to the U.S. (and to his own image as a master dealmaker) or resume bombing. So far, the bombing campaign seems to have accomplished little other than to put younger hard-liners in power and destroy a lot of antique military equipment that Iran didn’t need to close the Strait of Hormuz and terrorize its Gulf State neighbors. It did, however, put a serious dent in U.S. missile inventories and get 13 people killed and a bunch of exquisitely expensive and nearly irreplaceable military equipment destroyed.
It is difficult to predict how Trump would react to this further likely failure of bombing: whether to simply give up and take an even worse deal from Iran, or escalate by destroying Iranian water infrastructure, particularly dams, reservoirs, pumping stations, and desalination plants. The latter could very plausibly end Iranian civilization as we know it under the worst-case scenarios for people dying of thirst or fleeing as refugees.
No one outside the U.S. seems to be afraid of Trump anymore, and he is hated rather than loved. These key factors will drive the ongoing Iranian crises, and are the driving force leaving Trump with the options of accepting Iranian terms and trying to spin it as a win, or getting pushed far enough into a corner that he decides to do something monstrous enough to make himself truly feared.
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