Six months after President Donald Trump launched the war in Iran on Feb. 28 — predicting it would last four to five weeks — the conflict has instead become a defining liability of his second term.
Iranian forces have withstood months of bombardment, using mines and drones to keep degrading U.S. military capacity cheaply, and Trump's options are narrowed by his own-self imposed limits, reported the Washington Post.
"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," the Post reported. "His decision, at least so far, to hold back from the riskiest and most extreme military moves against Iran similarly limits his war options."
Experts offered a harsh assessment of his strategy so far and questioned his decision to start the war in the first place.
"We are in an absolutely weaker position, and I don't know that there's any redemption for it," said Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution.
Trump has pointed to a soaring stock market and insisted the Strait of Hormuz — a critical global oil corridor — remains open, saying Tehran can no longer pay its troops. But shipping data shows traffic through the strait has collapsed to as few as five vessels a day this week, down from more than 100 daily before the war, according to the tracking firm Kpler, even as U.S. officials say some ships are hiding their transponders. Oil prices have stayed elevated throughout.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week announced an "economic D-Day" of sanctions on countries doing business with Iran, then softened the threat by delaying enforcement so as not to "blow up the global financial system" — a hedge that sanctions expert Richard Nephew said signaled weakness to Tehran.
“It clearly sent a signal to the Iranians that there is a limit to how far we’re going to be prepared to act,” said Nephew, who helped formulate the sanctions regime during the Obama administration before the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
“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 added.
Domestically, the war is dragging on Trump's approval, which a Reuters/Ipsos poll put at 33 percent this week, with support softening even among Republicans, though it remains 69 percent within his own party.
U.S. intelligence assessments say Vladimir Putin now views Washington as weakened by the war and could be emboldened against Europe — prompting CIA Director John Ratcliffe's trip to Moscow this week to warn against further aggression toward Ukraine.
Roughly a quarter of the U.S. Reaper drone fleet has been lost, and Patriot stockpiles are strained, leaving allies like Greece warier of arming Ukraine and pushing the Pentagon to weigh scaling back its Gulf presence.
"We are not going to be the sole dominant presence in the Middle East in the way we were before," said Nate Swanson, a former National Security Council Iran director.