WASHINGTON: With President Donald Trump’s war against Iran now in its sixth month, this week’s flurry of threats and diplomacy has underscored the ever-tighter bind he finds himself in as he tries to extricate the U.S. from an unpopular conflict he originally claimed would last just weeks.
Trump is caught between an emerging interim deal being negotiated by Iran and Oman that would give Tehran control over the Strait of Hormuz it never possessed before the war, or following through on his warnings of sharp escalation, risking a more prolonged crisis.
The first option, analysts say, would grant Iran its biggest concession since the U.S. and Israel attacked it on February 28 and formalize, at least for now, the Islamic Republic’s supervision of the vital oil-shipping conduit, which the Trump administration had vowed to prevent.
The second path, likely a fresh wave of airstrikes, could be fraught with political peril for Trump ahead of November’s pivotal U.S. midterm elections, while seeming to offer no better chance of success than the earlier bombing that failed to bring Tehran to its knees.
Trump could instead choose to maintain the uneasy status quo. That would mean maintaining a blockade of Iran’s ports and periodically retaliating for any attacks on shipping. But this approach too would not offer Trump a face-saving way out of a conflict he had predicted would be over by mid-April.
“It’s a menu of bad options but Trump may have come to the realization that he can’t let this war go on endlessly,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Democratic and Republican administrations. “Something has to give, and that may be recognition of a new Iranian reality in the strait.”
A U.S. official said on condition of anonymity that any “temporary” shipping routes would be “without any impediments,” with no party overseeing transit.–Reuters
