If the administration’s assumption was that its “maximum pressure” campaign would force Iranian capitulation at no cost to the United States or its allies, that assumption is proving mistaken. And as both sides disavow any desire for war, both sides keep escalating.

Read: The world is getting sucked into U.S.-Iran tensions

Yet speaking to reporters last Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo characterized the tanker attacks—which hit four tankers near the Emirati port of Fujairah in May and a further two in the Gulf of Oman last week—as a response to the administration’s successful sanctions strategy. The sanctions campaign has succeeded at hurting the Iranian economy, yet it has so far failed to bring Iran to the table to discuss Washington’s demands, among which are a cessation of exactly the kind of destabilizing regional activity the administration has attributed to Iran in the past few weeks.

And Iran has more room to escalate. On the diplomatic front, Iran has threatened only reversible moves so far—first, in May, putting the Europeans on 60 days’ notice that it would quadruple its rate of uranium enrichment unless the deal’s other signatories could provide it with economic relief. This month, international inspectors announced that Iran was indeed ramping up nuclear-fuel production. Yet this was a modest step relative to others it could have taken, such as fully abandoning the deal, and clearly aimed at bargaining—what one senior administration official characterized on background recently as “fairly clumsy attempts at nuclear extortion.”

Meanwhile, the Europeans have been scrambling to find a way to preserve the deal—including by trying to construct a mechanism to do business with Iran despite U.S. sanctions. The mechanism hasn’t had much success so far (and the U.S. has threatened penalties against it). And so Iran ramped up the pressure further on Monday, saying it would breach the deal’s limits on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium within 10 days absent economic incentives. Even then, though, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani reportedly called on France, one of the deal’s European signatories, “to save the deal in this very short period of time.”

On the military front, the United States has accused Iran of numerous attacks in the past few weeks, often in the face of caution or skepticism from U.S. allies. In the most recent instance last week, for example, the U.S. military released a video it said showed Iranians removing a mine from a tanker after an explosion onboard to conceal evidence of its involvement, though the Japanese owner of the tanker later cited crew members saying they saw something flying toward the boat. The administration exacerbated its credibility problem by attributing a Taliban-claimed attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan to Iran, despite experts seeing no such connection. (Pompeo told a television program Sunday that he can’t share the intelligence about that attack but is confident in the Iranian connection.)