The Trump administration believes it has turned the tables on Iran. Washington assesses that the rerouting of maritime traffic through the Omani corridor, combined with a global shift away from Persian Gulf oil, has reduced the effectiveness of Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, the U.S. blockade has sharply constrained Iran’s ability to sell its oil. The result, in Washington’s view, is a status quo that imposes greater costs on Iran than on the United States.
That calculation changes the strategic equation. Rather than being forced to accommodate Iranian demands, President Donald Trump now believes he can afford to wait Tehran out. For the first time since the war began, the White House has concluded, time is working in America’s favor.
Assuming that assessment is correct, the more important question is what Trump intends to do with this newfound leverage. If Washington interprets Iran’s vulnerability as an opportunity to extract capitulation rather than to negotiate a durable settlement, the result is more likely to be another round of war than an end to the conflict. Tehran has already demonstrated that when confronted with a choice between surrender and escalation, it will choose the latter. Giving Iran the same choice again is therefore unlikely to produce a different outcome.
The only way to turn this unexpected shift in the balance of leverage into a political victory is through diplomacy. If Washington’s assessment is correct, it now has an opportunity to use its leverage to secure a compromise that addresses its core interests while giving Tehran sufficient reason to accept an agreement. If, instead, the administration pursues maximalist demands, it risks converting a moment of leverage into another cycle of war.
Historically, however, Washington has tended to make precisely this mistake. Whenever U.S. policymakers have concluded that time and leverage are on their side, they have often treated Iranian weakness not as an opening for compromise, but as an opportunity to seek capitulation. The danger is that Trump will repeat that pattern. He will mistake leverage for victory and turn a potentially favorable negotiating position into the continuation of the tragedy that is US-Iran relations.
Trump failed militarily, but thinks he can win economically
America has run out of military options. The clearest indication is that the Trump administration has stopped striking Iranian targets even as Tehran continues to attack ships transiting the Strait. On Monday, an Iranian attack killed a sailor aboard a vessel using the southern corridor. Yet Washington did not respond militarily – even though the second round of the war began precisely because the administration had declared that it could not accept Iran firing on ships.
According to Reuters, U.S. forces have used virtually all of their global stockpile of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) during the five-month Iran conflict. Moreover, roughly 65% of Patriot interceptors, 38% of THAAD interceptors, and almost half of the Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missiles have been expended.
The depletion of these stocks appears to have forced Trump to abandon its pursuit of a military knockout and instead shift the burden of economic pressure onto Tehran. That strategy, in turn, appears to be producing results faster—and to a greater degree – than the administration anticipated.
Hellbound and Down 