Trump’s abrupt Iran reversal exposes limits of his leverage

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WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump’s dramatic climbdown from his chilling threat to wipe out Iran’s civilisation has exposed the limits – and the rising risks – of his typically unpredictable negotiating style.

His decision on April 7 to back down and agree to a two-week ceasefire – which critics mockingly called another example of TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out – marked the biggest step so far towards de-escalating a 40-day-old war that has shaken the Middle East and disrupted global energy markets.

But Mr Trump’s claims of victory over Iran overlooked questions about the effectiveness of mixing maximalist demands, erratic rhetoric and increasingly extreme threats.

Mr Trump went further than ever before on the morning of April 7 when he issued a stark warning to Iran via social media that unless it reached a deal, “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

After a day on the brink, Mr Trump abruptly reversed his threats – which experts say could have amounted to war crimes – and announced a Pakistani-mediated truce agreement just two hours before a deadline he had set for Iran to open the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

He claimed in his post that the US had “already met and exceeded all military objectives”.

Despite Mr Trump’s triumphalist language, analysts say Iran is likely to emerge from the conflict as a continuing problem for Washington: militarily weakened but with a more hardline leadership, de facto control over the vital oil-shipping waterway and a buried stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Mr Trump has touted himself as a master negotiator since his real estate developer days, but some analysts say he can box himself in with his negotiating style and undermine US credibility on the world stage.

“The President was trapped by his own hyperbole,” said Dr Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington.

“He could not have destroyed Iranian civilisation, and the costs of even appearing to try would have been massive.”

The approach has an added risk – that adversaries, including China and Russia, become wise to the strategy.

“The surprise value is wearing off,” said a Republican lawmaker who had been in contact with the White House on the night of April 7, referring to Mr Trump’s habit of making reversals after tough-sounding threats.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that Mr Trump had backed down, telling reporters on April 8 that his language was part of his “tough negotiating style” and that the world should “take his word very seriously”.

Extreme negotiating positions

Mr Trump has a pattern of taking extreme negotiating positions, only to backpedal.

At times, analysts said, this approach has appeared to be an intentional strategy, while at others it has seemed haphazard, with his aides kept in the dark and the administration rowing back following pressure from financial markets or his MAGA political base.

Mr Trump’s change of tack on Iran followed a spike in US petrol prices and his own slumping approval ratings.

The term TACO dates to around a year ago, when faced with some US$6.5 trillion (S$8.2 trillion) of US stock market losses in the space of four days, Mr Trump dialled back the hefty tariffs he had announced days earlier at his Liberation Day event at the White House.

A few weeks later, he also reversed a separate batch of punitive levies against China.

In both instances, the stock market – which Mr Trump frequently cites as a barometer of his performance – rallied fiercely after his reversals.

On April 8, in keeping with the pattern, the S&P 500 index shot up 2.5 per cent following the ceasefire announcement.

Mr Trump also pulled back on threats to seize Greenland from fellow NATO member Denmark, and his push to take over war-ravaged Gaza.

While his deadlines for securing a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the war in Gaza did bear fruit, his ultimatums for the Palestinian militant group to disarm have gone unheeded.

However, Mr Trump has also issued and followed through on some threats of military action in his second term in ways that go far beyond his 2017 to 2021 presidency.

In a military operation that followed a massive US naval build-up off Venezuela and heated warnings from Mr Trump, a special forces raid in January led to the capture of then Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and a more US-compliant leadership in Caracas.

Mr Trump fulfilled escalating threats against Iran when he joined Israel in attacking the Islamic republic on Feb 28, even while Washington and Tehran were still negotiating over the Iranian nuclear programme.

In question now is whether Mr Trump, despite some tactical military accomplishments, could still fall short of his declared goals, including closing Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon.

Iran, which has denied seeking a nuclear bomb, still has a stockpile of enriched uranium believed mostly buried underground by US-Israeli air strikes in June 2025.

‘Madman theory’

Mr Trump and his aides have long insisted that being unpredictable is a negotiating tactic aimed at keeping opponents off-balance.

“I wouldn’t say he blinked,” said Mr Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy US intelligence officer for the Middle East now at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.

“He took Iran to the edge and managed to escape with at least the temporary off-ramp he had been hoping would come.”

Mr Alexander Gray, a former senior official in the first Trump administration and now chief executive officer of the American Global Strategies consultancy, rejected the notion that this had been another example of Mr Trump’s TACO tendency and said the heated rhetoric was instead aimed at “escalating to de-escalate”.

Mr Trump is widely believed to have taken to heart parts of the Madman Theory, famously used by former president Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, which holds that extreme threats can force foes to make concessions at the negotiating table.

Mr Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he was unhinged and might use nuclear weapons.

Mr Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a non-profit research institute considered hawkish on foreign policy, said he was sympathetic to what he saw as Mr Trump’s view that “you literally have to out-crazy the Iranians”, despite its drawbacks.

“The problem with the Madman Theory of geopolitics is you’re not only going to scare your enemy, but you’re scaring your allies and you’re scaring your people,” Mr Dubowitz said. REUTERS