Today marks the semianniversary of the beginning of the Iran War. The most hysterical predictions have not been borne out, as they seldom are, but the reality has been unpleasant enough. A huge amount of American materiel has been expended without accomplishing the (admittedly unrealistic) political goal of ousting the ayatollahs, or even getting them to acquiesce under duress to some settlement advantageous to the United States. Energy flows from the Persian Gulf region are still constricted, and Brent crude prices are still floating between $85 and $90 per barrel. Iranian retaliatory strikes have sufficiently savaged American bases in the Middle East to render the U.S. military hesitant to use them. As ungemütlich as this is for us, it’s worse for our regional partners; to take just one recent illustration, data reported Wednesday show that Qatari natural gas exports are down by 96 percent since the outbreak of the war.
So what’s the plan here? More of the same, evidently. We are maintaining our blockade on Iran—that is to say, closing Hormuz to open Hormuz—and ramping up sanction pressure yet again. You might be forgiven for skepticism; we have been sanctioning Iran with varying intensity for nearly 50 years, and, while this has certainly damaged Iran’s economy quite badly, it has not proven to be much of a winner for getting desired political outcomes. In his Monday announcement of “economic D-Day” (seriously, where do we get these names?), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made some ominous allusions to the idea that nations that do not cooperate with isolating Iran might be cut out of the dollar system. That would be something new, but is also the sort of thing that you can do only once and tends to invite exciting unintended consequences. (One also wonders whether it would actually work; the most comparable action, cutting Russia out of the SWIFT system in 2022, was supposed to bring the Bear to its knees in a month or less, but here we are all these years later.) Pakistan, which has served with zeal if not finesse as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, has already said that it will not cooperate with the new American sanctions, so an exciting test case may be in the offing.
The intensified economic warfare on Iran may produce some movement, albeit not necessarily the sort the White House wants. The rumor swirling around Washington is that the administration, in a very bare concession to political reality, is holding off on further military action until after midterms—which ought to be a cause of doubt for those who would like to think that this can be finished off quickly with a sufficient application of force. But Iran also gets a say in when things turn hot again. If the Iranian economy becomes untenably dysfunctional, it is entirely plausible that Iran will take the escalatory initiative and start hitting American and allied assets in the region again, including perhaps energy infrastructure, as a way to retaliate against economic weapons for which it has no equivalent.
Despite these unattractive circumstances, the negotiating table does not seem like a very loved piece of furniture these days. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’s “in no hurry” to cut a deal with Iran, and Karoline Leavitt got to spend her last morning as White House press secretary touting “Operation Economic Outcast” (again with these names!) and reassuring the good folks watching Fox News that “no negotiations are happening.” High officials from Pakistan and Qatar visited Tehran this week, and it seems unlikely that (despite the disavowals of the Pakistani side) restarting diplomacy was not on their agendas. Yet there seems to be, to put it gently, little appetite on the American side, and not much more on the Iranian side. The U.S. wishes to return to the status quo ante in the Strait of Hormuz and secure some form of nuclear deal, although whether this might be limited to guardrails on weaponization or extend to the full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program is still obscure at this late stage. Iran wants to keep hold of the only effective stick it has found for hitting the Americans—that is, control of Hormuz—and continues to insist on its privileges under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. (Although one wonders whether the antinuclear fatwa is under reconsideration chez Mojtaba these days.) Iran also wants some kind of restitution for the economic damage it has suffered, which, depending on how Bessent’s campaign goes, may in fact be an existential concern for the Islamic Republic. It is difficult to see how these circles can be squared, short of a major reconsideration of premises by one party or other—a reconsideration that has probably been rendered politically impossible by the war. When you give and take in peace, that’s a deal; when you give and take in war, that’s a capitulation.
It’s been six months. There’s no obvious end in sight. Can this go on forever?
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