Now Trump and the Iranians find themselves in a familiar predicament. The latter are once again facing US military attacks on their territory, highlighting their inability to defend their territorial sovereignty. With the renewed blockade, their oil revenues – the Iranian regime’s lifeline – are once again cut off.
Meanwhile, Trump once again faces a choice between escalation, which would carry domestic economic and political costs, and accepting some kind of solution that keeps a hostile Iranian regime in power.
“We were back where we were originally, and the question was: who has more patience?” said Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Iranians, who will not be able to export oil, or the United States and other countries using Persian Gulf oil?”
After months of worry that the war in Iran was sparking a new round of popularity-crushing inflation, Trump received good news Tuesday about falling consumer prices.
A resumption of full-scale hostilities, or even an escalation of the conflict, would inevitably push oil prices back to previous highs, jeopardizing this positive trend and once again putting Republicans in a precarious position ahead of the midterm congressional elections in November.
On Monday, after Trump posted on the social network Pravda, the price of a barrel of oil jumped almost 10% – the biggest one-day increase in six years.
For the first time, Trump’s blockade helped force the Iranians to the negotiating table and set the stage for a memorandum of understanding and the basis for a more lasting peace.
Now, according to Kelanic, the president’s influence on Iran may decrease.
“He’s already tried what he can do easily and reliably,” she said. “He can attack military targets, regime targets. “He’s done this before, and it didn’t make Iran give up.”
The latest target Trump has proposed is Mount Kirk, a heavily fortified nuclear research site south of Tehran. However, there is conflicting evidence about the site’s value and whether US airstrikes could cause significant damage to the tunnels located deep beneath the granite rock.
If Trump’s latest moves ultimately end in another ceasefire and face-to-face talks, the underlying, hard-to-reconcile differences – over Hormuz, over the location of Iran’s nuclear program, over Iran’s influence in the Middle East – will persist.
“I think there is room here for negotiations on a Strait of Hormuz agreement,” Abrams said. “But not a return to the Memorandum of Understanding.”
As the war approaches its fifth month, Trump again noted Monday that other American conflicts, including the Vietnam War, have dragged on for years.
However, it was this quagmire that hampered and ultimately ended the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson and damaged the global position of the United States for at least a decade. It’s a fate Trump is certainly hoping to avoid.
His supporters are also tired of repeating the “forever wars” in the Middle East that Trump condemned in previous presidential campaigns.
But with a broken memorandum of understanding, a ceasefire and the looming prospect of further conflict, the end of the Iran war appears no closer to resolution than it was in the weeks after it began.