Trump gets bogged down once again in an Iran war with no clear way out

In the days following the joint Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran on February 28, Donald Trump changed his rationale for the military operation at least a dozen times, while studiously avoiding calling it by its name. “War” is still a word he is reluctant to use. He also sent mixed messages about how long the campaign would last: first, he said it would be over in “a couple of days”; later, he suggested it would take no more than “four or five weeks.”

Trump has also declared more than 40 times that the war was on the verge of ending. Yet on Wednesday, 137 days after it began, not even he denies that the conflict has effectively started all over again.

The U.S. president is a man as impatient as he is volatile. As Regime Change, the revealing book by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about the inner workings of the White House during the first year of Trump’s return to office, makes clear, he enjoys launching new initiatives far more than following through on them and seeing them achieve their objectives. In the Middle East, he has found an adversary that has skillfully played its cards, and his temperament, to its advantage.

After securing a tentative ceasefire in mid-June, Trump considered the matter settled. Now he finds himself back at square one, once again focused on control of the Strait of Hormuz, but with an even less clearly defined strategy than in the conflict’s first phase. That phase cost an estimated 3,500 Iranian lives and $40 billion from U.S. coffers, according to calculations by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

He also has fewer pressure points left to use against Iran. If, as he has repeatedly insisted, Iran’s navy has been destroyed and its nuclear capabilities have been “obliterated” (a term that, according to Haberman and Swan, he instructed aides to use until it gained traction), what levers does the United States still have to pull in order to defeat its rival?

On Tuesday, Trump floated several ideas, seemingly unconcerned that some of them could later be cited as evidence of war crimes. “I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” the U.S. president said in an interview with Fox News. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

The Kharg Island option

The possibility of seizing Kharg Island, a strategic asset for Tehran, remains on the table. Trump floated the idea during the first phase of the war but abandoned it because of the risk of a dangerous escalation and because it would have meant breaking his promise not to deploy ground troops. Since the joint operation with Israel began, 13 U.S. service members have been killed.

Nor is Kharg the only Middle East policy reversal Trump has made. On Monday, he announced that, in addition to reimposing a blockade on Iranian shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, he would levy a 20% toll on the cargo of vessels from Gulf states using those waters. Less than 24 hours later, after speaking with several leaders from the region, he decided that was not such a good idea either.

Trump’s eagerness to declare the issue settled also resurfaced this week amid the renewed bombing campaign. “[The Strait of Hormuz] is open to ALL Ship traffic except for Iran — and that is because of their lying, violent, malicious leadership, which is taking them down the path of TOTAL DESTRUCTION,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

Shipping traffic data, however, contradict his triumphalist claims about the reopening of this crucial route to the Persian Gulf.

This time, time is working even more against him than it did during the first phase. On July 28, the war, pauses and all, will mark five months, a milestone Trump clearly did not anticipate, or at least not in the scenarios he has outlined during his many public appearances. Lately, he has taken to comparing the conflict to Vietnam, as he did again on Monday when a reporter asked whether this open-ended conflict in the Middle East had become “the new normal” for the United States. “Well, you know, we were in Vietnam 19 years,” replied Trump.

The consequences of a prolonged war abroad, precisely the kind he promised not to start during the campaign that returned him to the White House, are worrying members of his own party ahead of November’s elections, when control of Congress is at stake. If Trump fails to end the conflict before voters head to the polls while bombs are still falling on Iran, the outcome could be even worse than current surveys suggest. Polls point to a Democratic victory in the House of Representatives and indicate that a Democratic win in the Senate is also within reach.

Meanwhile, the Iranian regime, decapitated on the first day of the war by the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and subsequently reconstituted under a harder-line second tier of leaders, is making its own calculations. According to senior U.S. officials, Tehran’s strategy is to endure for as long as its economy, which was already in decline before the conflict began, can withstand the pressure.

“Iran believes the US will crack first under soaring oil prices and rattled markets,” writes Crisis Group analyst Robert Malley, a former Obama administration envoy to the region, in a post on X. “The U.S. believes Iran will crack first as its funds dwindle and its infrastructure is further degraded. At least one side is overplaying its hand. Most likely, both are.”

Like most Washington analysts, Malley attributes the resumption of hostilities to the ambiguous wording of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by both sides. In particular, he points to its fifth paragraph, which is so open to interpretation that Tehran can use it to claim authority over the Strait of Hormuz, while the United States can argue that it guarantees the unrestricted resumption of maritime traffic through the waterway.

Neither interpretation can be taken as settled. In its latest incarnation, the conflict appears to have no obvious exit strategy and has become almost entirely focused on a question that was not even at issue when Trump ordered the attack on his longtime rival: who controls a strategic strait vital to the global hydrocarbons trade.

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