Iran’s leadership is defiant. On Tuesday, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s parliamentary speaker, said that the strait would remain closed until Iranian assets frozen abroad were released, sanctions on Iranian oil were dropped, and U.S. and Israeli military operations fully ceased. A new round of hard-line appointments to top security posts by the new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei—who has been in hiding since his father, the former leader, was killed—may be a sign that the regime is prepared to wait out whatever Trump can muster. “Iran has come out of the war far stronger, not only in terms of regime stability, but more broadly, in terms of the self-confidence that it has,” Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies and international affairs at Johns Hopkins, told me. “So the glass for Iran is definitely half full, and, even if we don’t use definitive adjectives like ‘winning’ and ‘losing,’ it’s very clear that it’s half empty for the Americans.”
Trump came into the war on a high. The relative ease of his operation to remove Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan President, from office likely convinced him of the overwhelming primacy of American power. The conflicts that unfurled in the wake of the war in Gaza had also exposed Iran’s many vulnerabilities: Iranian proxies were toppled in Syria and humbled in Lebanon, and Israeli intelligence has repeatedly conducted successful assassination and sabotage missions within Iran. But Trump was overconfident and now finds himself unable to end a war that none of Iran’s neighbors wanted him to start.
American power has also been perceptibly diminished. The U.S. has burned through inventories of precision-guided and air-defense munitions, and seen its array of military bases in the region come under significant Iranian fire—which has also inflicted damage to civilian and energy infrastructure across the region. Some countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, have no love for Tehran, but recognize that Trump’s current belligerence may not be doing them any favors. A new tripartite defense alliance between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan—though publicly welcomed by Trump—is emblematic of a region thinking beyond the United States, and hedging against the uncertainty posed by both a resilient Iran and an aggressive Israel. “The larger shift is that Gulf capitals are no longer comfortable simply aligning behind maximum pressure. They increasingly want autonomy from both Washington and Tehran,” Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, told me. According to Nasr, “Everybody now sees America as less than it was before.” He views Trump’s travails as part of a “precipitous collapse of American power and American prestige” and says that “once this war is over, the U.S. is going to find the rest of the world much more difficult to herd around any coherent policy.”
The war is already deeply unpopular in the United States and has become a weight on Republican electoral prospects in the upcoming midterms. “Trump has trapped himself into an unwinnable war for America,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He seems shackled now by the sunk-cost fallacy that, because America has expended heavy resources, ammunition, and reputation in this war, it cannot pull back before a decisive win.” But Tehran seems to believe it can both outfox and outlast Trump. “Iran is now confident that it can absorb U.S. bombings, which seriously weakens any military threats the U.S. may issue in the future,” Gregory Brew, an expert on Iran and energy at the Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, told me. “In addition, the U.S. now looks broadly deterred from attempting more aggressive action against Iran, cowed by the risk of sweeping Iranian retaliation.”
This week, a sixty-day deadline for the United States and Iran to resolve larger differences—set in June as part of an earlier memorandum of understanding—elapsed with little fanfare. It was a mark of the fragility (and, frankly, the unseriousness) of the diplomatic round between the two sides. On Tuesday, Trump fumed in the Oval Office, demanding Iran raise “the white flag of surrender,” while threatening Oman—a key diplomatic intermediary—with military strikes because of its parallel negotiations with Iran over the handling of the Strait of Hormuz. He also lashed out at South Korea, justifying an astonishing decision to draw down military exercises with the country over Seoul’s apparent unhelpfulness in supporting Trump’s war in the Middle East. And then, in perhaps the most glaring illustration of his frustration, the President posted a bizarre map on Truth Social labelling the Strait of Hormuz as “U.S. territory.”
