With time running out for him, Trump searches for an exit from the war in Iran

In the war with Iran, the sense of urgency has shifted sides. In February, the United States and Israel judged it so urgent to start the conflict that they were prepared to launch a massive strike and kill the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, even amid negotiations; three months later it is Donald Trump who is trying to keep alive the talks that would definitively end the conflict, while Tehran remains firm. The U.S. president showed that attitude again on Monday when he ordered Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to halt the airstrikes the latter had announced on Beirut. The aim? To prevent the feared derailment of negotiations with the ayatollahs.

Much of that urgency stems from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. No one — probably not even Iran — believed the Revolutionary Guard could virtually seal the Strait shut. Yet it has: notwithstanding ups and downs, it is approaching 90 days of closure. The shutting of the maritime lane that typically carried one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied gas — and an even larger share of some key derivatives such as aviation fuel — has been Tehran’s strongest card to put pressure on the United States. It is also the reason that, three months on, the sense of urgency has shifted to the other side.

Although the worst energy consequences are being felt in Asia and Europe, Trump cannot afford to reach the November midterms — when the entire House of Representatives and more than a third of the Senate will be up for grabs and control of his legislative agenda will be at stake — with gasoline priced above four dollars a gallon. The precedents are clear: none of his predecessors has won a presidential or midterm election with the price of the nation’s key fuel above that threshold.

Other reasons add to the purely electoral ones. Trump launched this war convinced that it would end in a matter of days, as with the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or the strike against Iranian nuclear facilities a year earlier. The Republican leader has since used the word “boring” more than once in connection with this war. Polls showing that more than two-thirds of American voters oppose the conflict add fuel to his desire to bring it to an end once and for all.

There is another, military reason: the rapid depletion of ammunition used in the hostilities, especially the extremely costly interceptors for air-defense systems like THAAD and precision-guided missiles. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that replenishing those arsenals will take years — a window other adversaries might try to exploit.

It also matters that strategic stocks of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and jet fuel are being drawn down far faster than expected, increasing the urgency to reopen Hormuz. Reaching the summer with the strait still closed would be lethal. Conversely, the staying power of Iran — a country with martyrdom at the core of its culture — has been markedly greater than many analysts had anticipated, and greater than the White House itself predicted.

Last Thursday’s latest plot twist, when Iran denied that the draft agreement was only awaiting Trump’s signature, is further evidence that the hurry to end the conflict has switched sides in recent weeks. So too are Trump’s reported outbursts on Monday during a call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the digital outlet Axios.

In early April, when the U.S. announced its own blockade of Hormuz, Tehran seemed much keener to reach an understanding given the stranglehold its economy would face, but now it is now Washington that appears far more anxious for a deal to unblock the strait. Although Iran’s exports have fallen, most analysts agree it is a mistake to underestimate the resilience of a country that has lived under sanctions for decades.

For Israel, the offensive in Lebanon is a kind of two-for-one: the thinking was, if it does not affect the Iran–U.S. talks, fine — because that means ‘freedom of action’ (in Israeli military parlance) and that Hezbollah has been abandoned by Tehran, its main supplier of weapons and economic backer. If, on the other hand, it does impact the negotiations, even better, since Netanyahu wants the war with Iran to resume and to go after the regime and civilian installations until its collapse.

For all these reasons, Iran achieved an important victory in Monday’s episode: it linked the fate of the two ceasefires (the Lebanese one and the global one) and prompted Trump to act in the same direction, publicly showing an overpowering urgency to bring the Islamic Republic back to the negotiating table.

Israel had done everything possible to separate the two truces. In April it launched a brutal offensive in Lebanon to make clear, through more than 300 dead, that any agreement between Iran and the United States lay outside its purview. It was a fairly successful strategy: Trump treated it that way at the time.

But Tehran insisted, so as not to leave its ally Hezbollah completely stranded, and Trump ended up forcing a ceasefire in Lebanon. But Netanyahu and Washington agreed on a formula to empty it of substance — as they did in Gaza: Israel continued bombing the south and the Beqaa Valley and demolishing entire villages (even hiring private contractors it pays per demolished house). Hezbollah, meanwhile, has continued launching projectiles daily, especially drones against the soldiers occupying Lebanon, killing about a dozen. The U.S. only asked that Beirut be left out of the picture, except for targeted killings of Hezbollah leaders.

Netanyahu then ordered troops northward last week, escalating the conflict with Washington’s acquiescence. But the announcement that Beirut would be bombed was the last straw for Iran, causing it to abandon the position it had been adopting (that defending Hezbollah was not worth endangering the truce with the U.S.) and to relink the fate of both: it announced it was abandoning negotiations with the U.S. because of the offensive in Lebanon.

Trump phoned Netanyahu. The conversation, according to the news site Axios, was full of insults: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked. ‘You’re fucking crazy. If it weren’t for me you’d be in prison. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now, even in Israel.’

After that conversation the Republican rushed to social media to proclaim that talks with Iran were advancing “full steam ahead.” Though Trump boasts of being in no hurry to reach an agreement with Tehran, he wants to be able to announce as soon as possible a deal around the memorandum of understanding both adversaries are discussing, then use the 60 days that document envisages to address the thorniest issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program, and finally declare the crisis closed — even if a definitive agreement is never reached and those issues might trigger a new conflict in the future.

‘Sixty days is an extremely ambitious timetable to narrow positions on some of those topics,’ said Ali Vaez, an analyst at the think tank International Crisis Group, in a recent videoconference. ‘This could become one of those provisional deals that never turns into a definitive one, as in Gaza. But if you compare it with the alternative — returning to a conflict that could easily escalate and get out of control, or leaving things as they are — which could cost more lives globally, it is a step forward.’

The other lesson of this war is that the world economy’s capacity to withstand a closure of Hormuz — for which there is no precedent — is considerably greater than assumed. Fuel shortages are taking a toll, especially in Asia, where several countries have been forced to ration supplies, but the worst predictions have not materialized. Reserves are falling fast, yes, but the world’s ability to adapt has been greater than forecast.

The International Energy Agency warned in mid-April that Europe had only six weeks of jet fuel left, yet seven weeks have now passed, planes are still flying and costs have even fallen. Largely because refineries on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to redirect output toward that specific fuel, reducing production of less urgent products (such as gasoline and even diesel). Reserves are being consumed at record pace, but the apocalypse has once again disappointed its prophets — provided Hormuz does not remain closed into the summer. That remains the limit.

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