Neither 5D Chess Nor Idiocy

I’ve found myself surprisingly flat-footed trying to make sense of Trump’s behavior regarding the Islamic Republic.

Not because I think he’s playing some secret 5D chess game. And not because I think he’s crazy, evil, selfish, TACO, only cares about oil, doesn’t care about Iranians, or any of the other cartoon explanations people reach for. Those explanations all feel too easy.

The funny thing about the “5D chess” meme is that it gives chess masters way too much credit.

Actual grandmasters don’t play that way. They don’t sit down with some elaborate plan where move 4 is setting up move 17, which is setting up move 38, which eventually wins the game. That would fail almost immediately because the opponent gets a vote. The board changes. Unexpected opportunities appear. Unexpected threats appear.

What great players bring instead is a collection of intuitions. Control the center. Improve piece activity. Preserve initiative. Keep the king safe. Create threats that force responses. Avoid unnecessary weaknesses. Maintain flexibility. And they don’t have a single objective, either. They’d like their king safe, their queen active, their pawns healthy, their opponent constrained, and their tactical opportunities increasing. None of those is “the plan.” They’re simply things you’d generally like moving in the right direction.

Poker is the same way. Business is the same way. Science is the same way. And foreign policy is vastly more complicated than any of them because now there are not one or two opponents, but dozens. Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Europe, Russia, China, domestic voters, military institutions, energy markets, political allies, political opponents. Each move is simultaneously observed by multiple audiences, and each signal may be intended for several recipients at once. It’s remarkably easy for outsiders to misidentify who the signal is actually for. A raise in one poker game may look irrational until you realize it was directed at a different player sitting at a different table.

That’s part of why I’m reluctant to embrace either the “5D chess” interpretation or the “Trump suddenly forgot everything he knows” interpretation.

Trump has repeatedly distinguished between the Iranian people and the regime. He has repeatedly spoken about the impossibility of trusting the regime. His administration restored “maximum pressure” on Iran, explicitly aimed at denying Iran a nuclear weapon, countering its regional influence, and neutralizing its terrorist network.

And that’s what makes some of the recent signaling difficult for me to parse.

Does anyone seriously think Trump believes someone like Ghalibaf has had a genuine change of heart? That he suddenly sees IRGC leadership as trustworthy? That these people are going to transform Iran into a normal nation, dismantle their proxy networks, stop exporting instability, and open the door to political freedom?

Likewise, Trump surely understands Hezbollah, Israel, deterrence, and the reality that Israel cannot indefinitely absorb attacks and simply grin and bear them. He surely understands that perceptions of weakness matter. In fact, few modern politicians have spent more time thinking about reputation, leverage, threats, humiliation, bargaining position, and the public projection of strength.

So when I hear statements that seem inconsistent with those realities, I don’t immediately conclude that Trump suddenly forgot everything he knows. Nor do I conclude that every move is secretly part of some brilliant hidden design.

The more plausible hypothesis is that he’s what he’s always appeared to be: a messy pragmatic strategist. Not a master planner. Just a strategist trying to move a bunch of variables in favorable directions at the same time. Maybe those include preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, avoiding a major American war, keeping oil markets reasonably stable, continuing the integration of Arab states into a regional order that increasingly includes Israel, maintaining pressure on the regime, preserving American leverage, keeping military options available, avoiding irreversible commitments, and reducing the chances of a wider regional escalation.

The problem is that no single move advances all of those objectives simultaneously. Sometimes they reinforce one another; sometimes they conflict. Sometimes a signal that looks weak to one audience is intended for another. Sometimes what sounds conciliatory is really about preserving future options. Sometimes what appears aimed at Tehran is actually aimed at Riyadh, Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, or domestic voters. And from the outside we often don’t even know which poker table a particular raise was intended for.

Trump may be wrong. He may fail. He has failed before. But the most plausible interpretation isn’t that every move is part of some master plan, nor that every move is random. It’s that he’s navigating an insanely complicated landscape with a bundle of instincts, priorities, threats, opportunities, reputational considerations, and constraints, and trying to keep more of them moving in the right direction than the wrong direction.

That’s a lot less exciting than 5D chess.

But it’s also a lot closer to how actual strategy works.