There is a structural problem at the heart of American coercive power that officials rarely articulate: the louder and more frequently a great power threatens, the less credible each subsequent threat becomes. This is not a counsel of restraint for its own sake. It is a claim grounded in the logic of compellence and signalling theory[i] – and the U.S.’ experience with Iran makes the case with unusual clarity.
The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, launched after the U.S.’ May 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was premised on a stark wager: that intensive economic pain would force Tehran into a renegotiated agreement on U.S. terms or trigger the kind of internal instability that would render the regime pliable. Neither happened. But the deeper failure was not merely tactical. The campaign exposed – and in exposing, worsened – a widening gap between American coercive capabilities and their effectiveness. That gap, once visible to rivals, allies, and fence-sitters alike, has reputational consequences that outlast any single policy cycle.
The logic of coercion and its conditions for success
Classical theories of compellence, developed by Thomas Schelling and later systematized by Alexander George, are unambiguous about the conditions under which coercive pressure produces compliance: demands must be clear, the threatened punishment credible and proportionate, and – critically – a viable exit ramp must exist so that compliance would appear politically rational for the target. Remove any of these elements, and the instrument turns against its user.
The Center for International and Security Studies[ii] identified this failure pattern precisely: rather than bending Iranian behaviour, sustained U.S. sanctions deepened Iranian institutional resistance to the international order and strengthened domestic coalitions opposed to making concessions. Coercion, applied in the wrong structural conditions, does not merely fail – it can reconstitute the target’s internal politics in ways that make future coercion even less effective.
James Fearon’s bargaining theory of war adds a second dimension. As applied to the Iran case,[iii] once a coercing state reverses prior commitments – as the United States did in abandoning the JCPOA – the value of any subsequent assurance collapses. Tehran’s calculation after 2018 was not irrational: if compliance in 2015 did not protect against renewed pressure in 2018, why should compliance in 2019 produce different results? The asymmetry Fearon identifies explains why Iran’s nuclear programme advanced rather than retreated under pressure.
The domestic distortion effect
A dimension less examined in the policy literature is the degree to which maximum pressure was calibrated to domestic American audiences as much as to Tehran. Lawfare’s own coverage of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Foreign Terrorist Organisation designation[iv] noted that it was “largely symbolic and added little new economic pressure on the Iranian regime.” This was a telling admission that high-visibility coercive acts were being deployed for their performative domestic value rather than their strategic effect abroad.
This is what might be called the domestic distortion effect: when coercive rhetoric is calibrated primarily for internal political audiences, it tends toward maximalism, repetition, and escalating rhetoric decoupled from any clear operational intent. Adversary decision-makers learn to filter such signals. The E-International Relations analysis of coercive diplomacy and Iran[v] identifies the resulting dynamic: target regimes begin to treat the rhetoric of coercion as evidence of the coercing state’s unreliability, rather than its resolve. Repeated commitments made and reversed generate audience costs in reverse – for the coercing state.
The strategic consequence was confirmed in practice. Lawfare’s analysis of the JCPOA’s constitutional structure[vi] observed that the Obama administration’s choice to structure the agreement as a political commitment rather than a treaty was itself a product of domestic political constraints. The Trump administration’s withdrawal then became the predictable downstream consequence – demonstrating to every future negotiating partner that U.S. agreements are only as durable as a single political term.
The empirical record: Pressure without yield
The International Crisis Group’s assessment of maximum pressure[vii] documented that Tehran began methodically violating its JCPOA obligations in mid-2019 once it concluded that no economic dividend from compliance was forthcoming. Iran’s nuclear programme did not stall under pressure. It accelerated, producing what the Arms Control Association described in October 2024 as a fundamentally transformed proliferation baseline[viii]: complete with shorter breakout timelines, advanced centrifuge capacity, and significant International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring gaps.
Simultaneously, Iran adapted its economic architecture to defeat the instrument of pressure itself. By 2024, according to Baker Institute analysis[ix], Iran was exporting an average of 1.3 million barrels of oil per day, with roughly 90 percent flowing to China. The Brookings Institution had anticipated this pattern: decades of pressure cycles[x] have repeatedly failed to convert economic pressure into political concession, in part because the Iranian leadership has insulated itself institutionally from the domestic pressures that sanctions theory assumes will translate into elite bargaining.
The CSIS analysis of the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities[xi] adds that even after military action degraded Iran’s physical infrastructure, the underlying knowledge base, including enrichment expertise, and weapons design capacity, remained intact. Sanctions and military pressure can destroy facilities, but they cannot eliminate a state’s accumulated technological knowledge. The importance of this asymmetry has been under-weighed in every iteration of maximum pressure logic.
Prestige as infrastructure
The conventional critique of maximum pressure focuses on its immediate policy failures. The more consequential argument concerns what it did to the stock of U.S. coercive credibility over time. Prestige, understood not as vanity but as the operational asset that allows a great power to achieve outcomes through the threat rather than the exercise of force, is depletable. It accumulates through demonstrated follow-through and erodes through visible gaps between declared intent and actual behaviour.
The Lawfare analysis of the legal architecture of U.S. sanctions authority[xii] captures a related structural problem: the absence of an agreed international legal framework for the reimposition of sanctions left the United States legally isolated in ways that compounded the strategic isolation. When the European partners – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – diverged from Washington after the 2018 JCPOA withdrawal, the multilateral infrastructure that had given earlier sanctions their credibility was dismantled. A coercing coalition that has been fractured from within provides, as George’s framework predicts, significantly weaker deterrent signalling than a unified one.
When Iran observed that American threats had been issued and not followed through with decisive escalation over multiple years, it updated its assessment of U.S. resolve.
The structural lesson and its persistence
The return of maximum pressure in Trump’s second term against an Iran already militarily weakened by Israeli strikes and the December 2024 fall of the Assad regime opened direct U.S.-Iran negotiations for the first time since 2018.[xiii] This complicates any linear narrative of failure. But the Lawfare Daily podcast’s analysis[xiv] identified the persistent credibility problem even in this changed context: U.S. demands – nuclear rollback, proxy disarmament, and ballistic missile abandonment – remained inconsistent across interlocutors and administrations, making it structurally difficult for any Iranian leadership to identify what compliance would actually purchase.
The deeper structural lesson is not about Iran specifically. It is about what happens when a hegemonic power uses coercive instruments reactively, publicly, and without a coherent exit architecture: the infrastructure of credibility does not hold. Each miscalibrated signal is a data point that rivals, partners, and neutral states incorporate into their own strategic calculations. The result is not catastrophic decline but gradual reputational erosion as a result of the slow accumulation of doubts about the reliability of American commitments.
Credibility lost to miscalibration cannot be recovered by additional threats. It requires, as George’s framework demands, consistent alignment between stated objectives, operational capability, and follow-through over time. The Iran case suggests that the United States has significant work to do in all three dimensions.
[i] Rapp-Hooper, M. (2014). “New Iran Sanctions Would Undermine Coercion”, Center for a New American Security, 13 January 2014, retrieved from: https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/new-iran-sanctions-would-undermine-coercion.
[ii] Mohseni, E. (2015). “When Coercion Backfires: The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy in Iran”, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, 1 May 2015, retrieved from: https://cissm.umd.edu/research-impact/publications/when-coercion-backfires-limits-coercive-diplomacy-iran.
[iii] Cardot, L. (2026). “Coercive Diplomacy and the Limits of Credible Bargaining in the U.S.–Iran Standoff”, UCL Diplomacy Society, 23 March 2026, retrieved from: https://www.ucldiplomacy.com/post/negotiating-under-duress-coercive-diplomacy-and-the-limits-of-credible-bargaining-in-the-u-s-iran.
[iv] Chachko, E. “Nuclear Brinkmanship: U.S. Sanctions Against Iran Explained”, Lawfare, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/nuclear-brinkmanship-us-sanctions-against-iran-explained.
[v] Sprague, M. (2026). “The Nuclear Brink Revisited: Assessing Coercive Diplomacy in Iran”, E-International Relations, 24 April 2026, retrieved from: https://www.e-ir.info/2026/04/24/the-nuclear-brink-revisited-assessing-coercive-diplomacy-in-iran/.
[vi] Goldsmith, J. (2018). “The Trump Administration Reaps What the Obama Administration Sowed in the Iran Deal”, Lawfare, 9 May 2018, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-administration-reaps-what-obama-administration-sowed-iran-deal.[vii] “The Failure of U.S. ‘Maximum Pressure’ against Iran”, International Crisis Group, retrieved from: https://www.crisisgroup.org/cmt/middle-east-north-africa/iran/failure-us-maximum-pressure-against-iran.
[viii] Davenport, K. (2024). “Rethinking U.S. Nuclear Diplomacy With Iran for 2025”, Arms Control Association, October 2024, retrieved from: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-10/features/rethinking-us-nuclear-diplomacy-iran-2025.
[ix] Coates Ulrichsen, K., Krane, J. and Ayatollahi Tabaar, M. (2024). “Trump’s Maximum Pressure 2.0: US Options and Iran’s Likely Response”, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, 23 December 2024, retrieved from: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/trumps-maximum-pressure-20-us-options-and-irans-likely-response.
[x] Maloney, S. and Takeyh, R. (2011). “The Self-Limiting Success of Iran Sanctions”, Brookings, reprinted from International Affairs, November 2011, retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-self-limiting-success-of-iran-sanctions/.
[xi] Horschig, D. (2025). “What the Iran Strikes Mean for Nuclear Diplomacy”, Lawfare, 26 October 2025, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-iran-strikes-mean-for-nuclear-diplomacy.
[xii] Chachko, E. (2018). “Treaties and Irrelevance: Understanding Iran’s Suit Against the U.S. for Reimposing Nuclear Sanctions”, Lawfare, 26 July 2018, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/treaties-and-irrelevance-understanding-irans-suit-against-us-reimposing-nuclear-sanctions.
[xiii] Horschig, D. (2025). “What the Iran Strikes Mean for Nuclear Diplomacy”, Lawfare, 26 October 2025, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-iran-strikes-mean-for-nuclear-diplomacy.
[xiv] Wittes, B. et al. (2026). “Lawfare Daily: Are We Going to War in Iran?”, Lawfare, 25 February 2026, retrieved from: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily–are-we-going-to-war-in-iran.
