By Gerald F. Seib 

Whatever other assets and liabilities he brings to the table, President Trump certainly offers this: He is a master at sowing uncertainty, so neither friend nor foe really knows what he's up to.

And so it is right now with Iran, where Mr. Trump and his aides have in the past two weeks alternately raised and lowered fears about armed conflict. American warships moved toward Iran amid intelligence reports on pending Iranian attacks on U.S. targets in the Middle East. Then, Mr. Trump lowered the temperature, telling aides he didn't want a fight and tweeting: "I'm sure that Iran will want to talk soon."

On Sunday, he ramped the heat back up, tweeting: "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran." Then he backed it down again, saying in a Fox News interview: "No, I don't want to fight."

It's confusing, which may be the goal. Yet the underlying question is simple: What is Mr. Trump really trying to accomplish?

Here's a reasonable guess, based on conversations with officials and diplomats tracking the situation:

Mr. Trump almost certainly doesn't seek armed conflict with Iran. He's gone out of his way to avoid or end clashes involving American forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, and has done little to suggest a military move against Venezuela.

Meantime, the president and his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner on Sunday were on the diplomatic track in the region rather than the war track, rolling out a plan to hold an "economic workshop" for the Palestinians next month in Bahrain, just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. That's an attempt to extract international financial commitments to Palestinians as a first step toward getting them to make diplomatic concessions to end their long conflict with Israel. Such an initiative would have little chance of getting traction amid a hot fight with Iran.

So war doesn't seem to be the goal.

What Mr. Trump and his team are trying to do, however, is to use economic sanctions to generate unprecedented pressure on Iran, with two quite different purposes in mind.

The first is to create enough economic distress in Iran that the regime could buckle under the weight of popular discontent. This isn't explicitly a regime-change strategy, but it's close, and it's been taking shape ever since Mr. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal President Obama struck with Iran and started reimposing economic sanctions on Iran.

But the administration is doing more than simply reinstating the old economic sanctions; it has made them considerably harsher. Its stated goal is to drive Iranian oil exports as close to zero as possible by using financial coercion to persuade other countries to stop buying from Iran. Exports are indeed plunging.

Now that process has been combined with sanctions on Iran's metals industry, another attempt to cut off export income, and a declaration that Iran's Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization, allowing the U.S. to impose sanctions on those who do business with Revolutionary Guard leaders and their financial affiliates.

The idea that internal dissatisfaction might topple the Iranian regime is as old as the four-decade-long conflict between Washington and Tehran. But Trump aides point to outbursts of protest in the streets of Iranian cities as a sign that, maybe, something is different now.

One senior administration aide acknowledges that the protests are "sporadic" and without any central organization, but says: "In a hundred cities and towns in the country there is enormous dissatisfaction." At a minimum, the administration hopes economic distress will cut Iranian payments to armed groups it supports in the region.

The second potential goal is quite different from regime change. It is to drive Iran's top leaders back into a conversation with the U.S., perhaps with President Trump himself.

This seems implausible amid the poisonous atmosphere that now prevails. Yet Mr. Trump has raised the idea periodically in recent days, and officials confirm he is serious about it. The pattern of his engagement with Iran now -- economic pressure, international isolation, harsh threats, military maneuvering -- matches precisely the track Mr. Trump followed before he opened negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Iran is a much tougher nut to crack. It is far less isolated than is North Korea, diplomatically and economically. Still, Trump aides think they are bringing unprecedented pressure to bear.

The risks of miscalculation along the way are high. Iran's own belligerent words and actions are a response to the economic pressure. There's a real danger that some of the regional proxy forces Iran supports -- Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen's Houthi rebels -- will decide to take matters into their own hands and strike at U.S. targets on Iran's behalf.

Then things can spiral downward -- regardless of whether that's what the president seeks.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 20, 2019 09:20 ET (13:20 GMT)

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