By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (Reuters) – With President Donald Trump’s war against Iran now in its sixth month, this week’s flurry of threats and diplomacy has underscored the ever-tighter bind he finds himself in as he tries to extricate the U.S. from an unpopular conflict he originally claimed would last just weeks.
Trump is caught between an emerging interim deal being negotiated by Iran and Oman that would give Tehran control over the Strait of Hormuz it never possessed before the war, or following through on his warnings of sharp escalation, risking a more prolonged crisis.
The first option, analysts say, would grant Iran its biggest concession since the U.S. and Israel attacked it on February 28 and formalize, at least for now, the Islamic Republic’s supervision of the vital oil-shipping conduit, which the Trump administration had vowed to prevent.
The second path, likely a fresh wave of airstrikes, could be fraught with political peril for Trump ahead of November’s pivotal U.S. midterm elections, while seeming to offer no better chance of success than the earlier bombing that failed to bring Tehran to its knees.
Trump could instead choose to maintain the uneasy status quo. That would mean maintaining a blockade of Iran’s ports and periodically retaliating for any attacks on shipping. But this approach too would not offer Trump a face-saving way out of a conflict he had predicted would be over by mid-April.
“It’s a menu of bad options but Trump may have come to the realization that he can’t let this war go on endlessly,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Democratic and Republican administrations. “Something has to give, and that may be recognition of a new Iranian reality in the strait.”
Responding to Reuters’ questions, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity that any “temporary” shipping routes would be “without any impediments,” with no party overseeing transit.
CHOKEHOLD ON SHIPPING
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has insisted that the strait, where Iran has had a near-chokehold on a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments since the start of the war, must remain an open international waterway not controlled by Iran and free of tolls or fees.
But Trump has previously contradicted some of Rubio’s assertions about the war, and analysts say he could do so again.
With U.S. gasoline prices high, his own approval ratings low and the war deeply unpopular with the American public, the president’s room to maneuver is increasingly limited, they say.
As the conflict has dragged on, Trump’s bluster has done little if anything to force Iran to give ground, and analysts say it is looking more likely that the president could be the one making the biggest compromises.
Reopening the strait is seen as a prerequisite for a return to negotiations between Iran and the U.S., which the Trump administration wants to focus on Iran’s nuclear program, the main declared target of the president’s military campaign.
The question remains whether the U.S. would be ready to accept any arrangement worked out between Iran and Oman, which sit on opposite sides of the strait.
The proposed terms would give Tehran some control over ships entering the Gulf through the strait, a senior Iranian source and two regional officials told Reuters. Trump has said a deal reopening the waterway is imminent, but Iranian officials have said details remain to be resolved.
Even if an Iran-Oman pact is sealed and U.S.-Iran talks resume, experts are skeptical about the chances for a final peace agreement based on the memorandum of understanding the U.S. and Iran signed in June but which quickly unraveled. That preliminary deal had also given Iran some sanctions relief from the start, which drew criticism from some of Trump’s fellow Republicans.
Trump administration officials have increasingly accepted that the conflict likely will still be going on in some form by the time of the midterms, a White House official said on condition of anonymity. In some states, early voting begins as soon as September.
This would pose further political risks for Trump, who campaigned for a second term on promises to avoid foreign interventions and focus on Americans’ economic concerns, as his Republican Party struggles to keep control of Congress.
The U.S. official told Reuters that Trump’s decisions on Iran are not guided by “fluid opinion polls.”
MAIN WAR GOALS UNACHIEVED
Though Trump has regularly claimed victory for having killed many of Iran’s leaders and degraded its military capabilities, most analysts agree that the president has been stymied on many of his goals for the war.
He said on Saturday he canceled plans for new large-scale attacks after Middle Eastern partners asked him to give diplomacy another chance, but at the same time he threatened to hit hard if the effort failed.
Some analysts suggested Trump’s climbdown may have also been driven by concerns about depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles. Trump, however, has denied the U.S. is running low on munitions.
Even so, Trump issued a new contradictory message to Iran on Wednesday. “I’d rather make a deal because I don’t want to kill people,” he told a rally in Las Vegas. “But at some point we’re gonna.”
Iran has warned Washington’s Gulf allies that any new U.S. strikes would trigger retaliation against their energy infrastructure, five sources with knowledge of the discussions said.
Jonathan Panikoff, former deputy U.S. intelligence officer for the Middle East, said China, Russia and North Korea are watching closely.
“They are learning what U.S. limitations are going to be for years to come,” he said.
Even some Iran hawks who have mostly backed Trump’s war are advising caution.
“The Islamic Republic is trying to force President Trump into a lose-lose proposition before November,” Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a hardline anti-Iran think tank in Washington, wrote on X.
The Trump administration should avoid “rushing into anything” and recognize “where the U.S. does and doesn’t have leverage,” he said.
(Reporting and writing by Matt Spetalnick; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis)
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