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Such incomprehension means Trump’s pattern of ultimately unfulfilled blood-curdling threats is likely to continue, according to Boroujerdi. Mehrzad Boroujerdi , vice-provost and a political scientist at Missouri Science and Technology University, believes the US president’s failure to understand the individuals leading Iran’s authoritarian Islamic system has misled him into a dead end of ineffective and counterproductive threats. “One of the most terrible mistakes that Trump made was invoking this type of a language,” said Boroujerdi, who argued that regimes who come into being through mass revolutions such as the one in 1979 that swept Iranian revolutionaries to power are much harder to topple than other governments. “First, these are not people who are going to bend the knee,” he said. “Second, you have just killed the top of their leadership (including the former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ). Despite negotiations between Iran and Oman over shipping in the strait of Hormuz, no deal has thus far materialized, and the strategically vital waterway – conduit to a fifth of the world’s oil supply before the war – remains closed.