Inside Washington, it was assumed that Donald Trump would try to change the conversation after his debilitating diplomatic performance with Vladimir Putin last week. “We all knew that something would come. It was just a matter of what and how quickly,” one Trump administration official told me. Shortly before midnight on Sunday, the president delivered—issuing a tweet that swiftly rebooted the news cycle. “To Iranian President Rouhani,” it began, imitating the formal style of a letter. The bloodcurdling message that followed was spelled out with all capitalized letters. “Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence and death!” The note closed with an admonishment in Trump’s casual, oddly clipped diction. “Be cautious!”

The inciting event for Trump’s diatribe appeared to be an address by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who had given a speech earlier in the day warning Americans that “peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars”—relatively tame oratory by the standards of Tehran’s hard-line leadership, but sufficient to trigger a response from a president in need of a new foil. “I think the outburst was really due to Rohani’s speech hitting him the wrong way,” speculated one State Department official, noting that there didn’t appear to be “much of a plan behind the threats.” More likely, the Trump staffer told me, recalling the president’s pattern of acting out while under stress, Trump was simply “looking for the next opportunity” to distract from Russia. When Rouhani gave him an opening, this person said, “It was off to the races.”

An exasperated press corps was firmly reproached by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday. “The president has the ability—unlike a lot of those in the media—to actually focus on more than one issue at a time,” she told reporters from under a rain-soaked umbrella outside the White House. But one would be hard-pressed not to see Trump’s tweet as a first step to engineer a breakthrough on Iran that could supplant the negative headlines on Russia and offer a new diplomatic story line at a time when negotiations with North Korea appear to have stalled. And to a degree, it worked. “It’s surely shifted the focus away from Helsinki,” admitted a former high-ranking State Department official. “Also it is tough talk which, if you are on the distraction theme, counters any talk that he wasn’t tough enough with the Russians.”

If Trump’s “tough talk” with Tehran is reminiscent of his threats to rain down “fire and fury” on Pyongyang, the symmetry is by design. “In his mind, North Korea was a big success, mainly because he thinks it was a historic kind of summit, that he was able to do and he was able to do what no other American president was able to do . . . I think in his mind, replicating that with Iran now would be huge,” the administration official told me. “Not to mention, he always likes to beat Obama and one-up Obama, and for him to undo Obama’s deal and then try a similar version of a maximum-pressure campaign with Iran leading to a similar result would be huge in his mind because then he essentially one-upped Obama.” On Tuesday, while speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 119th annual convention in Kansas City, Trump said he was “ready to make a deal” with Iran.

For many foreign-policy experts, however, the situation in Iran is totally unlike that with Kim Jong Un—and could be more likely to escalate. To Trump, a “rogue nuclear bearing regime is kind of a rogue nuclear bearing regime,” the current administration official noted. “I don’t think that he is going to parse through the intricacies.” But Iran, a strategic petro-state with a sprawling network of influence throughout the Middle East, understands better than most how to thrive in the shadows. “Iran is a multi-dimensional threat to its neighborhood and beyond in a destabilizing way that I think Kim Jong un could only dream about,” explained Barbara Leaf, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and once headed the Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department. “Iran is famously involved in a long game, but that is what it requires and this is where I think the administration just falls short.”

Worse, the current leadership in Washington doesn’t seem to care. Unlike with North Korea, where there was little appetite for nuclear war in East Asia, the Republican Party is brimming with hard-liners hungry for regime change in Iran. Within Trump’s immediate orbit, Defense Secretary James Mattis remains the only adviser to have fought to preserve the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Adviser John Bolton, meanwhile, are all infamously hawkish on Iran. Bolton, who wrote a 2015 op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” was particularly ecstatic. In a rare statement on Monday, Bolton—who was markedly silent after the Helsinki summit—crowed that President Trump had assured him “that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.”

Outside of the neoconservative bubble, meanwhile, fear and consternation are rising. “The decision to threaten war is the most serious a leader can undertake,” said Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador who served Bill Clinton and in both Bush administrations. “Trump has an alternative—diplomacy.” The threat of war, he added, “was cynical and unnecessary, will confuse the public and needlessly stoke conflict.” John Glaser, the director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, described Trump’s tweet as “the primal scream of a callow president ‘punching back’ at a rather mild—and defensive—statement” from Iran. “I think the administration is searching in vain for a coherent policy,” he told me. “The president himself is out of his element and in no position—intellectually speaking—to develop a strategy.”

Trump’s efforts to court the exiled Iranian community in the United States are similarly schizophrenic, these people said. “The administration says it supports the Iranian people, but it puts them under the travel ban,” a former National Security Council official who worked on Iran policy, told me. “It says it wants allies to join us in pressuring Iran, but it unilaterally pulls out of the [Iran deal] against our allies’ wishes. It advocates for what essentially amounts to regime change, but its actions are actually encouraging factions in Iran to act more united.” Glaser dismissed Secretary Pompeo’s outreach to Iranians in Los Angeles last weekend as “laughably disingenuous.”

Insiders doubt that another glossy, high-profile summit can fix the problem, especially as relations with North Korea grow increasingly strained. “Folks will point to North Korea as an example where this kind of rhetoric led to talks, but given the lack of substantive progress on that front, that's not an example that should give anyone reassurance,” the former N.S.C. official told me. “To suggest that the outcome they achieved in Singapore, a 1.5 page document that largely repeated previous promises, is something that we should aspire to after we negotiated a comprehensive and detailed agreement is absolutely backward. Giving the administration credit for de-escalating a situation they escalated in the first place is counterproductive at best, ignorant at worst.”

The worst case, these people say, is a world in which Trump ultimately triggers a nuclear-arms race across the region. “They can bluster all they want to distract from Trump’s legal problems, but at the end of the day this is heading toward Iran joining North Korea as a nuclear-armed state,” said Jeffrey Lewis the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury College. As for the Iranian government, Lewis sarcastically suggested that Supreme leader Ali Khamenei borrow a stratagem from Kim’s playbook, and “send Trump a letter in a REALLY BIG envelope.”