Entering War’s Third Week, Trump Faces Stark Choices

 

Entering War’s Third Week, Trump Faces Stark Choices

 

As the conflict with Iran expands and intensifies, President Trump’s options — to fight on, or to move toward declaring victory and pulling back — both carry deeply problematic consequences.

 

David E. SangerEric SchmittTyler PagerRonen BergmanJulian E. Barnes

By David E. SangerEric SchmittTyler PagerRonen Bergman and Julian E. Barnes

March 15, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/us/politics/trump-stark-choices-iran-war.html

 

Two weeks into a war against Iran that he chose to launch, President Trump faces a stark choice — stay in the battle to achieve the dauntingly ambitious goals he has set, or try to extract himself from an expanding and intensifying conflict that is generating damaging military, diplomatic and economic shock waves.

 

He has quickly discovered that both options are deeply problematic, littered with consequences that he and his team downplayed when he plunged the United States, alongside Israel, into the biggest war in the Middle East in nearly a quarter-century.

 

He can continue to fight a weakened enemy that has nevertheless proved adept at extracting a fast-rising economic price for the United States and its allies, tying the global energy markets in knots and striking a dozen countries across the region.

 

Battling on would put more American lives at risk, accelerate the financial costs and risk further fraying alliances. There is angst within Mr. Trump’s political base over the sharp departure from his pledge to avoid entangling the nation in more wars.

 

Or he can begin to pull back, even though most of his objectives — including assuring that Iran never again possesses the capability to produce a nuclear weapon — are not yet met. The biggest military accomplishments of the joint U.S.-Israel action so far, officials say, have been wiping out much of Iran’s missile arsenal and air defenses and crippling its navy. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s brutal leader for nearly 40 years, is dead.

 

But an emboldened theocracy is still in power, apparently commanded by the ayatollah’s injured son, who has already sworn to continue deploying Iran’s asymmetrical capabilities, from cyberattacks to planting sea mines and conducting missile strikes on targets in the region. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps paramilitary force and the militias that killed thousands of protesting Iranians on the streets in January remain in place.

 

Moreover, if Mr. Trump leaves now, the stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel that is at the heart of fears that Iran could manufacture 10 or more nuclear weapons would remain inside Iranian territory, within reach of a wounded Iranian government that may be more motivated than ever to turn that fuel into weapons. “People are going to have to go and get it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said just as the war began, alluding to a ground operation to retrieve the material from deep underground storage in the heart of Iran, an immensely risky operation that Mr. Trump has said he is considering but not ready to order.

 

As the war enters its third week, the consequences are widening. Thirteen Americans have been killed in action. More than 2,100 people have been killed since the start of the war, most in Iran. More than 1,348 civilians there had been killed as of Wednesday, according to Iran’s representative to the United Nations.

 

The United States is deploying 2,500 Marines to the Middle East, adding to the 50,000 already there, after U.S. forces attacked Kharg Island, the huge shipping port for the vast majority of Iran’s oil exports.

 

Despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s assertion that Iran’s success in threatening shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was nothing to worry about, that vital waterway remains all but shut down, choking off a big chunk of global trade, especially in oil. By Saturday, Mr. Trump appealed on social media for China, France, Japan, South Korea and Britain to send naval forces to secure the strait, his first public acknowledgment that keeping the vital waterway open could require help and more resources than the United States has in the region now.

 

By Saturday, plumes of smoke were seen rising from a major oil trading port in the United Arab Emirates after a drone attack. To alleviate price hikes, the United States even suspended sanctions against some Russian oil sales. The U.S. Embassy in Iraq has been attacked twice in recent days.

 

Mr. Trump has wrestled publicly with his stay-or-leave options, sometimes suggesting that the war is all but won and at others seeming to acknowledge that there is still heavy fighting ahead. The president, who said he ordered the attack because he had a “good feeling” that Iran was preparing to preemptively attack U.S. forces in the region, said the other day that he would also rely on his instincts on when to get out. He told Fox News he would “feel it in my bones.”

 

The second week of the war brought a recognition by the Trump administration that Iran’s willingness and ability to disrupt the global economy by choking off the Strait of Hormuz was greater than officials had anticipated, as was Tehran’s capacity to widen the war across the region, according to interviews with officials in the United States and Israel, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters.

 

Even as Mr. Trump repeatedly suggested that the war was almost won, the United States and Israel continued to step up the tempo of their operations and the United States continued to move more military resources into the region. There were signs that the U.S.-Israel partnership was undergoing strains. And some Republicans worried that Mr. Trump’s political base — deeply suspicious of foreign interventions — could fracture if the American commitment grows and U.S. casualties mounted.

 

Mr. Trump’s aides maintain that 14 days into a complex military operation is far too early to judge results. And they insist that Mr. Trump is prepared to tough it out.

 

“He made the decision to take the short-term risk to oil prices for the long-term benefit of wiping out the threat that Iran poses to the United States,” Karoline Leavitt, the president’s press secretary, said on Saturday. “He is wise enough to know that operations like these are judged by their outcomes. And if the U.S. can say the Iranian military capability is wiped out, the president knows that will be one of the greatest accomplishments of any president in modern times.”

 

She concluded: “The president is dug in to ensure the objectives of Operation Epic Fury are fully achieved.”

 

Even if Mr. Trump is right, the effects will be felt for years, or decades. Hoshyar Zebari, a former foreign minister and deputy prime minister of Iraq, said that while he believed the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was the “end of an era” for the region, he was not convinced that it meant the end of Iran’s theocratic Islamic Republic.

 

“They are resisting, they are resilient,” he said. “This is a war between technology and ideology. The Iranians are squeezed, and their situation is difficult, but for them, this is ‘to be or not to be’.”

 

Reopening the Strait?

At a meeting in the Oval Office last week, a frustrated Mr. Trump pressed Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about why the United States could not immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The answer was straightforward: Even one Iranian soldier or militia member zipping across the narrow neck of the strait in a speedboat could fire a mobile missile right into a slow-moving supertanker, or plant a limpet mine on its hull.

 

With oil already hovering around $100 a barrel, and insurance premiums for transiting the Persian Gulf surging, the image of more burning tankers would make the Iranians look more powerful than they really are. Already, having seen Iran attack shipping around the strait, tanker owners are refusing to take the risk, even after Mr. Trump declared on Fox last Sunday that they should “show some guts.”

 

By the Pentagon’s metrics — “total air dominance,” as Mr. Hegseth put it, plus the sinking of much of Iran’s navy and the destruction of hundreds of missiles and launchers — the U.S. military is ahead of schedule.

 

“Iran has no air defenses, Iran has no air force, Iran has no navy,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters during a Pentagon briefing. Iran is now firing 90 percent fewer missiles than at the start of the war, the Pentagon reported, and 95 percent fewer one-way attack drones.

 

“Never before has a modern capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat-ineffective,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters on Friday.

 

But the problem is that the destruction of its conventional forces has not eliminated Iran’s ability to sow chaos, even in its weakened state. And, five years into dealing with Mr. Trump, the Iranians appear to understand that soaring oil prices and declining stock markets can be powerful pressure points on him.

 

The strait was Exhibit A in Iran’s ability to seize an asymmetric advantage. Despite ramped-up strikes in recent days against what little is left of the Iranian Navy, traffic through the strait has come to a near halt. A New York Times analysis concluded that as of Thursday, at least 16 oil tankers, cargo ships and other commercial vessels had been attacked in the Persian Gulf, including three in the narrowest part of the strait.

 

The one solution being discussed the most is having the U.S. Navy escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz — a costly and risky operation and one that administration officials conceded was probably weeks away. The United States would need to assemble even more ships and defensive equipment, and conduct further assaults on the Iranian weaponry that menaces the strait.

 

Mr. Trump’s call on social media on Saturday for five nations to “send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated” was notable because it was the first time he had sounded eager to build a broad coalition to counter Iran.

 

But he was asking for backup from allies who were largely not consulted about the decision to plunge into the war in the first place. (Just a week ago he had told Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain not to bother sending two aircraft carriers to the region because “we don’t need them any longer,” adding that “we don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”)

 

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the U.S. Central Command, which is carrying out the war effort, flew to Washington for a two-hour meeting on Thursday night at the Pentagon with Mr. Hegseth and General Caine to discuss strategy and additional forces.

 

The next day, U.S. officials said that about 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships were cutting short a tour in the Indo-Pacific to rush to the Middle East. Military officials declined to say what missions the Marines would be assigned, but they are equipped to help secure the strait or potentially join an operation to seize Kharg Island, should Mr. Trump order them into action.

 

On Sunday, a senior U.S. military official said there would be an international effort to ensure the flow of oil and goods through the strait.

 

But while American leaders were bringing in reinforcements, so were the Iranians — of a different kind. Iran built up a talented cybercorps after the United States and Israel mounted a sophisticated cyberattack on the country’s nuclear centrifuges more than 16 years ago. Now Iran’s hackers were being called into service, directed at targets in both Israel and the United States.

 

One of the most conspicuous of those affected was Stryker Corporation, a maker of advanced medical equipment in Michigan. Its systems were brought down last week, and an organization of hackers called Handala claimed responsibility, saying that it was in retaliation for the strike on an elementary school outside a military base in southern Iran in which, according to Iranian officials, at least 175 people died, mostly children. (The Times has reported that a preliminary finding by the U.S. military indicates that a Tomahawk missile, launched by U.S. forces, was responsible for the school strike.)

 

And then there were a series of terrorist attacks inside the United States that were attributed to individuals who might have been inspired by the American and Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon, though the evidence so far is murky. On Thursday, a man yelling “Allahu akbar” opened fire at Old Dominion University in Virginia before being killed, and in Michigan, a naturalized American citizen born in Lebanon rammed his vehicle into a reform synagogue that is home to a school before killing himself.

 

New Strains With Israel

In the days leading up to the war in late February, senior Israeli  officials told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if the initial strike against Iran succeeded in killing a large portion of the Iranian security establishment, including the supreme leader, there was a good chance that protests against the government would erupt again quickly.

 

Mr. Netanyahu appeared to sell that idea to Mr. Trump, who built it into his own message to the Iranian people on the morning of the opening attack. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be yours to take.”

 

It seemed far-fetched to many at the time. In the two weeks since, only pro-government rallies have been seen in Tehran’s major squares, fueled by anger over the war and the American military’s apparent missteps, including the deadly strike on the school. Now Mr. Trump himself seems to have his doubts about how effective the protesters could be.

 

In a radio interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, Mr. Trump conceded that the Basij militias tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would probably kill people who rose up.

 

“They say, ‘Anybody protests, we’re going to kill you in the streets.’ So I really think that’s a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons,” Mr. Trump concluded. “I think it’s a very big hurdle.”

 

It was only one area in which differing agendas and assessments became evident between the United States and Israel. Both Mr. Trump and Admiral Cooper of Central Command warned the Israelis against striking the big oil tanks outside of Tehran, fearing that such an attack would trigger the Iranians to strike more energy targets around the region in retaliation, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

 

Mr. Netanyahu ignored the advice, and Israel hit the depots a week ago Saturday, triggering huge blazes and setting off an initial surge in oil prices. Inside the White House, officials became convinced that the Israeli leader wanted dramatic scenes of Tehran covered in the black smoke of destruction.

 

The Israeli view, one White House official said, was that the burning tanks would create internal chaos in the Iranian leadership. But what it ended up producing were more Iranian drone strikes against oil refining and storage facilities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those strikes led to a halt in oil loading on Saturday at Fujairah, one of the U.A.E.’s largest export terminals.

 

There has been similar tension over Israel’s second front in Lebanon, with renewed attacks on Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy group. In the Trump administration’s view, those strikes only heighten the risk from the spreading conflict while taking resources and attention away from the main target. In Mr. Netanyahu’s view, Iran and Hezbollah are inseparable, and the time to attack the terrorist organization is when the Iranian leadership is too consumed by its own battles to help out.

 

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Sunday that Israel and the United States were maintaining a “close and ongoing security and strategic cooperation, based on professional dialogue and the highest level of transparency.”

 

“The claim that the I.D.F. deliberately opened an additional front with Lebanon is incorrect and misleading,” the statement said, adding that “Hezbollah made a deliberate decision to join the war being waged by Iran against Israel and launched a wave of strikes, acting with the direction of the Iranian regime.”

 

Through it all, Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu have been speaking almost every day, the prime minister said at a news conference last week. White House officials confirm the frequent conversations and say Mr. Trump is also talking regularly to Arab leaders, particularly Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.

 

According to several officials, the advice Mr. Trump is getting from the prince is to keep hitting the Iranians hard — essentially repeating the advice that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who died in 2015, repeatedly gave to Washington: “Cut off the head of the snake.”

 

Trump’s Next Decisions: Kharg Island and the Nuclear Depot

Mr. Trump said at the outset of the conflict that he expected it could take four to six weeks of fighting, and White House officials say that is still their expectation. That means the war is likely to still be underway when Mr. Trump takes his long-awaited trip to China at the end of March, one that was supposed to focus on trade and security issues.

 

Now there is little doubt that the war will dominate the Beijing summit. Last year, President Xi Jinping of China used his control over critical rare earth minerals and magnets to force Mr. Trump to back down on tariffs; now he must face the possibility that this year Mr. Trump could control oil shipments to Chinese refineries from Venezuela and, depending how the war turns out, Iran.

 

In 2025 China purchased about 1.4 million barrels per day of Iranian oil, more than 13 percent of the oil it brought in by sea. (For Iran, China is overwhelmingly its biggest customer.)

 

Even as he prepares for the summit, Mr. Trump will have to grapple with two of the biggest decisions of the war: whether to attack, with ground troops, Kharg Island and the nuclear storage facilities where about 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade uranium is believed to remain.

 

They each pose very different challenges. The island is an exposed target, accessible to the U.S. Navy at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. But seizing it means protecting an occupying force from remnants of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which could launch strikes from the shore or small boats, or blow up the pipelines that supply the port facilities on the island with Iranian oil. That could require a continuing military presence of exactly the kind that Mr. Trump’s political base has warned against and that Mr. Trump himself said he would never repeat.

 

But if it is successful, Mr. Trump will have full control of the port that most Iranian oil exports originate from — and thus a stranglehold on the country’s economy.

 

The seizure of the nuclear fuel, on the other hand, would be a one-time raid, but even riskier.

 

Most of the uranium enriched to 60 percent — just shy of what is needed to produce nuclear weapons — is stored in deep tunnels in Isfahan, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is in gas form, in canisters that could each fit in the trunk of a car.

 

But the tunnels are hard to get at, especially after the United States bombed the facility last June, collapsing many of the entrances. American and European intelligence agencies, which have been watching the Isfahan plant by satellite, say that while some access has been reopened, they see no evidence that the fuel has been removed. But that does not make it any easier to get at.

 

Special Operations forces would either have to go in stealthily, and hope to gain quick access, or go in with a huge protective force and spend days or weeks carefully extracting the canisters. There is little room for error: If the canisters were pierced and moisture entered them, the result would be both highly toxic and radioactive. If they were kept too close together, there would be risk of triggering a critical nuclear reaction.

 

The issue is all the more urgent, American officials say, because the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is more desperate than ever — and may view keeping the nuclear fuel in Iran as the kind of leverage that could get the United States to back off.

 

“We haven’t made any decision on that,” Mr. Trump said about seizing the material. “We’re nowhere near it,” he said, which suggests that the war may have a long way to go.

 

Reporting was contributed by Erika Solomon from Erbil, Iraq, and Mark Mazzetti and Maggie Haberman from Washington.

 

David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.

 

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

 

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

 

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.

 

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.