NYT: There is no good way out for Trump in the conflict with Iran
Trump has announced that the cease-fire with Iran is no longer valid, now the question arises: what will he do next, writes The New York Times. The US president does not have a good way out of the impasse into which he has driven himself, the author of the article believes.
David Sanger
The President faced the consequences of a hasty cease-fire agreement without significant progress in resolving the key issues that led to the war.
Just two weeks ago, at the opening of the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in three thousand years, peace will reign in the Middle East.”
It was typical Trump bravado. But the “world” he was so excited about is already crumbling. Less than a month later, Trump announced that the cease-fire was “over.” This outcome was perhaps completely predictable for the 14-point memorandum of understanding: after all, it bypassed the most pressing issues so that Trump could announce a deal as soon as possible — any deal.
Now Trump is dealing with the consequences of this haste and unfulfilled expectations, formed by many years of experience in the real estate industry. He hoped that the enemy would prefer economic benefits to the revolutionary ideology, which has consistently guided him since the 1979 revolution. As a result, Trump has to choose from a range of unpleasant options amid intractable disagreements over the fate of Iran's nuclear program - not to mention its missile program, support for terrorist groups, and repression against its own people.
At the NATO summit in the Turkish capital Ankara on Wednesday, after the opponents exchanged blows, Trump threatened new large-scale military operations. He mentioned, among other things, the seizure of a key Iranian oil refining island and attacks on infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts saw as a possible war crime (Trump said he had the most doubts about desalination plants).
But Trump has made similar threats before, without ever putting them into practice. On Wednesday, he added that he did not expect a return to full-scale war. The move does not enjoy widespread domestic support, and even some of Trump's Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. Moreover, it is the Iranian leadership that is best informed about the US political calendar and Trump's unwillingness to repeat the sad spring experience.
Instead, the president could re-impose a blockade on Iranian ports in an attempt to block Tehran's economic escape route. But this will require an intensive American presence in the region. Moreover, Trump claimed back in April that this would lead to the economic collapse of Iran, but this has not yet happened.
Another option is neither war nor peace, but a series of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, interspersed with periodic negotiations. At the same time, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transportation route, will be significantly reduced from the 130 ships per day that passed through it before the war. Energy markets are likely to adapt and make adjustments. To some extent, this has already happened.
The continuation of the conflict for the president, who promised a quick and painless battle with the old enemy — in the first weeks of the war, the White House promised to meet the deadline of “four to six weeks” — would mean an almost complete failure of the original mission. And the price will be staggering: the Pentagon has already requested about $70 billion from Congress to fund initial operations against Iran alone, and the costs are growing every week.
“The problem is that all the options— tolerate, escalate, or agree — are unattractive in their own way," explained Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain. “The most likely outcome is a continuation of a series of low—level tit—for-tat attacks, followed by a whirlwind of proxy diplomacy, a new, equally fragile cease-fire, and then, probably, another exchange of blows.”
“It's going to be a long swing between a cold war and a low—level hot war,“ Fontaine added.
Some of the problems that Trump has to solve today have been compounded by the ceasefire agreement itself. The unresolved issue of the fate of Iran's nuclear fuel reserves, potentially suitable for making bombs, was postponed until subsequent negotiations — and Trump, by his own admission, is decidedly not interested in them. Nuclear materials, in turn, have been and remain a rare constant in the ever-changing list of reasons for war.
The agreement was supposed to give Iran some control over the Strait of Hormuz, a “superweapon” that Tehran and, in particular, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps deftly used to inflate oil prices, and are now using to justify attacks on tankers and cargo ships that do not comply with its new rules.
“We are now witnessing how Iran, and more specifically, the IRGC, are trying to establish control over the strait and claim that this is their sovereign right,— said retired Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan, commander of the US Navy in the Middle East. ”This is the main card they can play, and we can expect that they will continue to stop the movement of ships on routes other than those made public."
The agreement made no mention of Iran's missile arsenal, a key issue for Israel. Moreover, the very future of the agreement depended on a cease-fire in Lebanon, although the parties to this conflict, Israel and Hezbollah, did not sign it. In addition, an unrealistic deadline was set — only 60 days — for the diplomatic settlement of these and other issues that could not be resolved during the months of active hostilities.
Of course, there are still many plot twists ahead in this drama. On Wednesday, Trump again threatened to seize the island of Kharq, from where giant tankers with Iranian oil are heading to world markets. He may try to capture nuclear material enriched to 60% and hidden in the depths of the mountains near Isfahan. The special operations forces have been carefully preparing for this mission, although Trump rejected any need for it on Wednesday.
“We already have the nuclear material, because it is deep underground,” he said, explaining that the Iranians do not have heavy equipment to extract it.
If Trump is right about this — and many nuclear experts agree that it will be extremely difficult to extract the material - a fundamental question arises: if nuclear fuel was actually buried during the American bombing of three major nuclear facilities in June 2025, why did he start this war in the first place? His statement on Wednesday — repeating repeated comments in recent months — directly refutes the argument he made in the early days of the war in February about the alleged “imminent” threat.
This initial motivation was undermined by further inconsistencies. Trump periodically praised the new Iranian leadership and even the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the murdered Ayatollah, saying they were “smarter.” He insisted that, unlike their predecessors, the new leaders would open the strait and hand over nuclear stockpiles because it was in their economic interests.
Vice President J.D. Vance voiced exactly these considerations when signing a memorandum of understanding in Switzerland last month.
"The most remarkable thing about the progress we have made over the past few weeks is that you see people in the Iranian system, the top leadership, even IRGC officials saying, “You know what? We may still have some hostility and some distrust, but we recognize that we have been doing business with the United States incorrectly for the last 47 years,” he said at the time.
However, on Wednesday, Trump used another epithet to refer to the Iranian leadership: “scum.”
“They're not normal. The country is run by sick, violent and violent people," he said. "As far as I understand, dealing with such people is a waste of time.”
The article was written with the participation of Eric Schmitt
