Analysis
Trump in
tough spot as he tries to avoid deal that highlights US failures in Iran
Andrew
Roth
in
Washington
Pete Hegseth denies Iran war is a ‘quagmire’
as estimated US cost so far hits $25bn
Wed 29
Apr 2026 09.40 BST
Donald
Trump is learning first-hand about the perils of mission creep.
The
US-Israel war in Iran has just passed its eighth week – twice as long as the
president predicted it would take when US warplanes launched their joint attack
with Israeli forces to decapitate the Iranian leadership and paralyse its
military. The military attacks were successful. The predictions about the
political cause-and-effect to follow were not.
Iran has
survived the initial strikes and remains defiant, closing the strait of Hormuz
in a move that has blocked off a fifth of the global oil trade. The US has
responded with its own blockade to lock in Iranian oil, inflicting losses of an
estimated $500m daily on Tehran and threatening the country’s long-term energy
production – but negotiations have stalled and it is not clear if the White
House is willing to withstand the pain of a sustained economic war or the risk
of a military operation to open the strait.
“This has
gone from being a war of choice to a war of necessity,” said Aaron David
Miller, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment and a former US diplomat and
Middle East negotiator.
The war
had transformed from a conflict involving Iran, the US and Israel to a “global
economic crisis which shows no signs of abating”. Just this week, petrol prices
in the US approached a four-year high, and they are expected to continue to
rise before a crucial midterm election that could allow the Democrats to retake
congress.
“The
status quo is not tolerable … there has to be a fix to it,” Miller said. “It
strikes me that the administration is in a very tough spot.”
But the
solution remains elusive. One option would be to negotiate a temporary
reopening of the strait of Hormuz but to delay nuclear talks on the fate of the
more than 400kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) – as well as the country’s
right to enrich uranium in the future.
But the
New York Times has reported that Trump is “unsatisfied” with Iran’s most recent
proposals to open the strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic: Tehran has indicated
it is unwilling to negotiate on its nuclear programme and is ready to reopen
the waterway only if it is paid for transit – a concession that could set an
unwelcome precedent at key conduits for shipping freight around the world.
Trump has
remained bullish in public, claiming on social media on Tuesday that Iran
admitted to being in a “state of collapse” and that “they want us to ‘Open the
Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership
situation (Which I believe they will be able to do!).” But previous rounds of
negotiations have ended inconclusively, and the latest attempts to dispatch his
Middle East envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were cut off abruptly by
the president.
At heart,
the Trump administration wants to avoid signing a deal that would lay bare the
fact that the White House has fallen short of its goals in Iran – a measure
that could be made clear by comparisons to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), an Obama-era deal signed in 2015 that limited but did not
eliminate Iran’s right to enrich uranium. Trump pulled the US out of the deal
in 2018.
Former
negotiators of the JCPOA have told the Guardian that Iran’s closure of the
strait of Hormuz, a line it was not previously willing to cross, had
fundamentally altered the negotiations: Iran now has a weapon that one said was
far more convenient than a nuclear weapon itself.
Trump’s
other options are equally unsavoury. One is to escalate with a mission to open
the strait militarily. That would probably be far more difficult than the
escort operations during the tanker war of the mid-1980s, when US warships
convoyed with neutral shipping to run a gauntlet of Iranian and Iraqi attacks
that killed more than 440 sailors, as well as dozens of US service members, and
damaged 400 ships.
Dennis
Blair, a former head of US Pacific Command and director of national
intelligence, argued in a recent article that opening the strait would be
possible by placing detachments of sailors onboard an initial convoy of about
20 oil tankers, then deploying six to 10 destroyers to intercept small boats,
missiles and drones, other ships and submarines to disable mines and then jets,
attack helicopters, and raiding parties to counterattack against IRGC firing
positions.
A “small
number of the weapons fired by IRGC forces would penetrate the layered convoy
defenses, inflicting damage and some casualties,” he wrote. “But the navy
combatants are tough, with good damage-control capabilities, and many of the
tankers are huge, up to four times the size of an aircraft carrier. They do not
sink from a few missiles, drones, and mines.”
The
other, even less palatable option is a full assault on Iran’s civilian
infrastructure or an invasion force, but there are no guarantees that would
coerce the government into bending to Trump’s will.
The
vacuum of leadership in Iran is a problem largely of the US and Israel’s own
making. The targeted strikes that killed Ali Khamenei – and injured his son,
the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei – removed a leader who was capable of
uniting the clerical, political and military circles, including the IRGC. In a
recent Truth Social post, Trump admitted as much, saying: “Iran is having a
very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know!”
“The
infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the
battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining
respect!), is CRAZY!”
But Trump
has his own advisers taking a hard line on Iran – and he has also shown that he
is ready to follow Benjamin Netanyahu’s lead on Iran policy. As they push
increasingly for Iran to agree to no nuclear enrichment and to open the strait
of Hormuz, the Iranian position appears to be hardening as well.
And
voices of criticism on the left and right are growing louder, especially as the
war exacerbates the US’s affordability crisis just months before the midterms.
“This is
the outcome that Trump and Netanyahu have created,” said Matt Duss, the
executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and a former
foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders.
“Many of
us warned about exactly this, but these people have this kind of weird,
completely unjustified religious belief in the capacity of military force to
produce magical outcomes. And once again, they’ve been shown to be completely
full of crap.”
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