Trump’s predicament mirrors that of former President Barack Obama’s drawing of a “red line” in Syria back in 2012.

At the time, Obama declared that former Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s possible use of chemical weapons during the then-ongoing Syrian civil war would yield a military response from the U.S. However, just one year later, Obama chose not to respond to Assad’s killing of more than 1,000 Syrians with sarin gas with military action. That decision has been widely attributed to the rise of ISIS, where rebel forces gained public support by offering protection from future attacks from the Assad regime.

Fast forward 12 years, and Trump finds himself in a similar situation. The president has repeatedly promised Iranians protesting the Khamenei regime that “help is on the way,” after the Islamic Republic of Iran responded to nationwide demonstrations by killing thousands of its own citizens.

Trump and his national security advisers have been reviewing military options against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government in recent days, signaling that the president is in fact seriously considering a sequel to the airstrikes he launched on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities last summer.

But on Wednesday, the president indicated a possible de-escalation while speaking in the Oval Office, telling reporters that the U.S. had determined that the “killing in Iran is stopping,” based on statements given to the administration by Iranian government officials.

Averting another foreign military operation could prove politically advantageous for the president. A Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday found 70% opposition to new American strikes against Iranian targets, with just 18% voicing support for the possible operation.

But Edmund Fitton-Brown, the former British ambassador to Yemen and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that Trump “will have to follow through or take that same sort of reputational hit that President Obama took over Syria.”

“If you don’t constrain your own options, then you run the risk of affecting your own credibility,” he said. “We’ve got, on the record, both his threat to the Iranian regime, but also his direct encouragement to the Iranian people to step up their protests. And so, he’ll now have to live with that in one way or another.”

Fitton-Brown noted that, unlike Trump’s recent intervention in Venezuela, which didn’t require the U.S. to “break and own” the Latin country, intervening in Iran would likely require significant nation-building efforts from the U.S. and its allies, which would inevitably infuriate the isolationist wing of the president’s own base.

“The notion that you could talk to reformists within the Islamic Republic about some kind of change, short of the complete overthrow of the Islamic Republic, that is complete chimera. It does not exist,” he said. “You either have Iran in all of its current horror as an enemy, or you overthrow the entire Islamic Republic, and you then look at the remaking of Iran as a different kind of country with all the risks that that entails.”

“It’s cliched, but you break it, you own it. That’s not to say that the U.S. couldn’t walk away from it, but then there’s the issue of credibility with the Gulf States if it all goes horribly wrong and we see some sort of new virulent strain of Iranian nationalism that is just as aggressive against Arabian Gulf States as the Islamic Republic has been,” Fitton-Brown said.

Following Trump’s comments Wednesday afternoon, the president declined to clarify if he is still considering military action against Tehran.

“We’re going to watch and see what the process is, but we were given a very good — very good statement by people that are aware of what’s going on,” he responded when asked about the potential for strikes in the future.

A White House official added to the Washington Examiner, “All options are at President Trump’s disposal to address the situation in Iran.”

“The president listens to a host of opinions on any given issue, but ultimately makes the decision he feels is best,” the official said in a statement. “He demonstrated with Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Absolute Resolve that he means what he says.”

Two Trumpworld insiders, both of whom fall firmly into the isolationist camp, indicated to the Washington Examiner that they believe Trump will order airstrikes on strategic targets, including Iran’s military and communications infrastructure.

“I feel for the people of Iran. I really do, but the last thing the U.S. needs right now is getting into Iraq 2.0,” one insider, a former Trump-White House official, stated. “But he already gave the ayatollah the hezzy hey last summer, and I think what you saw in the Oval [Wednesday] was more of the same.”

The second insider, a prominent voice in conservative media, gave a less colorful prediction but agreed that airstrikes seemed to be on the horizon.

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“I’d guess he hits them soon. Too much forward momentum at this point,” the insider said. “It’s all so shocking.”