Only three months into the Fourth Gulf War, the world has been granted multiple insights into the thinking - such as it is - that has driven the Trump administration’s pretense of having a strategy.

The first came within hours of the US president’s catastrophic decision to greenlight the Israeli assassination of the Islamic Revolution’s Leader Sayed Ali Khamenei. His acquiescence to Netanyahu’s incessant warmongering was clearly driven by the assumption that the Islamic Republic would collapse within days and an internal uprising of Iranians happy to have their country attacked by the US and "Israel" would follow. This new pliant Iran would abandon its sovereignty, normalize relations with “Israel”, and voluntarily dismantle the state to be sold off to the Trump family and its parasites.

What he got instead was more than 90 million people rallying around the flag and a generational leadership transition that locked the Islamic Republic even more solidly in place than at any point in its history.

To his predictable surprise, he had trapped himself in an existential war with no exit to a better, or even the same position as he had on February 27. He had provoked an existential Iranian retaliation in the Strait of Hormuz that has granted it geopolitical power unheard of in modern history, perhaps ever in its long existence. His failure and that of “Israel” even forced Iran into minimal concessions, which has fatally undermined the myth of US-Israeli military omnipotence. Trump has also managed to sink the US security guarantee to the regional Arab states, having failed to protect them from the consequences of his actions.

Realizing too late that no symbolic or “surgical” operation would give him a face-saving way out or reopen the Strait against Tehran’s wishes, he opted to deepen the hole he’d dug. Within hours of gaining a tentative ceasefire and possible resumption of maritime traffic, he imposed his own ‘counter-blockade’ on the Iranians. He did so, not recognizing that such a transcontinental crossroads would only be partially disrupted by a blockade of one shoreline and that Tehran’s massive sea-borne oil storage gave it several months’ buffer before the economic effect would manifest.

Now in the fourth month of the war, Trump has perhaps begun processing the gravity of his actions and the inexorable historical processes he has set in motion. Nonetheless, he persists in the delusion that he is the only, or even the primary, decision-maker involved. His public statements, as well as his reported private negotiations, are indicative of someone adrift, hopelessly in over his head, but still convinced that he can demand concessions from the very regional states he has thrown under the bus by his blundering.

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With US allies and regional client-states most directly affected - the GCC states, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkiye - have assumed the burden of conducting outsourced diplomacy on behalf of a sun-downing White House. For all his trumpeted “calls” and “talks” with the Islamic Republic, the negotiations are between the Iranians and their Pakistani and GCC counterparts. Rather than taking the obvious favor that this is to help get him out of an intractable conflict with deepening global consequences, the president instead appeared to have spied yet another opportunity to extract concessions in exchange for nothing.

Despite his conspicuous lack of leverage even with the regional states whose security he was supposed to ensure, Trump reportedly seized the moment last week to demand that the region collectively join the defunct "Abraham Accords" - that is, normalize relations with “Israel” under American oversight. Such a radically nonsensical step, his thinking seems to be, would be their "payment" to him in exchange for definitively ending the war on Iran and its sub-regional fronts. That is to say, in exchange for their straining efforts at diplomacy that Washington itself is incapable of conducting, the expectation is that those countries who haven’t done so will enter into direct political, economic, and diplomatic alignment with the Zionist project, still in the midst of its Gaza campaign of extermination, its "annexation" of the West Bank, and its scorching of Lebanese Jabal Amel. It is every bit as idiotic as it sounds.

To be making such a ludicrous demand in a moment of unprecedented weakness could well be explained solely as a symptom of Trump’s personal derangement - a grasping attempt to bargain with the immovable consequences of his choices in the vain hope that he can still get his way through a tantrum.

While this explanation on its own is sufficient, a subsidiary motivation helps to ground its explanatory power.

Since the inception of both “Israel” and the modern Arab state system, Washington’s overarching ambition has been to fully integrate the two into a single regional economic, political, and military system subordinated to American-led Western interests. This was the basis of the so-called “Arab NATO” floated by the first Trump administration. Such a regional arrangement would delegate much of the logistical and economic costs of direct occupation to regional client states.

Despite intensive perception management, the regional network of US bases in the region has suffered intensive damage during the war. If it is to come to a definitive end, one of Tehran’s key demands that it is least likely to compromise on is a US military withdrawal from the Gulf. Depending on the state of its facilities, this could be as simple as Washington agreeing not to rebuild them. Either way, any sustainable post-war settlement will require a massive reduction of the regional American presence, at a minimum.

This being the case, the shoehorning in of pan-regional normalization and integration of “Israel” looks less like the culmination of a long-term goal and more like the last remaining vehicle for continued American influence in a transformed region.

In this way, Trump’s demand reads less as senescent idiocy than as a final, desperate attempt to salvage a generational geopolitical objective before it is lost forever.