He continues to flail in the wind over Iran. He lost the war. Better to surrender now and just accept the omelet on the face. Mr. Trump may be the president who “has least understood Iran’s leadership,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official who has studied Iran for decades. “In many ways, Trump represents the epitome of America’s frustrations with Iran,” Mr. Pollack said. “He has been both the most desirous of making a deal with Iran, and the one who used the most force against it. He has found that neither got him what he wanted.” Mr. Trump considers himself a master of sizing up and exploiting his adversaries. But Iran’s leaders have baffled him. “All they do is make me angry,” he told reporters last week. “They just make me angry.” There are few signs that Mr. Trump’s months of dealing with Iran’s regime have given him a clearer understanding of it. Over the course of the conflict, Mr. Trump has constantly revised his assessment of Mr. Khamenei and his deputies. He has branded them “lunatics,” “reasonable,” “crazy bastards,” “very smart” and “stone cold crazy.” Dennis Ross, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy who served presidents of both parties, said that “the Iranians seem to understand us better than we understand them.” Only Mr. Obama has pulled off a major diplomatic agreement with Iran, in the form of the 2015 nuclear deal that placed limits on Iran’s atomic program lasting up to 15 years in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. Iranian suspicions that the U.S. could not be trusted were soon affirmed. In 2018, Mr. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed even harsher economic sanctions than had been in place before the agreement. “They tend to read our sense of urgency as a form of leverage,” Mr. Ross said. “We always seem in a hurry to get things done. They operate under the premise that time serves their interests more than ours.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/us/politics/trump-iran.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
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