Trump struggles to end an Iran war he never should have started

All the options are bad, and the president has no one but himself to blame.

By Max Boot

On May 23, President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war with Iran was almost finalized and would be “announced shortly.” Yet more than two weeks later no deal has been unveiled, and U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange fire regularly.

Last week, an Iranian drone attack heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport. On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed for all but a trickle of traffic.

So what happened? When the proposed terms, which apparently included unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets, leaked out, American hawks on Iran went ballistic.

Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first-term secretary of state, compared the proposed accord to the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and exited by Trump in 2018.

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, slammed Pompeo online: “Mike Pompeo has no idea what the f--- he’s talking about. He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”

Despite the White House pushback, the criticism from the right seemed to spook Trump. He reportedly sent a tougher counteroffer to Tehran at the end of May, and now the negotiations have stalled.

The Iranians are demanding the release of $12 billion of their frozen assets as part of any deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and another $12 billion during the 60 days of negotiations on their nuclear program that would follow.

Giving in to their demands would be exceedingly embarrassing for Trump, if he were capable of embarrassment. He relentlessly mocked President Barack Obama for sending “pallets of cash” worth $1.7 billion to Iran after the 2015 deal.

Obama isn’t the only Democratic president he wants to avoid emulating. Asked on Thursday why he didn’t send U.S. troops to extract what he calls “nuclear dust” — i.e., enriched uranium — from Iran, Trump replied: “I didn’t feel like being like Jimmy Carter,” a reference to the failed U.S. mission in 1980 to rescue 53 American hostages in Iran.

Because Trump doesn’t want to militarily escalate, and he doesn’t want to make costly concessions, he is sticking with the status quo for now, while retreating at times into the realm of fantasy. He has posted three times the same social media post imagining Iran signing “Documents of Surrender” and yet the “Dumacrats and Media” not giving him any credit for this “Masterful and Brilliant Victory.”

This is obviously wishful thinking. Trump is simply trying to avoid the grim reality that there is no easy way out of a conflict he should never have entered in the first place. All the options are bad, and Trump has no one but himself to blame.

The good news for Trump is that the U.S. economy and especially the stock market have held up remarkably well despite the shutdown of a waterway that normally carries 20 percent of the world’s oil. Trump is terrible at running a war but very good at talking up the market. But oil industry executives and analysts say that global oil reserves are running out and that if the war doesn’t end soon, oil prices could soar to $150 a barrel. Oxford Economics warns that if the strait still isn’t open in July, that would be “difficult to tolerate for long.”

Trump is plainly frustrated that he hasn’t had more success in forcing Iran to agree to his terms even though Israel and the United States can bomb Iran at will. Why can’t a superpower defeat a much weaker adversary? It is not a new dilemma. Trump is learning the same bitter lessons that previous presidents learned in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — and that Vladimir Putin is now learning in Ukraine.

War is not a targeting exercise, and the side with the most bombs does not necessarily win. Willpower counts more than weapons, and the ability to absorb punishment is ultimately more important than the ability to dole it out. For Trump, this conflict is a “short excursion” that he entered with no attempt to rally public opinion, because he assumed it would be over quickly. For the Iranian regime, it is an existential struggle. Guess which side is willing to show more patience to prevail? As the Taliban liked to say, “You have the watches. We have the time.”

Trump made the war all but impossible to win by laying out maximalist demands — at one point he was calling for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” — while using minimalist means. Airpower alone is notoriously incapable of achieving regime change, and yet that’s what Trump foolishly tried to do in Iran, while ignoring the obvious risk that Tehran would retaliate by closing the strait.

So now Iran has the world over an oil barrel. Trump hasn’t achieved his overly ambitious war aims, and he isn’t going to. Nobody even talks anymore about Iran ending its missile program or its support for regional proxies. The best Trump can hope for is that Iran will reopen the strait without tolls and accept limits on its nuclear program backed by international inspections.

That would basically re-create the conditions that existed under Obama’s nuclear deal. And just to achieve that much will probably require a substantial payoff to the mullahs, with the exact price tag to be determined in bazaar-style bargaining.

This is likely to be the costliest TACO (the now-famous acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out) that the president has ever bought. Let’s just hope this chastening experience will make him think twice before launching any more wars of choice. Few military operations work out as neatly as his intervention in Venezuela, and none in the Middle East.

By Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.