Trump Has Lost His War on Iran--Here's Why
By my count, Donald Trump has threatened Iran’s leaders with dire consequences seven times if they failed to open the Strait of Hormuz—closed since the February 28 Israeli-US attack. On one occasion, April 7, Trump went so far as to threaten to erase Iran’s civilization by 8:00 pm that day unless Tehran relented. Iran’s leaders remained unmoved, and on April 21 Trump said he’d give them more time to come up with a “unified proposal”—but didn’t set a time limit. Meanwhile, the Strait remains blocked. Iran’s negotiators rejected the terms JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff presented at the April 11–12 Islamabad talks—terms that treated Iran as a defeated country. As for the much-anticipated second round of the Islamabad negotiations—which were expected to start on April 21 or 22—Iran didn’t send a delegation, even as press reports indicated Vance was preparing to depart.
On each occasion that he pulled back, Trump sought to salvage his carefully-cultivated image as a tough guy who never backs down—White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell”—by saying that Pakistan, the mediator, had appealed to him to extend his deadlines so that talks could continue, or that behind-the-scenes exchanges were going well and needed more time to bear fruit. No serious person believed these explanations. It was evident that the president bluffed repeatedly and that Tehran remained unmoved. The tell was Trump’s heated social media posts, whose fury gave off a King Lear vibe.
The War Has Become a Political Liability
This much is clear: Trump desperately wants to end this war, which imperils the one thing he does care about: political power. According to the respected pollster Nate Silver, the president’s approval rating had sunk to 38.9 percent as of April 22—a drop of 10 points since the war began. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of his job performance also rose by 10 points, to 57.5 percent. Other opinion surveys show that the two numbers are even worse for Trump. An AP-NORC poll, for example, found that more than two-thirds of the public disapproved of his performance. As for the war, according to Silver’s numbers, 54.2 percent of Americans opposed it on April 22—up from 47 percent on March 1.
Polls like this have caused panic among GOP candidates gearing up for midterms, though none has been willing to publicly criticize the president for starting the war or mismanaging it. The betting among pundits has been that the Democrats would take control of the House in November, but not the Senate. Now, even the Senate seems to be in play. If the GOP loses both houses of Congress, Trump’s wings won’t just be clipped; he won’t have any to speak of—and the push for releasing the Epstein files and for investigating corruption and incompetence in the executive branch will become stronger than ever before.
Wars are waged at the front, but in democracies especially, they can’t be sustained if public support collapses—precisely what’s happening to Trump’s war. For all his bravado about Iran “begging for a deal” and having nothing left to fight with, Trump now realizes that his expectations for a quick victory—fed perhaps by his success in Venezuela and Benjamin Netanyahu’s cheerleading—were misplaced and that he is trapped in a quagmire.
The Economic Consequences Have Been Disastrous
The economic fallout of the war, already bad, is getting worse. Take oil prices. Benchmark Brent crude has again crossed the $100/barrel mark as of today (April 22). But that figure refers to “paper oil,” the price buyers are willing to lock in now for future delivery. “Physical oil”—what’s available for immediate purchase—sells for $30–40/barrel more, and that is the price that matters to consumers. To put this in everyday terms, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $4.02 on Wednesday compared with $2.94 just before the war began—a 37.9 percent increase.
The bad news for Trump—and more so for average Americans—is that things will get worse if the war reignites because countries with deep pockets—like China, Japan, and South Korea—will resort to panic-buying and hoarding, and will send tankers to buy oil from Canada. Unlike the Persian Gulf countries, Canada is producing more and now provides 61 percent of American oil imports—more than seven times the volume the US buys from Mexico, the next biggest supplier. But Canada lacks the capacity to rapidly produce more oil to keep up with increasing demand or to offset the 20 million barrels/day of oil that is missing from the global market because of the war.
That’s not the extent of it. The price of several other critical commodities, of which between 20 percent and 40 percent flow through the Strait of Hormuz, has also increased.
Helium, essential for semiconductor production among other things, now costs at least 50 percentmore—unsurprising because Qatar provided one-third of global supply, as a byproduct of its LNG production, and the AI revolution has accelerated demand.
Fertilizer prices have nearly doubled following the stoppage of urea, ammonia, and sulfur flows from the Persian Gulf, which accounts for about a third of global supply of each.
Average diesel prices are now $5.53 per gallon—up by $1.70 since the start of the war. That’s bad news for individual and retail consumers alike: 65 percentof all freight by weight in the US moves by truck, and for certain goods—motor vehicles, machinery, and mixed freight, including food—the share approaches 80 percent or higher.
Then there’s the surge in jet fuel prices. One gallon cost $2.50 on the day the war began; by April 2, it had soared to $4.88/gallon, and though it dropped to $3.87/gallon on April 20, that still amounted to a 55 percent increase. The result: a spate of flight cancellations and suspensions worldwide (20,000 by Lufthansa alone) and an increase in airline fares—by 24 percent on average—as well as air freight costs, which had nearly doubled by April 1. (As an aside: while these cost increases taken together will create hardship for Americans, they will be devastating for the world’s poorest countries.)
Opinion polls show increasing anxiety over the economy. According to an April 16-21 AP-NORC survey, only 30 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s management of the economy, compared to 38 percent in March. He has dismissed these findings as fake, even as he has approved of past results that favor him.
Trump’s Military Miscalculations
Trump’s worst military mistake—one that American presidents made in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Soviet leaders in Afghanistan, and Vladimir Putin in Ukraine—was to assume that a massive preponderance in military power would guarantee rapid success. It did to this extent: Satellite imageryconfirms that Iran has suffered severe economic losses: $270 billion in total, according to its leaders, including 7,645 buildings damaged or destroyed. Even if that estimate is inflated, even losses of half that value would require years, perhaps decades, of reconstruction.
That the US could destroy large parts of Iran was never in doubt. The important point is that the destruction hasn’t translated into a strategic victory defined as success in compelling Iran’s rulers to do Trump’s bidding. Despite Trump’s claim to have carried out “regime change,” the institutions of the Islamic Republic remain intact. Yes, Israel and the United States killed scores of Iran’s senior civilian and military leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—but they have been replaced by hardliners who show no willingness to negotiate, let alone capitulate. Seen thus, America’s huge firepower advantage has proved to be counterproductive.
Moreover, though there’s no doubt that millions of Iranians despise their government—note their intermittent mass rebellions—on account of its repressiveness and economic failures (the latter made worse by crippling American sanctions), the revolution from below that Trump and Netanyahu had counted on didn’t happen. Perhaps Iranians feared that the state would treat wartime revolts with even less mercy. Perhaps they were alienated by the colossal destruction the US and Israel inflicted on their country (including its universities, schools, hospitals, libraries, bridges, and stations), which made a war that was supposed to be aimed at the Iranian state seem like one waged against the Iranian people. How else could they have viewed Trump’s threat to eviscerate their civilization, which is more than 4,000 years old? Perhaps they’ve been too busy staying alive amidst the Israeli-US bombing and missile strikes. Whatever the reason, the Iranian state hasn’t succumbed to external force or internal rebellion.
Another mistake Trump made was to forget that in war the adversary also has agency—and will therefore have its own strategy. Iran’s leaders understood that they could never match the US in vertical escalation, namely the ability to pile on more and more military pressure. They therefore fell back on their comparative advantage, horizontal escalation. They extended the war across the Persian Gulf region—shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, relentlessly attacking the ports, refineries, and LNG installations of the US-aligned Gulf monarchies with missiles and drones, and damaging American military bases and equipment. Israel and the US started running low on interceptors, but predictions made as early as the beginning of March that Iran would soon exhaust its arsenal of drones and missiles proved wrong. Though Trump insists that Iran’s entire navy has been sunk, its air force destroyed, and its air defenses shattered, there’s good reason to doubt each of these assertions—based on what American officials themselves have told reporters.
The economic pain produced by horizontal escalation quickly registered in global markets, and Americans started turning against the war, which they increasingly saw as a military failure and an added burden on their budgets. Despite Trump’s promises to pressure Iran into unblocking the Strait—including by imposing a blockade on ships traveling to and from Iranian ports—two months into the war, the waterway remains closed. What remains to be seen is the extent to which Iran will seek to control it. From 1429 to 1857, Denmark charged a fee—the Sound Dues—on ships sailing through the Øresund, the narrow strait between Denmark and Sweden that links the Baltic Sea to the Kattegat and, beyond it, the Skagerrak and the North Sea. Iran may not be able to impose a similar arrangement and for now has made side deals with countries willing to pay $2 million per oil tanker for safe passage through the Strait using a route mandated by Iran.
Still, Iran’s toll-collecting could continue well beyond the war. It’s a lot easier for Iran to make sailing through the Strait perilous than it is for the US to ensure that it is safe. The latter task would require a constant military presence, the former only periodic attacks on ships, aided by the advantage of geography. The American blockade of Iran’s ports will not force Tehran to open the Strait, especially since—despite the Trump administration’s claims of the quarantine’s effectiveness—Lloyd’s List reports that “at least 26” Iranian ships, including 11 oil tankers, have evaded it as of April 20.
Trump has been no more successful in achieving his other goals. Iran still refuses to hand over the nearly 1,000 lb of 60 percent enriched uranium and the 406 lb of 20 percent enriched uranium it has, and the US military operation aimed at locating and seizing the stash failed and required the destruction of two MC-130J Special Operations aircraft that were part of the effort. Nor has Tehran agreed to limit the number and range of its ballistic missiles—a key Israel demand. What’s more, the two attacks that Israel and the US have launched against Iran in less than a year arguably make it even less likely that Tehran will agree to this demand: those missiles were key weapons that Iran has relied on during this war. Likewise, Iran has so far refused to cut off support to its regional allies: Ansar Allah (popularly referred to as the Houthis) in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. A final political settlement may well include some concessions by Iran on both issues; but we are very far from any such outcome.
What to Expect?
My guess is that we’ll see a compromise-based agreement on some of the issues in dispute, but not a comprehensive accord that settles all of them. Trump’s barrage of threats and his false claims that Iran had agreed to concessions that it had not may have convinced Tehran that he is not a reliable interlocutor and also cannot be trusted to honor the terms of any comprehensive deal. Iran’s leaders will, without a doubt, reject another attempt by Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff to present take-it-or-leave it terms in a brief, one-time round of negotiations.
In exchange for the full lifting of American sanctions, Iran might agree to uranium enrichment ceilings similar to those in the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump foolishly renounced in 2018. Maybe the terms will be a little bit better from the American standpoint; but I’d be surprised if Tehran were to make concessions that are more far-reaching. This of course assumes that the new Iranian leadership—dominated to an unprecedented degree by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps—has not concluded that the lesson of this war is that Iran must not forsake the option of developing nuclear weapons. As for the Strait of Hormuz, it’s hard to say what kind of agreement can be reached, but it’s safe to assume that because the US and Israel will never agree to pay the war reparations Iran demands, Tehran will seek to keep its toll booth in place. The bargaining on the Strait may center on how long it collects the toll.
Two questions arise if indeed there’s a stopgap agreement along these lines: Why on earth was this war undertaken? And in what sense can it, even on a generous judgment, be viewed as a victory? Sure, Trump can try to coerce Iran into accepting more onerous terms by resuming the bombing and missile strikes, but can anyone be confident based on what we’ve seen of the war so far that he will be successful in bending Iran to his will, or that the pressures he faces to find an exit will decrease if the war drags on?