The stalled nuclear negotiations with Iran mask a fundamental shift in Washington's strategy, one aimed less at securing a deal than at hastening the collapse of the Iranian regime itself, said Or Horvitz, a senior fellow at JPPI and former IDF officer, on the last episode of The Deep Dive podcast.
While public attention has fixated on stop-start diplomacy and Iranian propaganda, the US has quietly returned to a "maximum pressure" campaign modeled on Ronald Reagan's pivot from containment to confrontation with the Soviet Union, said Horvitz.
"Any negotiation with this regime is pointless," he argued, describing the current Iranian leadership as a hawkish "military junta" more extreme than its predecessor and unwilling to compromise on its core interests, the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear program.
The analyst pointed to two camps within the Trump administration, one led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio favoring regime collapse and another associated with Vice President JD Vance still seeking a negotiated outcome, both now aligned behind escalating economic pressure.
With Iranian inflation soaring and minimum-wage earners able to afford only a fraction of the month, Horvitz said the regime's starting point is far weaker than during the first pressure campaign, warning that a cornered, panicked Tehran also becomes more likely to launch an irrational or preemptive strike against Gulf states, Europe, or even NATO members.
In the conversation with the host, Jacob Laznik, Horvitz cautioned that toppling the regime would be a "matter of time" rather than a certainty on any timeline, noting it took eight years for Reagan's approach to help bring down the Soviet Union, and that the West missed an opportunity to back Iranian protesters earlier in the year.
He argued that Iran's economic weakening opens a "historic" window against its most important proxy, Hezbollah, while cautioning that a vacuum could empower Sunni jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.
On Syria and Turkey, Horvitz urged pragmatism over confrontation, cooperating with Damascus on shared interests and managing Ankara as a "growing challenge" that is "not Iran by any means."
His closing warning drew on Winston Churchill: "Iran is a bully, and you cannot appease a bully."