Trump promised a short Iran war. Six months later, he has few good options.
Iran’s regime has endured, Trump’s standing at home has fallen, Hormuz remains largely closed and U.S. weapons stocks are depleted.
The day after President Donald Trump launched the war in Iran on Feb. 28, he said the fight could last four to five weeks. Six months later, there is little to suggest the end is near.
The Iran war has become a major challenge to Trump’s second term, buffeting his standing with voters at home and eroding the U.S. position in the Middle East. And
the president’s ability to shape the outcome appears to be severely constrained after Iranian leaders discovered that they could withstand intense bombardment and slowly degrade the world’s most powerful military with a cheap combination of mines and drones.
Now Trump needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while operating within his own red lines: His fierce aversion to becoming a 21st-century Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Great Depression, limits the economic moves available to him. His decision, at least so far, to hold back from the riskiest and most extreme military moves against Iran similarly limits his war options.
“We are in an absolutely weaker position, and I don’t know that there’s any redemption for it,” said Suzanne Maloney, an expert on U.S.-Iran relations at the Brookings Institution. The war “is part of a larger set of dynamics that have been unleashed by this administration that have eroded U.S. credibility and capabilities in the Middle East, but also with respect to other adversaries in other theaters.”
Trump boasted Thursday of the soaring stock market and said that Tehran was suffering from a U.S. naval blockade and a tightening sanctions campaign, both of which have put pressure on its economy.
He downplayed the war’s impact on the flow of oil through the strait, which before Feb. 28 carried more than a fifth of global supplies.
“Iran is right now, they’re not paying their troops. They’re in deep trouble,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as he signed an order that directed U.S. government agencies to change the name they use for Lake Ontario to
Lake America.
“They have very little capacity. Last night, we took 24 boats through the strait. We’re taking them through all the time,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we’re finished with the military, but we are, the strait is open.”
More than 100 ships traversed the Strait of Hormuz on average every day before the war. Just five went through on one day this week, according to Kpler, a commodities and shipping tracker. U.S. officials say the true number is higher because some ships have been turning off their transponders to avoid getting hit by Iran, but oil supplies have remained tight and prices have stayed well above pre-war levels.
The president and his allies say they have dealt a historic blow to Iran’s military and its ability to construct a nuclear weapon. They point to the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the intense first phase of the war that destroyed much of Iran’s armed forces.
A residential building in Tehran damaged in a U.S.-Israeli strike in March remains in ruins. (Vahid Salemi/AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
But half a year into a war that Trump said he launched to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon and oppressing its people, the country’s hardline regime appears firmly entrenched, and it is still able to launch attacks against U.S. bases and allies.
Those allies and foes alike are contending with the severe depletion of the Pentagon’s arsenal. And as the midterm elections loom, some Trump voters who cheered the president’s 2024 campaign pledge that he would steer clear of Middle East wars are questioning how much longer they’ll have to pay higher prices at the gas station.
Approval of Trump’s handling of the war has been dropping as prices for gasoline and other goods remain elevated. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put Trump’s approval at 33 percent. The pollsters found that support for the war has been dropping among Republicans, although approval for the action within his party remains 69 percent.
Trump has been especially sensitive to
investors’ reaction to his moves on Iran. In June, just after he signed an interim peace deal with Tehran that later fell apart, he said “every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.”
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” he said, explaining his decision to sign the deal.
Those economic concerns appear to have limited the administration’s willingness to push against Tehran economically. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week
declared an “economic D-Day” against Iran, telling countries they risked the wrath of U.S. sanctions if they continued doing business there.
In the same breath, he took some of the sting out of the threats by saying he wasn’t imposing sanctions immediately, because “why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”
Iranians likely took notice, said Richard Nephew, who helped devise the sanctions regime during the Obama administration ahead of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
“It clearly sent a signal to the Iranians that there is a limit to how far we’re going to be prepared to act,” Nephew said.
Economic pressure remains an important tool, he said — but the war may be demonstrating the limits of both economic and military pressure.
“What worries me is whether or not we have now also, in addition, learned the limits to how far military coercion can push, and that actually the Iranian response is going to be, ‘We can handle all of this.’ In which case, it’s not just the the leverage on the economy that we’ve lost. We’ve lost leverage across the board,” Nephew said.
A pro-government demonstrator at a rally on Wednesday in Tehran. (Vahid Salemi/Ap Photo/Vahid Salemi)
The war is reverberating far beyond the Middle East. Fresh U.S. intelligence indicates that the Kremlin sees the United States as weakened by the Iran war. Russian President Vladimir Putin may see that as an opportunity to escalate action against American interests and allies in Europe, the assessments say, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The intelligence assessments preceded CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s Tuesday trip to Moscow, where according to one of the people, he warned his Russian counterpart not to escalate against Ukraine, saying that such a move would backfire. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. The CIA has not commented on the subject of the conversations, and Trump said Thursday that Putin is “not going to be attacking a NATO territory.”
The Post has previously reported that the U.S. has
lost roughly a quarter of its Reaper drones, which cost between $30 million and $50 million each. They are used for surveillance and targeting. Stocks of sophisticated Patriot anti-missile defense systems, which are used to protect Israel, Ukraine and U.S. bases around the world, are also severely depleted.
The shortages have led some other countries to be more cautious about their aid for Ukraine and Arab allies, as they see a growing need to preserve a larger arsenal for their own defense in case the U.S. is less able to help them. Ukraine has sought Patriot batteries from Greece, for instance, but Athens has recently declined, instead relocating a system to the island of Crete, near a U.S. base there, following threats from Iran.
In the Persian Gulf region, where the U.S. has long maintained a robust presence, the Pentagon is assessing whether to
pull back some U.S. forces rather than rebuild all of its damaged bases.
Washington’s allies “are going to hedge,” said Nate Swanson, who was the Iran director on the National Security Council during the Biden administration and continued into the first half year of the Trump administration.
The U.S. presence on their soil “has been a negative for these countries” over the last six months, Swanson said.
“It’s been a reason of justification for being attacked, and there wasn’t much we could do to defend that,” he said. “We are not going to be the sole dominant presence in the Middle East in the way we were before.”
