Trump’s war with Iran has delivered military destruction but no victory, trapping Washington in an escalating conflict with mounting global costs.

Now in its fifth month, the war with Iran continues after the collapse of a memorandum intended to halt the fighting and clear the way for a permanent peace agreement.

The United States and Israel have inflicted severe damage on Iran’s conventional military and defense industry since launching their campaign on February 28. Yet Tehran retains a formidable arsenal of missiles and drones, which it has used against U.S. bases, Gulf states, and commercial vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. military says its latest strikes targeted Iranian air-defense systems, coastal radar installations, missile and drone sites, command centers, and maritime assets. But the distinction between tactical success and strategic failure is becoming increasingly difficult for the Trump administration to conceal. Washington has destroyed much of Iran’s military infrastructure without compelling Tehran to accept its demands.

Instead, the war has allowed Iran to exert unprecedented leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supplies once passed. Even with much of its conventional navy damaged or destroyed, Iran can still threaten commercial vessels with missiles, drones, rockets, and small boats operating from scattered positions along its coastline.

That reality has produced a debate inside the administration over what comes next. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly favored expanding military operations, while President Donald Trump’s sweeping and sometimes contradictory statements appear designed to pressure Tehran and keep Iranian leaders uncertain about Washington’s intentions. The result has been strategic confusion, leaving allies and adversaries unsure whether the United States is preparing to escalate or searching for an exit.

The latest fighting has again brought traffic through Hormuz almost to a standstill. Iran attacked ships using a southern corridor promoted by the United States, including a Qatari tanker carrying liquefied natural gas. Tehran’s message was unmistakable: No route through the strait can operate safely without Iranian consent.

Iran wants commercial vessels to use a channel close to its coast and intends to impose transit fees following negotiations envisioned under the June memorandum. Washington, without coordinating with Tehran, encouraged ships to use an alternative route along the Omani coast. Iran responded by declaring the strait closed, while the United States reimposed its blockade of Iranian ports on July 15 and attacked an empty tanker it said was heading toward Iran.

American airstrikes have targeted military positions along Iran’s coast in an attempt to weaken its control over the waterway. But Tehran insists its ability to strike ships from a distance does not depend on fixed installations. The continuing attacks on tankers suggest that claim cannot be dismissed.

Iran’s retaliation has extended beyond the strait to U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. The latest phase of fighting has proved among the deadliest of the conflict for U.S. forces, with the death toll rising to 18. The war has killed thousands of people, mostly in Iran and Lebanon.

The conflict has also become a political liability for Trump. Polls show his approval ratings sinking amid voter anger over high gasoline prices, while Republicans worry the war could cost them control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

The danger now is that the war will spread from one global energy chokepoint to another.

Iran has pressed Yemen’s Houthi movement to threaten shipping around the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthis have deployed missiles and drones near the waterway and announced what they describe as a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. Shipping companies using Saudi ports have been warned that their vessels could be targeted anywhere.

The timing could hardly be worse. With Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has diverted much of its energy trade through the Red Sea port of Yanbu. A sustained Houthi campaign would endanger the Middle East’s principal alternative outlet for oil exports. During the Gaza war, Houthi attacks prompted major shipping companies to reroute vessels around Africa, adding considerable time and expense to global trade. Simultaneous disruption of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb would be far more consequential.

The Houthis’ confrontation with Saudi Arabia also threatens to unravel a fragile truce in Yemen. After accusing the kingdom of bombing an airport under their control, the Houthis fired missiles at Saudi territory on July 13, breaking four years of relative calm. Riyadh has promised to respond forcefully, particularly as coordination between Tehran and the Houthis deepens. The United States says Iran has provided the group with weapons, funding, and training, including support channeled through Hezbollah. Tehran denies the accusation.

These developments reveal the logic behind Iran’s wartime strategy. Faced with the overwhelming conventional power of the United States and Israel, Tehran sought to widen the conflict and distribute its costs across the region.

From the opening days of the war, Iran launched missiles and drones not only at Israel but also at Gulf states hosting U.S. military installations. Governments across the region condemned Iran, but none was eager to join the war directly.

Tehran calculated that they lacked both the capacity and the political appetite to confront Iran on Washington’s behalf. Geography supplied an additional advantage: Iran’s position along Hormuz gave it a means of imposing enormous economic costs even while absorbing sustained military punishment.

In that limited sense, Iran had a strategy. The United States did not.

The Trump administration entered the war without a stable definition of victory. Its objectives shifted between destroying Iran’s nuclear program, weakening the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reopening Hormuz, defending Israel, and perhaps even encouraging regime change. None was matched by a credible political plan for ending the conflict.

Air power could destroy bases, missile launchers, radar systems, and command centers. It could not eliminate Iran’s capacity for dispersed retaliation, force ships safely through Hormuz, or produce a government in Tehran willing to surrender on American terms. Economic pressure proved similarly ineffective. Iran had already endured years of sanctions, while the war gave the regime a powerful nationalist argument: Whatever Iranians thought of their government, their country was under attack by two foreign powers.

The Islamic Republic entered the conflict facing internal unrest and profound public discontent. Rather than collapsing under bombardment, the state survived, and the Revolutionary Guard emerged with even greater influence. There is no contradiction in recognizing the regime as repressive, corrupt, and brutal while rejecting the fantasy that U.S. airstrikes can produce a democratic successor. Regime change would likely require a massive ground invasion, followed by the even harder task of creating a stable political order.

The United States has repeatedly learned this lesson, usually at ruinous cost. It has also repeatedly forgotten it.

Trump came into office promising to avoid open-ended foreign entanglements. Yet he entered a war without an imminent threat to the United States, a coherent withdrawal plan, or broad international support. NATO allies refused appeals to help force open Hormuz without a peace agreement and an internationally authorized mission. European and Gulf governments now fear Washington will either prolong the war indefinitely or accept a weak agreement to escape it.

Retaliation is not a strategy. Each American strike invites another Iranian response, generating demands for further U.S. retaliation. The administration is caught in an escalatory cycle from which it cannot easily withdraw without appearing defeated.

That dilemma helps explain Trump’s shifting rhetoric. He wants a decisive victory, but no realistic path to one exists. He wants Iran to capitulate, but Tehran believes survival itself constitutes victory. He wants Hormuz reopened, but Iran can threaten it even after its coastal installations are bombed. And he wants to leave the war without admitting that the United States entered it on false assumptions.

Iran has not achieved a conventional victory. Its military infrastructure has been devastated, thousands of people have been killed, and its economy has suffered immensely. But Tehran has denied Washington the clean triumph it expected.

More important, it has demonstrated that even a weakened state can impose disproportionate costs on a superpower by exploiting geography, asymmetric weapons, allied movements, and the vulnerabilities of the global economy.

The war has also strengthened Iran’s ties with China and Russia. Both view its survival as strategically useful in challenging American influence. The longer the conflict continues, the stronger their incentive to deepen their assistance. Smaller regional states watching Washington struggle to control the consequences of its intervention will also hedge and search for alternatives.

The conflict is altering assumptions about maritime power. Hormuz is an international waterway through which commercial vessels are entitled to pass, but legal principles matter little when missiles, drones, and mines make passage prohibitively dangerous. Iran may not possess uncontested control, but it has established an effective veto over normal shipping. Washington cannot formally accept such authority without suffering a strategic defeat, yet it has found no military means of permanently eliminating it.

The global economic consequences are already severe. Oil, natural gas, and fertilizer prices have climbed as shipping through Hormuz has dwindled. The World Bank expects the conflict to reduce global growth to its weakest rate since the pandemic. Developing economies face higher borrowing costs, weaker growth, and another wave of inflation. Renewed fighting—or successful Houthi disruption of the Red Sea—could push oil prices much higher and tip vulnerable economies toward recession.

Yet neither Washington nor Tehran can impose its preferred outcome. Iran does not trust the United States to honor another agreement after the June memorandum unraveled. The Trump administration cannot accept Iranian demands over Hormuz without acknowledging the limits of American power. Israel remains determined to weaken Iran and Hezbollah, further complicating any attempt to separate the Gulf war from the conflict in Lebanon.

Pakistan continues to mediate, and diplomatic channels remain open, however strained. That offers some hope, but another interim arrangement will merely postpone the crisis unless the parties confront the political disputes driving it.
The United States and Iran will eventually have to compromise. All wars end, if not through victory, then through exhaustion, stalemate, or the recognition that continued fighting costs more than negotiation.

That moment has not yet arrived. Washington still believes additional force might restore its lost leverage. Tehran believes endurance will extract greater concessions. Every missile strike, tanker attack, and threat against civilian infrastructure makes miscalculation more likely.

The central tragedy is that this was avoidable. The United States chose a war against a country that posed no immediate military threat to the American homeland. Iran bears responsibility for its attacks on neighboring states, military bases, and commercial shipping. But Washington initiated a conflict whose consequences it neither anticipated nor controlled.

The war will end eventually. Before it does, the Middle East—and much of the world—will continue paying for the illusion that overwhelming firepower is the same thing as strategic wisdom.