The Disappearing Off-Ramp in Iran

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here. The window for Donald Trump to end the Iran war by simply declaring victory and walking away is rapidly closing. Soon he will face a stark choice: He can take greater risks in pursuit of a decisive tactical success, prepare the country for a prolonged conflict that could last for many months, or seek a negotiated settlement that involves a real compromise with Tehran. Initially, Trump saw his Venezuela operation as the template for Iran. He imagined that he would make a deal with someone inside the regime who would work pragmatically with him and maybe cut the United States in on the oil. But the Islamic Republic proved more aggressive and more resilient than he had anticipated. By his own admission, no one in his administration had expected Iran to strike out against American allies in the region—“they weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East”—although it had repeatedly threatened to do exactly that. As the war grew more difficult, declaring victory anyway and unilaterally ending it without a deal became his most obvious off-ramp. Trump has set the stage for this outcome. He has repeatedly insisted that the war is “already won” and “very complete.” He told Fox News that he would choose to end the conflict when “I feel it in my bones.” Senator Josh Hawley urged him to declare victory immediately and end the war. But the longer the war continues, the harder sustaining the claim that the United States is winning will become. Trump can point to some military successes. The United States and Israel have destroyed much of Iran’s navy and air force, as well as many of its missile systems. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Yet the costs of the conflict are mounting. Iran effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz and is denying access to allied tankers. The price of oil has jumped to nearly $100 a barrel. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei is now the supreme leader. And Iran continues to strike targets across the Gulf. The war has also depleted U.S. air defenses and munitions stockpiles, which raises concerns about America’s ability to deter crises elsewhere. The Financial Times has reported that the United States has burned through years’ worth of certain crucial weapons, including long-range Tomahawk missiles. The U.S. has reportedly pulled THAAD missile-defense systems out of South Korea and is moving a Marine expeditionary force from Japan to the Middle East. [Read: The dangerous mismatch between American missiles and Iranian drones] The enemy, of course, also gets a vote. Some analysts argue that Iran will continue to fight until the United States and Israel agree to a negotiated settlement ensuring that they will not restart the war in the future. In other words, Iran wants to restore deterrence. In this scenario, it will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and attack U.S. targets even if Trump announces a unilateral end to the war. The administration may hope that events will break its way. Wars sometimes turn suddenly. During the 1999 Kosovo campaign, NATO waged an air war against Serbia for 78 days before Slobodan Milošević accepted NATO’s terms and withdrew his forces from Kosovo. As the bombing dragged on, doubts grew within the alliance about whether airpower alone would succeed, and the Clinton administration began examining the possibility of launching a ground invasion. In the end, however, Serbia relented. Theoretically, something similar could happen here. Iran’s regime faces serious internal pressures and structural weaknesses. But it has already proved more resilient than expected. If the regime does collapse, it could take a long time. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested that America’s past struggles in war stemmed primarily from overly restrictive rules of engagement and a commitment to democracy building. Shed of such concerns, he claims, the United States will win easily. But this is a dangerous fiction. The United States tends to falter in wars not because the military lacks freedom of action but because its political objectives are unclear or unattainable. The real challenge in the aftermath of regime change is not building a democracy but establishing and sustaining a pro-U.S. government to avert state collapse or the installment of a hostile leader, both of which Trump needs to be worried about in Iran. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States had a clear objective—expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait—and achieved it. Yet President George H. W. Bush was criticized afterward for stopping short of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. By contrast, the United States fought in Iraq after 2003 and in Afghanistan after 2001 with far more ambiguous and changeable goals, and without the means of achieving them. Planning for the aftermath of the current conflict is even harder. The administration now faces three realistic options, aside from simply hoping that events resolve themselves. The first is to take greater risks in pursuit of dramatic operational success and then declare the mission accomplished. For instance, Trump could order  a large raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow to seize the country’s enriched-uranium stockpiles, something that the administration has hinted at. But such an operation could be the largest and most complex raid of its kind and could result in significant casualties. Another possibility would be to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil-export hub. Yet doing so could intensify the global oil crisis, and the island would be difficult to hold without incurring high casualties. [Read: Iran’s war is not only with the West] The second is to wage a longer war. But the administration is not prepared for such a war and has not built public support for it. Indeed, the day before hostilities started, J. D. Vance told The Washington Post that “the idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen.” A third is a negotiated settlement, but given that Tehran may feel better positioned for a protracted war, it would likely hold out for guarantees that America would not attack again and an easing of sanctions. In other words, Trump would likely get a worse deal than he could have gotten before the attack. Wars have a way of generating new reasons for continuing to fight. For example, personal incentives, such as revenge: The United States killed Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, so Iran plotted to assassinate several U.S. officials involved in that decision. The opening strike of the current war injured the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and killed his father, wife, and sister. He could well seek to make American officials pay for those losses for as long as he is in power. Ordinarily, the U.S. government would provide extensive security to those who faced such threats. But on the first day of his second term, Trump stripped many officials targeted by Iran of their government protection because he had fallen out with them, saying they had to take care of themselves. A future president may be more responsible, but the precedent may weigh on the minds of those now making decisions about the course of the war. For some within the administration, the safest strategy may appear to be pressing the conflict until Israel succeeds in killing Mojtaba Khamenei as well. Trump launched the war because he believed that Iran was weak and that he could quickly win. Many wars start that way. Few end as expected. Now, just over two weeks in, the window for declaring victory is closing. He can try to escalate, as some of his predecessors did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but that is no guarantee of success. Unless he gets lucky, his real choice may be whether to keep fighting or try to negotiate a messy compromise. Either way, the war Trump chose to start is no longer entirely his to control.