If words won wars, Donald Trump’s Iran conflict would have ended long ago.
But the president still can’t find a way out of a war meant to last no more than a month and a half that is now grinding into its 10th week.
Trump is ensnared by two traps of his own making — one geopolitical and the other domestic. Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and refusal to fold mean he can’t definitively end the war at an acceptable military price.
And as the conflict drags on, its political impact at home further narrows his options. With an approval rating in the 30s, gas prices averaging over $4.50 a gallon and public opposition to the war rising, he’s got no political space to continue waging it.
So Trump is stuck — a reality that helps explain his incessantly upbeat claims of progress in peace talks and tendency to announce or change military strategies with no warning.
The latest hope is a one-page memo now being negotiated with the two countries and third-party mediator Pakistan, CNN has reported. The document would end the war and start a 30-day clock to resolve sticking points.
This might suit Trump’s taste for simplicity. But a one-pager, even if it is agreed upon, seems insufficient to finally solve a near half-century of US issues with Tehran — including intricate nuclear negotiations and its missile and proxy terror programs.
Then there are Iran’s demands for huge sanctions relief to revive its economy and its desire to profit from the passage of oil and gas tankers through a strait it has turned into a major strategic advantage.
Iran is expected to hand its responses to the US plan to Pakistani mediators on Thursday. Some sources said that current negotiations are the closest the two sides have come to ending the war. It is to be hoped that optimism is justified, since the conflict’s human and economic costs are dire and growing.
But Trump has claimed multiple times in recent weeks that a “deal” was about to come together and that Tehran had agreed to all his demands — only for the reality of an unyielding US foe to reassert itself.
From Washington, this war has been plagued by strategic confusion, sudden shifts and a fogginess about how it ends. The trend is getting worse.
In one example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned almost in passing Tuesday that the war — “Operation Epic Fury” — was over. He then spent nearly an hour pushing another operation conjured up hours before by Trump in an attempt to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But within a few hours, “Project Freedom” was paused after shepherding only a few vessels to safety. Trump said he was trying to boost peace talks. But the rapid adoption and abandonment of the latest US approach hardly sent a message of US resolve.
The short-lived Project Freedom was Trump’s latest deployment of what Iran expert Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft called a “silver bullet” strategy — a belief that one decisive action can make Iran bend.
First, the US and Israeli bombing campaign assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Next up was a fearsome bombing campaign against military targets; then, a blockade of Iranian ships and ports. Then “Project Freedom” came and — within a few hours — went away.
But none of these sudden moves succeeded in dislodging Iran’s regime after a new layer of extremists slotted into the spots of their martyred superiors. There is no sign of a splintering of the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that might presage regime collapse. In a war that Iran’s brutal rulers see as existential for their radical Islamic revolution, survival equals a kind of victory.
Anyone hoping for clarity of thought from the commander in chief or evidence of a coherent endgame will have been disappointed by his remarks at the White House on Wednesday to a group of military mothers.
Trump was vague and blasé, playing down the scale of a complex military campaign involving thousands of US personnel, a massive military footprint and billions of dollars.
“We’re in — I call it a skirmish because that’s what it is, it’s a skirmish. And we’re doing unbelievably well, as we did in Venezuela, where it was rapid, over in one day,” Trump said. “And we’re doing pretty much equally as well, I would say — larger, but we’re doing very well in Iran. It’s going very smoothly, and we’ll see what happens. They want to make a deal, they want to negotiate.”
It is extraordinary that nearly 70 days into the war, the president has reverted to comparing it to the hourslong lightning raid that seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Flexibility and improvisation can be strengths in a president. But Trump’s remarks, verging on denial and obfuscation, did not sound like those of a leader who knows how to get out of this war.
Even before it ends, this war is destined to be another lesson in how smaller, outgunned countries can defy superpowers with asymmetric warfare.
It is likely that administration claims to have destroyed Iran’s naval and air forces and to have inflicted severe losses on its military industrial establishment are backed up by evidence. Trump’s unwillingness to deploy tens of thousands of ground troops — a wise act of self-restraint given America’s recent history — meant that an unequivocal military victory was always out of reach.
But the limitations on US operations, combined with Iran’s discovery of the power of its seizure of the strait — which has inflicted severe pain on global economies, and consequent political pressure on Trump — have muddied the battlefield.
“The whole evolution of the conflict so far underscores the enormous gap between America’s operational capability capacity, which is substantial, and the difficulty in bringing a kind of strategic result on terms most people would judge as a success,” said Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
That disconnect explains Trump’s inability to enforce a swift and decisive US strategic victory on terms mentioned by officials at the outset of the war to match the operational one achieved by the military.
There has been no uprising by Iranians against their tyrannical rulers. Iran has not yet verifiably renounced its aspirations to have a nuclear program or agreed to hand over its stocks of highly enriched uranium. There are no guarantees that the IRGC will not try to rebuild its proxy networks in Lebanon or Gaza.
As Anja Manuel, executive director of the Aspen Security Forum, said to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, “This conflict is not over.”
Manuel, a State Department official in the George W. Bush administration, added: “You can change the name of the operation, you can declare the ceasefire on or off, but what remains the case is the Straits of Hormuz is closed. We are blocking Iranian tankers, oil is sky-high, American companies are suffering and this conflict is nowhere near resolved.”
Weaknesses in the US negotiating position, meanwhile, were laid bare, perhaps inadvertently, by Rubio in the White House Briefing Room on Tuesday, even as he amplified Trump’s line that the US “holds all the cards” and insisted the US naval blockade would eventually bring Iran to its knees.
The secretary of state said the US “preference” was for the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened: “Anyone can use it. No mines in the water. Nobody paying tolls. That’s what we have to get back to, and that’s the goal here.”
But the strait was open before the war started, and Iran has now discovered that it can in fact be used as a major tool of deterrence. That the vital waterway is now at the center of negotiations between the US and Iran underscores how the strategic balance of the war has tilted in Tehran’s direction.
For the sake of US service personnel in harm’s way, Iran’s defenseless civilians, Americans vexed by high gas prices and people around the world hurt economically by Trump’s war, a swift resolution is vital.
But the president’s imprecision; his apparent wish-casting about staggering diplomatic breakthroughs; and the idea that a one-page memo could hold the key to peace raise new doubts about the administration’s seriousness and capacity.
