As the Trump administration looks for a way out of its confrontation with Iran, Patrick Theros, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar with decades of experience in the Persian Gulf, argues that Washington may have made diplomacy harder by striking at the very leadership it may now need to negotiate with.
“If you want to negotiate with a government, you do not decapitate its leadership,” Mr. Theros said in an interview with TO VIMA, using the term to describe what he sees as the central flaw in the American approach.
Mr. Theros is not a distant commentator on the region. A career Foreign Service officer who joined the diplomatic service in 1963, he served as U.S. ambassador to Qatar from 1995 to 1998, as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism and as political adviser to the commander of U.S. Central Command after the Gulf War.
His diplomatic postings included Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, giving him long experience in precisely the Gulf and Arab political terrain now at the center of the Iran crisis.
His warning goes to the heart of the current American dilemma: whether overwhelming military force can produce a diplomatic outcome if it leaves no clear counterpart with whom to negotiate.
“There is no plan for how we move forward from here,” he said. “Or, if there is one, there is probably no confidence in it.”
The Trump administration has described Operation Epic Fury as a campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s offensive missiles, missile production, naval forces and security infrastructure, while preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the mission was “laser-focused” on those objectives. The Pentagon also said American forces had targeted Revolutionary Guard command and control facilities, Iranian air defenses, missile and drone launch sites and military airfields.
Mr. Theros does not dispute that the strikes may have damaged Iran’s ability to retaliate. His argument is different: that the political effect of the campaign has been to make an eventual settlement harder.
“What I do not understand, because it worked against the intended objective, was the decapitation of the Iranian government,” he said. “One of the things I learned, having done several studies on scenarios for strategic nuclear exchanges, is that if you want to negotiate the surrender of a government, you do not decapitate its leadership.”
He added, “I do not see a single objective on which we are closer than we were before the attack. And on most issues, we are in a worse position.”
His criticism is not simply that the United States used force. It is that Washington, in his view, used force without a convincing political theory of what would follow.
Diplomatically, he said, “I see nothing.”
It was one of his bleakest assessments. The reason, he argued, is twofold. Deep Iranian distrust of the United States and Washington’s inability to find a formula that avoids both a larger war and what he called “the humiliation of defeat.”
“It is perhaps one of the most disappointing moments in my involvement with the Middle East,” he said.
Mr. Theros said he believed the White House may have expected a sudden and overwhelming blow to produce a rapid political result in Tehran. He pointed to Venezuela, where U.S. forces captured Nicolas Maduro in January and flew him to New York to face drug trafficking charges. Reuters reported at the time that Mr. Trump said the United States would run Venezuela temporarily until what he called a “safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“I do not believe we were even close to that,” Mr. Theros said of the possibility that Iran would collapse or surrender under military pressure.
“But all of this seems to have convinced Mr. Trump that a sudden, fierce military attack that would decapitate the Iranian government would produce in Iran the same kind of surrender that occurred in Venezuela. That, for me, is the only logical explanation for what we tried to do.”
Asked whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had pushed Mr. Trump toward such a strategy, Mr. Theros was careful not to go that far.
“I do not know whether he led him into it or whether he simply did not tell him,” Theros said. “The problem with President Trump, as we have seen in many cases, is that he has the big idea, but he does not look at the details.”
The former ambassador also questioned whether senior American officials were positioned to challenge the assumptions behind the campaign.
“Given the composition of the National Security Council at the moment, I doubt there are people there who would have seen this,” he said. At the State Department, he added, there may still be officials from an older generation who remember Cold War strategic studies, but he doubted whether anyone would have been willing to raise the objection.
“Perhaps since the Korean War, we have not fought a country that could effectively strike back, with the exception of the short war with Iraq in 1991,” he said. “As a result, I do not think anyone really thought to go back to the old manuals, which said clearly that you do not decapitate the leadership.”
In his view, Israel’s experience against Hamas and Hezbollah may have reinforced the appeal of leadership targeting.
“The Israelis did an excellent job decapitating Hezbollah and Hamas,” he said. “The operations succeeded in weakening the organizations, but they did not lead to victory.”
Iran, Mr. Theros said, is a far harder military target than many in Washington may have assumed.
“First, look at the size of Iran,” he said. “It is a huge country. Second, most of it is very mountainous. That makes targeting very difficult.”
He compared the challenge to the search for missiles in Iraq, a flatter country with fewer mountains. If Iraqi forces were able to hide missiles and launch them, he said, there was little reason to assume Iranian systems would be easy to find.
“We had an overly optimistic view,” he said. “Israeli intelligence was very good at locating the leadership. I do not believe they had very good tactical intelligence.”
The crisis is also testing the Gulf’s energy system.
The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy routes, has become a pressure point in the confrontation. The U.S. Israeli war on Iran had led to the effective closure of the strait, with only limited crude sailings. A Greek operated tanker was among the few oil vessels to cross in mid-May, according to ship tracking data cited by Reuters.
For Mr. Theros, that gives the crisis consequences far beyond the battlefield.
“Economically, for many countries everything depends on the opening of the strait,” he said. “I do not believe we have yet seen the consequences of all the developments of the recent war.”
Iran, he said, cannot force the United States to end a naval blockade militarily. But an American attempt to reopen the strait by force, he argued, would carry enormous costs and could become politically disastrous for Mr. Trump.
The pressure on Gulf energy infrastructure has already been severe. Reuters reported in March that Iranian attacks had knocked out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity, damaging two LNG trains and one gas to liquids facility. QatarEnergy’s chief executive said the LNG repairs could take three to five years, while the gas to liquids facility could take up to a year to repair.
Mr. Theros said even reopening the strait would not quickly restore normal energy flows.
“In the best case, at the end of the year,” he said. Qatar, he added, had suffered significant damage and would need at least a year to return to its previous condition.
“When you shut down these facilities, you have to be very careful when you reopen them because you do not know what has deteriorated,” he said. “Some of the chemicals in natural gas or oil have accumulated in the machinery, and all of that has to be cleaned before operations restart.”
“It will take billions of dollars to repair the damage,” he added.
Whether time favors Washington or Tehran is harder to judge. Mr. Theros declined to offer a firm prediction, saying too many variables remain in motion. But he said the pressure could test Mr. Trump’s political endurance, particularly as the November elections approach.
“I believe time will test Mr. Trump’s endurance, given his fear of the November elections and the fact that now, by doing nothing, he appears weak,” he said.
If he were advising Mr. Trump, Mr. Theros said, he would recommend a politically painful but strategically clean option: withdrawal.
“I would do what Mr. Reagan did in Lebanon,” he said. “I would simply leave.”
The comparison is to President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1984 to move U.S. Marines offshore from Lebanon. The State Department’s Office of the Historian records that Reagan approved the idea of redeploying the Marines on Feb. 1, 1984, amid mounting congressional criticism, and announced on Feb. 7 that they would withdraw offshore after pro Syrian militias overran West Beirut.
Mr. Theros described that episode more bluntly.
“We left overnight,” he said. “We simply disappeared.”
He argued that the domestic political cost of a similar withdrawal today could be limited.
“In America, withdrawing from a small defeat like this would cause little political reaction,” he said. “We are a huge continental country where 90 percent of the population does not care about what happens beyond our borders.”
The Lesson for Greece
For Greece, Mr. Theros said, the crisis offers a warning about the limits of relying too heavily on any single regional relationship.
The confrontation has shown how quickly American power can reshape the Middle East, but also how uncertain and costly U.S. strategy can become once force is used without a clear diplomatic end point.
That lesson applies directly to Greece, he argued. Athens has moved closer to Israel in recent years, especially on security and energy, a relationship Mr. Theros described as useful and necessary. But he said Greece should not allow that partnership to become the sole foundation of its Middle East policy.
“Unfortunately, the region has been diplomatically neglected throughout Greece’s modern postwar history,” he said. “I have long argued that Greece needs a dynamic eastern policy, using the acceptance it enjoys in the Arab world.”
Greece, he said, has an advantage that many Western countries lack.
“Greece is not seen as a foreign colonizer,” he said. “It is seen by Arabs as ‘one of us.’”
That gives Athens room to pursue a broader regional role, he argued, without distancing itself from Israel.
“In the Middle East, you should never put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. “At the moment, Greece has developed a strategic alliance with Israel. That is certainly positive, but it should not be the only center of gravity of our policy.”
For Athens, he said, the deeper strategic anchor should be Europe. The relationship with Israel remains important, he argued, but it cannot replace a broader security strategy.
“The relationship with Israel was and remains necessary,” he said. “But it is transitional and could disappear from one moment to the next. Real security lies in Europe as Greece’s strategic foundation.”
But Europe, he added, should not be seen only as Greece’s security anchor. Because of its standing in the Arab world, Greece can offer Europe a channel into the Middle East that few others possess.
“Greece can offer Europe an entry point into the Middle East that no other European country can,” he said.
