When the cease-fire in the war with Iran went into effect a month ago, President Trump was pretty direct that if the Iranians failed to end their nuclear program, or to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the bombers would be back in the air. \u201cIf there\u2019s no deal, fighting resumes,\u201d he said, making it very clear this was just a pause.<\/p>\n
But it turns out, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the war actually ended at some point after the cease-fire took hold, or so he told reporters at a news conference at the White House on Tuesday. \u201cThe Operation Epic Fury is concluded,\u201d he said. \u201cWe achieved the objective of that operation.\u201d The effort to reopen the strait, Mr. Rubio said, is entirely a defensive and humanitarian operation that would result in direct military exchanges with the Iranians only if U.S. ships came under fire.<\/p>\n
Later on Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced that he was pausing even that effort \u2014 which was only one day old, and had succeeded in getting just a few ships freed \u2014 \u201cfor a short period of time,\u201d citing what he said was \u201cgreat progress\u201d toward an agreement with Iran. But he kept the American blockade in place, part of a strategy of maximum economic pressure.<\/p>\n
Still, Mr. Trump\u2019s suspension of the effort to guide ships out of the strait seemed to contradict the administration\u2019s stated position that it was intolerable for Iran to block an international waterway, and that only the United States had the ability to force it open again.<\/p>\n
For the White House, the insistence that the war was over was the latest rhetorical leap in an effort to put a war that has created the greatest political crisis of Mr. Trump\u2019s presidency in the rearview mirror. But the mere proclamation does not make it true. Missiles were still flying. Both sides insist they control traffic in the waterway.<\/p>\n
And despite Mr. Rubio\u2019s declaration that the objectives of the war have been accomplished, they clearly have not. In the 38 days of intensive combat operations, the United States hit, by the Pentagon\u2019s count, about 13,000 targets. But destroying targets was not the only point. Mr. Trump himself described his objectives in the early hours of Feb. 28, when he told the country, in a video he had recorded earlier, that he had five major goals.<\/p>\n
The first, of course, was to ensure that Iran can \u201cnever have a nuclear weapon.\u201d But he went on to add that the United States had to destroy Iran\u2019s ballistic missiles and their launchers, sink its navy, end its support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and, finally, create the conditions for the Iranian people to topple their government.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour hour of your freedom is at hand,\u201d he said at the time.<\/p>\n
A mural in Tehran last month showing Iranian missiles attacking a U.S. Navy ship.Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times<\/p>\n
The Iranian Navy is clearly gone, as Mr. Trump often notes. But that is the only one checked off the list. So far, Iran\u2019s nuclear stockpile has not been touched and there is no agreement, at least yet, to ship it out of the country or to dilute it so that it cannot easily be used to manufacture weapons. While intelligence estimates differ, the U.S. assessments suggest that more than half of Iran\u2019s missiles and launchers survived. It is too early to tell about support of the proxy groups, which were shredded by Israeli attacks.<\/p>\n
And Mr. Trump has abandoned talk of changing the country\u2019s leadership, suggesting at one point that he never called for it. At other moments he has maintained that regime change already happened, citing the emergence of a new supreme leader and other officials, replacing those who were killed. To most Iran experts \u2014 and many in the American intelligence agencies \u2014 that is a change of personnel.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have many reasons to declare that Epic Fury ended at some undefined date in the recent past. Congress was getting increasingly restive about the War Powers Act, which demands a vote of approval by Congress after American troops are involved in combat for more than 60 days. His political base has fractured on the question of whether Mr. Trump has dispensed with his own promise to get America out of lengthy wars. And Mr. Trump delayed his trip to China once to make sure that the war was over, that the United States was victorious and that the strait was open before he touched down in Beijing. That trip is now scheduled for next Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s language has changed, too, though even he has not gone so far as to declare that the operation is ended. He cannot quite seem to keep himself from describing the current situation as a war, even if he has begun to back away. \u201cOur country is booming now, despite the fact that we\u2019re in a \u2014 I call it a miniwar,\u201d he said at a White House event for small businesses on Monday.<\/p>\n
In other speeches, he has interspersed the word \u201cwar\u201d with other, more benign descriptions: Attacking Iran was an \u201cexcursion,\u201d he said. At another point he described it as a \u201cdetour,\u201d making it sound more like a weekend drive across the Middle East that hit some traffic.<\/p>\n
While it all sounds like politically convenient wordplay, any real declaration that the battle is over represents a fundamental change in strategy, even for a war in which the White House seemed to be making up its next move day by day. For the past nine weeks American military power, and the prospect that it could resume, was the leverage Mr. Trump celebrated as the steel behind negotiations. Nothing would focus Iranian minds, he suggested, like the prospect of further destruction.<\/p>\n
Indeed, when negotiations over the future of the nuclear program broke down in late February, the American bombing was designed to force Iran to make concessions.<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the new military effort to guide merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be understood as a completely separate enterprise, and a temporary defensive effort.Credit…Reuters<\/p>\n
But the bombing campaign, while deadly and destructive, did not alter Iran\u2019s fundamental positions, at least yet. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps\u2019 success at sealing off the strait \u2014 bottling up tankers and cargo ships and sending oil and fertilizer markets into a frenzy \u2014 changed the dynamic. Mr. Trump\u2019s frustration was clear: He threatened even heavier strikes \u2014 and attacks on power plants \u2014 if Iran refused to relent, lashing out with expletives on social media.<\/p>\n
The Iranians ignored it, then a few days later Mr. Trump warned, \u201cA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.\u201d Then came the cease-fire.<\/p>\n
But Iran\u2019s restraint fell apart after Mr. Trump on Sunday announced a new operation to guide ships through the narrow strait, on a pathway that had been declared free of mines. Iranian forces shot at two ships the following day, but the missiles were intercepted by American forces. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that since the cease-fire took effect, Iran had attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times, but that the attacks were \u201call below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
General Caine added that defining that threshold was \u201ca political decision,\u201d meaning it was Mr. Trump\u2019s decision. And Mr. Trump, pressed a few hours later to explain where he put that threshold, told reporters, \u201cYou\u2019ll find out, because I\u2019ll let you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know what to do,\u201d he said of the Iranians. \u201cThey know what not to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday morning that the new military effort to guide merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be understood as a completely separate enterprise, and a temporary defensive effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not looking for a fight,\u201d said Mr. Hegseth, who only a few weeks ago was celebrating American firepower against Iran and urging \u201cmaximum lethality.\u201d But he noted that U.S. warships shot down cruise missiles and drones that Iran fired at the ships and commercial vessels, and that Army Apache helicopter gunships also sank six Iranian military speedboats that threatened the vessels.<\/p>\n
(Mr. Rubio compared the boats to Boston Whalers, small, ubiquitous speedboats. He said those that were struck \u201csit at the bottom of the sea, along with the rest of Iran\u2019s navy.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Now the administration has moved from declaring that military strikes would change Iran\u2019s leaders to insisting that it is really economic cutoffs that will do the trick. Mr. Rubio said the United States was now cutting off revenue that keeps together \u201cwhatever remains of their frail economy.\u201d<\/p>\n
And he called the Iranians pirates. \u201cYou can\u2019t have a situation in which the straits are closed to everyone else, but they benefit from the piracy \u2014 that can\u2019t happen,\u201d he said. Only the United States, he said, had the power to open the Strait of Hormuz \u201cas a favor to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFrankly, we are the only ones that can,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we live in a world where a rogue state like this Iranian regime is allowed to claim as a new normal control over an international shipping lane,\u201d he added, \u201cit will not be long before you see that happen in multiple shipping lanes around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the cease-fire in the war with Iran went into effect a month ago, President Trump was pretty…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,5959,4783,83,99,13192,3097,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,209164,141631,5503,277,67,201827,69783,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-776647","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-donald-j","10":"tag-hezbollah","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-lebanon","14":"tag-middle-east","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-newyork","18":"tag-newyorkcity","19":"tag-ny","20":"tag-nyc","21":"tag-oil-petroleum-and-gasoline","22":"tag-persian-gulf","23":"tag-strait-of-hormuz","24":"tag-trump","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","27":"tag-united-states-international-relations","28":"tag-united-states-of-america","29":"tag-unitedstates","30":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","31":"tag-us","32":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}