Of course, despite their hesitance to materially support the effort, lots of nations are willing to help Trump wave his sword at Iran. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates benefit directly from a weakened Iran and have supported the U.S.’s tough talk (though they’re having second thoughts now). Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Trump ally who is fighting for his political future (and facing a criminal investigation), on Sunday compared Iran’s breach of the uranium limits to Hitler’s 1936 march into the Rhineland. And British Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson, looking for a path to 10 Downing Street, told an interviewer this week that he favored Iran sanctions, in part because “I don’t want people to think I’m in any way soft on Iran.”

None of those leaders or nations, however, are promising military might to back up Trump’s position. And why would they? Trump’s position, such as it is, is self-contradicting and demonstrably weak; as The Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner notes, Trump is now asking for what the previous U.S. administration got; he has proven he’ll back down from a military confrontation at the eleventh hour; and he is increasingly making Iran’s nuclearization more likely, not less. “The Obama policy on Iran made sense, even if you disagreed with it,” he wrote. “The hawkish policy on Iran also made sense, even if you disagreed with it. The Trump administration is not pursuing a hawkish policy any more. It’s implementing a contradictory train wreck.”

Even that critique, blistering as it is, seems to give Trump too much credit for policy coherence. What is clear is that sanctions have strangled the Iranian economy and unsettled its domestic politics, increasing the current regime’s incentives to ditch the nuclear deal and vilify Trump. What will the president do in response? He will continue to tweet wild stabs at escalation and propose more double-secret sanctions, before de-escalating and repeating the cycle, because it is all he knows to do. For many of the people who surround him in the administration, brinksmanship may be a means to some other end. But for Trump, and many of the people who voted for him, pushing the world onto a dangerous brink is an end in itself.