The incoming Trump administration is expected to restart the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran that it utilized during his first administration.
During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that sought to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and he imposed what the administration characterized as a “maximum pressure” strategy in the hopes of limiting their overt aggression against U.S. interests.
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Trump is expected to maintain that posture this time around, including moving to choke off Iran’s oil income to restart that strategy, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Brian Hook, who served as Trump’s special envoy for Iran during the first administration, provided insight into the president-elect’s positions on Thursday.
“President Trump understands that the chief driver of instability in today’s Middle East is the Iranian regime, and the Gulf is, I think, the most economically dynamic and culturally vibrant region in the world today,” Hook said on CNN, referring to the Arab countries on the Persian Gulf. “And this sort of extremism and revolutionary ideology that the Iranian regime exports is one of the obstacles, right, to continuing on this good path.”
Trump plans to “isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken [Iran] economically so they can’t fund all of the violence” perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and other proxies in Iraq and Syria, Hook added.
Brian Carter, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute predicted the “sanctions, which had such a deleterious impact on the regime under the first Trump Administration, will probably be less effective” this time around, due to Iran’s growing relationships with other U.S. adversaries, like Russia and China.
Tehran has gone as far as to supply Russia with drones for use in Ukraine, and have helped them establish a factory for the Russians to build them domestically.
“Iran has strengthened its relationship with Russia and China since 2021, which may allow Iran to better mitigate sanctions. The increasingly strong ties between Russia and Iran also underscore an additional point: one cannot be a Russia dove and an Iran hawk,” Carter told the Washington Examiner. “The two regimes are growing closer, and both hope to defeat the United States in the Middle East, Europe, and globally. This creates a profoundly different Middle East than the one the Trump Administration faced from 2017-2021.”
Another factor in how Trump could approach Tehran during his second administration is Iran’s continued efforts to assassinate Trump and other officials who were in his first administration.
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The Department of Justice announced on Friday that it charged three people in connection to an alleged plot that originated in Iran to assassinate Trump before the 2024 election. Prosecutors alleged that an IRGC official asked Farhad Shakeri to “put aside his other efforts on behalf of the IRGC and focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating, former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
This was not the first time the DOJ has charged individuals with ties to Iran who allegedly plotted to kill Trump.