Donald Trump now governs between enemies who want him to fail, and allies who demand impossible victories. He confronts that predicament as he announces that an agreement reopening the Strait of Hormuz is now “largely negotiated.”
Trump faces attacks from both directions at once. Republican allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham fear an ignominious retreat. “If a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict because it is believed that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism,” Graham warned on X over the weekend, “then Iran will be perceived as being a dominate [sic] force requiring a diplomatic solution.” Such an outcome, he added, “will be a nightmare for Israel.” Meanwhile, Democrats who opposed the war from the start depict the move toward diplomacy as an admission of futility. Senator Chris Van Hollen gloated that the emerging framework amounts to “a return to the prewar status quo.”
Adversaries claim that Trump’s diplomacy vindicates their depiction of the war as needless and reckless, while supporters demand an unconditional victory he cannot realistically deliver. Both sides misrepresent the strategic logic of the moment.
The Democratic critics refuse to acknowledge the war’s substantial achievements, foremost among them the severe degradation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and one of the leading independent experts on nuclear proliferation, assesses that Tehran went from near-certainty of the ability to build a nuclear weapon within months, to facing far longer timelines with substantially lower odds of success.
