Donald Trump says he wants to make a deal—but the Battle of Hormuz may be coming whether he wants to fight it or not. Over the last 24 hours, the president’s rhetoric has alternated between bullishness on the progress of negotiations and threats of military escalation. This being President Trump, sometimes he has alternated within the same sentence, as when he told the press on Sunday evening, “We’re doing extremely well in that negotiation but you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.”
The president has every incentive to get a deal. The military is dangerously low on some of the high-end munitions needed to keep China and Russia down in their respective strategic holes. The restriction of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will only do more violence to markets with time. As that economic clock ticks, an American political clock is running as well. The American people were promised a four- to six-week war. Soon enough, even MAGA will start glancing furtively at its watch.
Wars, the saying goes, are easy to start but hard to end. The Iranian regime, even in its damaged condition, gets a vote. It could yet agree to a deal. And should it refuse to agree to terms acceptable to Trump, the president could conceivably attempt to declare victory while leaving Iran with de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz and in possession of its “nuclear dust,” as he likes to put it. But after all his past rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the idea of allowing Iran to retain a nuclear stockpile will be a hard sell—and leaving Tehran in effective control of the Strait is simply not strategically feasible. After all this, the Iranians would retain the ability to torture the global economy with mischievous glee.
