One way or another, President Donald Trump would like you to believe the war in Iran is wrapping up soon.<\/p>\n
Trump said this week that he is \u201cvery intent on making a deal\u201d<\/a> and that his team has had good talks with unnamed Iranian leaders, who also \u201cwant to make a deal badly.\u201d<\/a> He has insisted that the war has already been won<\/a> and that \u201cthe only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.\u201d Wall Street, rattled by the war\u2019s disruptions, seems to love the new happy talk about negotiations.<\/p>\n The White House has presented a proposal<\/a> for a peace deal and is hopeful for talks via a new diplomatic track possibly led by Vice President JD Vance, with the government of Pakistan acting as intermediary. The 15-point plan<\/a> to end the war that the US has presented to Iran, which includes Iran turning over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and accepting limits on its missile program, is probably a non-starter for the Iranian government. Iran has rejected the plan and presented a five-point proposal of its own<\/a>, including the payment of war reparations. But warring parties tend to present maximalist demands at the beginning of ceasefire negotiations. It\u2019s at least possible this is the beginning of a deal.<\/p>\n But a better question than whether the US and Iran can reach a deal may be why it\u2019s even necessary. Why couldn\u2019t Trump simply order a halt to airstrikes as he did at the conclusion of the \u201c12-day war\u201d last June? If he\u2019s really done with the war, shouldn\u2019t it be as simple as stopping the war?<\/p>\n Iran won\u2019t let Trump walk away <\/p>\n The difference between this war and Trump\u2019s previous military engagements with Iran as well as Venezuela and Syria, is that this time Iran has fought back to a much greater extent.<\/p>\n While this was widely anticipated by experts and commentators<\/a> before the war started, Iran\u2019s attacks on Gulf Arab countries and the disruptions to the global energy industry seem to have come as a genuine surprise to the president. Whether it was the killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020<\/a> or the bombing of the Houthis in 2024<\/a>, Trump\u2019s enemies have generally found it worth it to deescalate in hopes that he would simply go away. Even the recent raid on Venezuela that captured dictator Nicolas Maduro<\/a> \u2014 which seems to have given Trump confidence that the Iran operation would go more smoothly than it has \u2014 appears to have been less an example of \u201cregime change\u201d in the President George W. Bush sense, and more a backroom deal cut with members of the regime who wanted to preserve their hold on power.<\/p>\n This time things are different: Iran\u2019s leadership worries they will face an existential threat moving forward if they don\u2019t prove Trump\u2019s decision to strike was a disastrous mistake. And they may take Trump\u2019s sudden skittishness about the war as a sign their counterattacks are working as intended.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t put your opponent in a corner where their only way out is through you. That\u2019s what he\u2019s finally done to the Iranians,\u201d said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Pentagon Middle East adviser now with the advocacy group J Street. \u201cHe\u2019s so boxed them in and so threatened their feeling of regime survival, that they\u2019ve basically taken off the gloves and just gone nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n One Iranian response in particular may account for much of why Trump can\u2019t simply declare victory and move on this time: its disruption of global trade, especially oil, through the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n \u201cThe simplest reason is Hormuz,\u201d said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. Even with the damage the Iranian regime has sustained, it has demonstrated an ability to strike at the heart of the global economy and inflict just the sort of pain \u2014 in the form of high oil prices \u2014 to which a US president heading into a midterm election year is most susceptible. \u201cI think the White House is sufficiently aware that if Trump does just deescalate now it will look very much like an Iranian victory, despite the costs that have been imposed on Iran,\u201d Brew added.<\/p>\n In the short term, Iran\u2019s leaders are also publicly skeptical of whether the US entreaties are genuine \u2014 and not just a feint while they move thousands of troops to the region<\/a>, possibly ahead of a ground invasion to take over Kharg Island, Iran\u2019s main offshore oil terminal, or to control the coast along the strait. It doesn\u2019t help that Iran has been bombed by Israel and the United States twice in the past year while in the middle of nuclear negotiations.<\/p>\n A further question now is whether Iran would restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz even if the US and Israel were to deescalate. Some analysts suggest the Iranians<\/a> might keep the strait partially closed in order to impose costs significant enough that the US and Israel won\u2019t simply do this all again in six months<\/a>. Iran is reportedly now developing a selective vetting system<\/a> for which countries will be allowed to use the strait.<\/p>\n Given that the economic impact of rising energy and fertilizer costs are being felt globally \u2014 and far more severely in Africa and Asia than in the United States \u2014 Iran would likely come under enormous diplomatic pressure to restore normal traffic through the strait, including from its most important trading partner, China. But Iran has still demonstrated the ability to shut down more than 90 percent of trade through the strait<\/a> and to do it with a relatively small number of tanker strikes rather than the extensive mining campaign that many expected. That raises the political stakes for both sides moving forward.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s allies aren\u2019t ready to back down either<\/p>\n Trump, depending on the day, may hope to wind down the war soon, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely happy for it to continue.<\/p>\n From an Israeli perspective, every day that the US and Israel continue destroying Iranian missile launchers and killing senior officials is \u201cpure profit<\/a>\u201d in the tactical sense. The strikes are making it harder for the regime to rebuild its military capabilities and they\u2019re giving Israel more time to take on Iran\u2019s allied \u201caxis of resistance\u201d groups<\/a>, like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Plus, there\u2019s always the off chance that the leadership is weakened to the point that it becomes vulnerable to mass protests again.<\/p>\n Netanyahu is also probably not the only foreign leader with Trump\u2019s ear right now. Despite Saudi Arabia\u2019s public opposition to the strikes on Iran, de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has reportedly been privately urging Trump to continue the war<\/a>, viewing it as a historic chance to reset the balance of power in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reports that the leaders of Arab Gulf states are \u201cpressing Trump in regular phone conversations to finish the job and destroy Iran\u2019s military capabilities<\/a> before moving on.\u201d<\/p>\n While the Gulf states may have been reluctant about getting involved in the war at the outset, for the now-apparent reason that it would expose their cities and oil infrastructure to Iranian reprisals, the ferocity of the Iranian response may have shifted their thinking. Just as Iran has proven it can make the world pay a heavy price by choking off oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, its regional rivals are hoping to prove to Iran that it can\u2019t hold their economies hostage without paying an even bigger one in order to prevent this from becoming a regular occurrence.<\/p>\n The US is still the dominant player in this war and could resist demands from allies to escalate things further. As Trump demonstrated in June when he effectively called off the 12-day war on social media<\/a> with Israeli jets still in the air, this is ultimately the president\u2019s call to make. But having some of Trump\u2019s closest friends in the region insisting the war isn\u2019t done could give him pause.<\/p>\n Trump also might not want to end things just yet <\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that we\u2019re roughly three and a half weeks into what Trump had predicted would be a four- to five-week war or longer<\/a>. Perhaps Trump simply doesn\u2019t feel much sense of urgency about ending the war.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen is he is very willing to just sort of pull the escape cord when he thinks he needs to,\u201d said Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center. \u201cSo obviously he does not, or has not yet, felt that he needs to.\u201d<\/p>\n Wars of attrition tend to continue as long as both sides think they are winning. Iran\u2019s leaders\u2019 calculation, from the beginning, has been that their tolerance for pain is higher than Trump\u2019s and that with relatively little effort they can continue to impose intolerable costs on the United States.<\/p>\n But is Trump really feeling the pain? One would think the president would be alarmed by the spiking energy costs \u2014 and the way that diplomatic announcements appear to be timed to the opening and closing of the New York stock exchange suggests he at least has one eye on the markets, as well as his own poll numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n