Whether the target has been North Korea, with which warnings of “fire and fury” have become little more than an exchange of “beautiful” letters between Trump and Kim Jong Un; or Venezuela, where the threat of “all options” has failed to upset the status quo, the president has blinked. With Iran, the dispatch of a US aircraft carrier and a bomber task force, as well as reported plans to deploy 120,000 troops, were quickly followed by Trump’s insistence that he only wants to talk to Iranian leaders.

Trump has said there is no inconsistency in his administration’s messaging but that the image of incoherence can be useful. “At least Iran doesn’t know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!” he tweeted Friday. But as he moves more deeply into the second half of his term with major foreign policy issues unresolved, Trump’s credibility has suffered, and his options have narrowed.

“If you make threats and then people decide you aren’t going to follow through, if you’re looking for the reaction and you stop getting the reaction, the options are either to make larger threats, or to stop going down that road at all,” said Jon Alterman, Middle East Program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Credibility is a hard thing for a president to maintain,” Alterman said.