Feedback Loop

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As the world nervously tracks Trump’s latest attempt to bring about a ceasefire in Iran, the president’s belief in his own ability to shape events and geopolitics by his own force of will alone are being tested to the limit by an apocalyptic regime that is battered but growing in confidence  

The ultimatums and the rejections are flying back and forth between President Donald Trump and the Iranian leadership — but for now, the bombers and the ballistic missiles are staying grounded. At press time, the fragile ceasefire is still holding, as tattered hopes for yet another imminent deal are buoyed.

Trump’s negotiating style is reminiscent of a used car salesman handing you the keys while you’re still standing on the lot trying to decide which vehicle is within your budget. Trump describes deals as though they already exist, leaving the rest for negotiators to figure out.

By declaring momentum into existence, Trump pressures diplomats, allies, markets, media narratives, and sometimes even adversaries to begin behaving as though an agreement is already inevitable. The underlying theory appears to be that once enough people start emotionally pricing in a deal, resisting it becomes harder.

That’s the brilliant madness behind Trumpian diplomacy. Traditional negotiators wait for signatures before announcing victory. Trump announces victory first and then forces reality itself to justify the headline.

For Trump, a deal is like a Pet Rock. It doesn’t really make a difference if you’ve got one or not. And if no deal develops, then no deal develops. Aside from some compounded confusion and cascading chaos, nothing has changed, as far as Trump is concerned.

Even if this most recent “deal” Trump claims to have reached with Iran lasts longer than a would-be assassin’s shootout with Secret Service, the Trump-Iran War has already rearranged the global operating system. And there’s no going back.

It has exposed how frighteningly dependent modern civilization remains on a handful of choke points, underwater cables, shipping lanes, server farms, and electrical grids. It has revealed that a few cheap drones and some suicidal speedboats can shake the global economy harder than entire armored divisions once could. It accelerated the migration of conflict into Africa, cyberspace, and into space itself. And while it has reminded China that America still sits near many of the world’s strategic arteries, it has also reminded America that empires can bleed themselves dry attempting to police them.

The Trump Instinct Doctrine

For President Trump, the war appears to have reinforced one of the defining assumptions behind his political and diplomatic worldview. Trust your instincts, move fast, absorb the backlash later, and let everyone else catch up afterward. Congress, polling, allied objections, expert panels, cable news outrage cycles, and even large segments of the MAGA movement itself increasingly seem secondary to whatever conclusion Trump arrives at after combining his own gut feeling with whatever intelligence briefing he believes matters most in the moment.

To outside observers, Trump’s Iran strategy can appear wildly inconsistent. He’ll negotiate, threaten, bomb, pause, flatter, pressure, and then suddenly start talking about a deal again. Most presidents treat diplomacy as the alternative to force. But inside Trump’s worldview, the sequence is remarkably coherent. He seems to view diplomacy less as a peace process and more as an extension of leverage by other means. If a regime whose strategic assets and leadership were crippled during negotiations and they still feel compelled to negotiate with him afterward, that’s winning.

And crucially, Trump does not appear particularly afraid of stalemate. Unlike leaders who panic when unresolved tensions linger on front pages for too long, Trump seems unusually comfortable sitting through long, awkward stretches of uncertainty, because he believes the leverage equation will eventually swing back in his favor.

Furthermore, every time Trump survives a political, legal, or geopolitical gamble that experts insist should destroy him (cue “the walls are closing in” montage), he emerges even more convinced that conventional wisdom is fundamentally disconnected from reality.

The conflict appears to have reinforced Trump’s belief that modern leadership is less about maintaining stable systems than dominating momentum. Institutions react, bureaucracies react, markets react, media reacts, allies react, adversaries react. Meanwhile, Trump’s objective seems to be ensuring that everybody else spends their time responding to him long enough for him to identify an opening, seize the initiative and run with it.

Because in Trump’s worldview, pressure reveals reality. Allies, enemies, markets, and entire ideologies all reveal themselves under pressure. One striking example came when Trump threatened Iran’s bridges and power plants. In a panic, the regime rushed human shields toward the sites it feared were most vulnerable and strategically important, inadvertently signaling exactly which facilities it considered indispensable. In other words, the panic itself became intelligence, which Trump converted into leverage to be used at a future date.

The uncomfortable truth for America’s allies and adversaries alike is that the Iran war may have radicalized Trump’s confidence in his own Instinct Doctrine.

Iran’s Survival Feedback Loop

For the regime in Iran, survival itself is being interpreted as divine protection, which lamentably makes the resumption of war more likely, not less. A less radical regime might look at devastated infrastructure, assassinated commanders, economic collapse, and international isolation and conclude that escalation carries unbearable costs. In the ideological framework of the Islamic Republic, enduring a seemingly existential assault can be reframed as proof that the regime remains under heavenly protection and still occupies a sacred role in history.

Right when the newborn regime’s cradle was rocked by war with Iraq across the ’80s, hardline factions inside Iran learned to interpret pressure not as a reason to moderate, but as validation that their struggle was righteous, sacred, and unfinished. That mentality has only deepened with every survived uprising, assassination campaign, sanction wave, and regional conflict, creating one of the most dangerous feedback loops in modern geopolitics and a regime emerging from devastation not chastened, but spiritually emboldened. The logic becomes almost self-sealing. If the system survives, survival itself becomes proof that the mission retains divine legitimacy and heavenly protection.

Much like we’ve witnessed with Hamas, surrender becomes spiritually dangerous, because laying down arms can be interpreted internally as doubting Al-lah’s promise of ultimate triumph. Layered on top of that is a devastating Islamist sunk-cost spiral. The greater the destruction incurred, the harder surrender becomes, psychologically and theologically. If they did not surrender when 70% of Gaza was destroyed, they become even less likely to surrender after 80% is destroyed; capitulating at that stage would mean admitting not only that the suffering accomplished nothing, but that they abandoned faith before Al-lah’s victory arrived. Besides, any leader prepared to surrender can expect to be eliminated by a more radical replacement who isn’t.

NATO’s Midlife Crisis

For decades, much of NATO operated like a homeowners association with nuclear weapons and strongly worded statements. The post-Cold War assumption was that major industrial warfare had been consigned to black-and-white documentaries narrated by British-accented individuals.

Then along came the Trump-Iran War, politely reminding everybody that military history did not, in fact, retire in 1991.

The alliance understands that if it looks weak, indecisive, or strategically paralyzed for too long, the entire post-Cold War order begins wobbling underneath it. The complication is that NATO’s timeline and Trump’s timeline are not necessarily aligned.

Trump increasingly behaves like a man who views prolonged tension as leverage, while for NATO, prolonged tension has made it look irrelevant.

The Hormuz crisis left NATO with a bruised institutional ego. While Trump and the US military shaped the trajectory of events, the alliance itself appeared hesitant, fragmented, and largely invisible.

The danger is that NATO increasingly risks developing the institutional equivalent of “do something” syndrome. Should they find themselves desperate enough to prove they’re both relevant and not reliant on Trump, expect a forced showdown with Putin over Ukraine, where only losers will emerge, if at all.

The Superpower Trap

The Trump-Iran War has forced both Washington and Beijing to confront opposite sides of the same strategic nightmare: The more globally you extend your reach, the harder it becomes to defend all the places where your interests now live. America learned that stationing military bases across the Middle East means inheriting dozens of permanent vulnerabilities every time the region catches fire. What once looked like strategic dominance has suddenly materialized into an enormous collection of expensive targets.

Meanwhile, China saw something even more unsettling. Beijing has been rapidly expanding its influence through ports, shipping routes, infrastructure projects, and overseas investments designed to support its rise as a global power. The country’s entire economic model depends on massive flows of imported energy and exported goods moving through waters that America could potentially disrupt during a crisis. Once strategic waterways become contested, a sprawling international footprint risks transforming into an overstretched dependency system vulnerable to disruption from multiple directions at once.

Apocalypse Discount Sale

The war has exposed something deeply unsettling about the future of conflict — the fact that the most destructive weapon on earth is rapidly becoming one of the cheapest. A swarm of angry little airborne lawnmowers stuffed with explosives and guided by software updates can originate from across a border, from a cargo ship, from a rented warehouse, or even from a secret factory already operating deep inside the country being targeted. And somehow these buzzing death-hover-mopeds are managing to wreak more chaos than stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, and trillion-dollar missile defense systems combined.

Russia and Ukraine introduced this menace, and in the 12-Day War, Israel took clandestine drone production on enemy turf to the next level. And the truly horrifying part is that we may not discover who’ll be next to perfect it, should the lights suddenly go out.

Now the cost of causing catastrophic disruption is collapsing faster than the cost of preventing it. A country can spend billions protecting critical infrastructure, while its enemy pays the price of a used Honda Civic to turn the lights off across an entire region.

Perhaps the only way to stop mass drone swarms would be by preemptively destroying the energy grids, factories, and industrial systems powering their production in the first place — systems that are themselves increasingly vulnerable to a mass drone attack. Civilization is entering the strategic equivalent of a circular firing squad powered by lithium batteries. Even worse, drone warfare scales downward. Superpowers can use it, and so can terror groups, cartels, and wealthy lunatics.

This war is so much greater than nations or coalitions. Civilization itself hangs in the balance, as the world drifts toward a deeply unstable future where society becomes simultaneously more advanced and easier to cripple. We are approaching a point where nobody wins, the state of war never ends, and civilization itself becomes too cheap to sabotage.