The War Trump Keeps Ending
Tehran knows how to turn Trump’s impulsiveness into an endless war.
Over lunch last Tuesday, a colleague asked the question now hanging over nearly every discussion of Iran: How does Trump get out of this war?
I deflected. Donald Trump, I said, thinks war is a Steven Seagal movie when it is more often Black Hawk Down. In his version, American power arrives without warning, removes the villain, and the credits roll with no consequences to ponder.
It wasn’t a particularly poignant question. Most of us have been asking it for weeks — and lately asking louder. At Friday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump offered no clarity for a war he has repeatedly declared finished: “We’ll be hitting them very hard and, you know, at some point they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” Officials said strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure — possibly with Israel joining for the first time in weeks — could come within days.
Then, late Saturday, Trump called them off — contingent, he said, on both sides being able to “rapidly” reach a deal. Saudi Arabia’s state media reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had pushed for the deescalation. Iran’s state media said nothing about having requested a pause.
Developments since the weekend didn’t answer my colleague’s question. Trump and Iran have been here before. In June, the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding to suspend the fighting while they negotiated something lasting. As we all know, nothing was resolved, and the war soon resumed.
So, when Trump says “rapidly make a deal,” past precedent does not suggest peace but rather an intermission.
Tehran denies it is negotiating with Washington, and nothing it has said suggests it is ready to surrender something of consequence: its control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, its regional proxies, its missile and/or nuclear program, or some combination of all of these.
The one negotiation Iran does acknowledge is with Oman, and it points the other way. News services are reporting an emerging arrangement with Oman that could reopen shipping through the strait while formalizing a measure of Iranian control over it. If implemented on the terms Iranian officials describe, the deal would give Tehran strategic leverage it did not have before the war.
That leaves Trump facing the same problem in a sharper form: accept an outcome that falls short of what he demanded or reject it and return to military escalation. Either choice buys Tehran time, and time is what has kept this cycle going.
Time allows Iran to preserve its leverage, exhaust American patience, and wait for Trump to confront the same choice again. If negotiations stall, he becomes the president who paused an attack and received nothing in return. If he loses patience and orders another strike, Trump looks unfocused and reactionary.
That is the strategic advantage Iran has seized. It does not need to defeat the United States on the battlefield. It needs only to keep presenting Trump with situations in which restraint can be portrayed as weakness.
Trump has particular difficulty leaving such challenges unanswered. An attack on an American base, a missile aimed at an ally, or another disruption in the Gulf becomes not merely a military problem but a test of his personal resolve. Iran can exploit that instinct, knowing that every American retaliation prolongs the war, consumes additional resources, and imposes further political and economic costs without necessarily bringing Washington closer to an achievable settlement.
Nor can Trump easily claim that Iran alone bears responsibility for the confrontation. The United States and Israel began the war. Tehran will continue to portray its actions as resistance to a conflict imposed on it, even as it widens that conflict and raises its costs.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keep trying to settle the “is it over” question through vocabulary — a bit of an Obi-Wan mind trick, insisting to Americans that these aren’t the droids they’re looking for. The war has ended; what follows are combat operations, retaliatory strikes, the unfinished work of securing the Strait of Hormuz. A pause contingent on an emerging arrangement that may reopen the strait while expanding Iran’s control over it is the newest addition to the list.
Most people won’t measure this war through sorties flown or the semantic gap between a “campaign” and a “response.” They’ll measure it through the household budget. In April, nearly seven in ten Americans named fuel prices as their top concern about the conflict; by June, two-thirds said rising prices had hit their finances; in July, 79 percent expected the war to drag on while only about a third supported it.
By that measure, the war is not over.
Nor should anyone assume the midterm elections will supply the missing endpoint. Trump has said he doesn’t care about them, and there’s reason to believe him — a rout that costs Republicans Congress would bring investigations, but it won’t necessarily change a president who treats criticism as persecution rather than signal.
Congress holds the power of the purse, but cutting funds gets harder, not easier, while troops remain exposed and the Strait of Hormuz stays contested; any appropriation for missile defense can be framed as protecting forces already in harm’s way. Lawmakers could oppose the war while still financing its continuation.
Richard Nixon eventually met a moment like the one this war is waiting for. In August 1974, days after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and other Republican leaders told the president his support in the Senate had collapsed and that removal was now certain — and Nixon accepted what the evidence had already made clear.
It is hard to picture a similar delegation walking into this White House. Cabinet members owe their jobs to affirming Trump’s judgment, not challenging it. And military advisers can warn that further strikes will deplete interceptors or have hit the limits of their usefulness. But Trump will likely still decide his instincts are better — the same instincts he trusted over the warnings that preceded this war in the first place.
So back to the question that I was asked: How does Trump get out of this war?
I still do not know. But an unconfirmed deal that resembles an earlier “understanding” both sides allowed to collapse is unlikely to provide the answer. It gives Tehran more time and another opportunity to watch Trump decide whether patience or another strike makes him look less like a president being managed.
I would prefer to be optimistic. But what comes next may look much like June: a pause, a stalled negotiation, a provocation for which no one accepts responsibility, and Trump returning to television to promise, once again, that this is the moment Iran bends to his will.
Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.
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"Tehran denies it is negotiating with Washington, and nothing it has said suggests it is ready to surrender something of consequence..."
It says a lot when there are people who are more likely to believe what Tehran is saying about the war than what the administration says.