Sometimes you need to write about something you’re pretty sure isn’t going to happen.

That thing is war with Iran, which Donald Trump doesn’t want, and which he will probably avoid. But since the president’s foreign policy is making war more likely, it’s worth saying it would be a terrible idea.

There is a coherence to the Trump foreign policy, even if it’s an accidental synthesis of a chaotic White House’s competing impulses. Recent American presidents have been overly optimistic about democratic transformation, embracing utopian hopes in the Islamic world and naively accommodating the rise of China. So what is needed instead is a retrenchment in the greater Middle East, an abandonment of occupations and nation-building efforts and a return to kill-your-enemies, back-your-friends realpolitik, which in turn will make it easier to pivot to a more confrontational approach with Beijing.

In practice, this has included backing out (or trying to) from the Bush-era military commitment to Afghanistan and jettisoning the Obama-era effort to woo Iran into détente. The White House’s hard line toward Tehran reflects a belief that the mullahs’ enmity is an ineradicable fact and that it’s better to back our Sunni and Israeli allies rather than reaching for an unlikely realignment.

But the coherence of this approach has been breaking down as the Trump administration has moved into its “maximum pressure” phase of sanctions against Tehran. If you impose maximum pressure on a regional power you are no longer trying to maintain a Middle Eastern status quo while pivoting to Asia. Instead, you’re effectively returning to the last two administration’s more dramatic Middle East ambitions: You are assuming either that some great diplomatic coup awaits or that your pressure will lead to regime change.

I suspect that Trump is making the first assumption, imagining all this pressure as a prelude to a dramatic deal, while John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are making the second one, imagining the Iranian regime suddenly buckling like the Soviet Union in 1991.

But whatever the core assumption, the maximalist approach inevitably increases the risk of war. If the White House is wrong about the Iranian regime’s willingness to make more concessions, then they’re turning a dial that can produce only two policy responses: endurance or armed reaction. And if they’re right that regime change is a possibility, then the regime they’re trying to change will become more likely to lash out the closer it gets to its own breaking point.

Either way, there is nothing about the current situation in the Middle East, or globally, that makes the chance of war with Iran worth taking – as hawks as well as doves concede.

The U.S. can treat Iran as an enemy without going all in for brinkmanship; it can leave the nuclear deal without taking steps that make a conventional war more immediately likely.

Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric made a case against a hawkish Republican foreign policy consensus that seemingly wanted to confront all our enemies, at once, everywhere. The president is now in the middle of a trade war with China that by his own logic is far more important to long-term U.S. interests than some immediate breakthrough or regime breakdown in Tehran. So he should return to that campaign-season wisdom, and to the maxim it suggested: Whenever possible, one war a time.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.