Top American foreign policy scholars have delivered a blunt assessment of the outcome of the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran, concluding that the U.S. has suffered a catastrophic defeat after an unauthorized military campaign launched five months prior.
In an interview with Australian journalist Tom Switzer on Sunday, prominent University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer directly addressed what has become a defining vulnerability of the Trump administration’s position: the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy shipping chokepoints. The waterway, which carries roughly a fifth of global oil trade, has been largely closed to commercial traffic since late February, when the U.S. and Israel launched a joint bombing campaign against Iran. Today, Tehran now controls access to the strait, and is demanding shipping companies pay transit fees to reopen it – a development Mearsheimer says the White House has no leverage to reject.
When asked why President Donald Trump appears willing to accept Iran’s terms, Mearsheimer offered a straightforward explanation: the U.S. has no remaining options to reverse its defeat. “He has no choice. He lost the war. This is a devastating defeat for the United States. Can you tell me what the United States should do to regain leverage over Iran? I actually think you can’t tell me because we have no solution,” he said.
Mearsheimer went on to break down why Trump’s public threats to escalate military strikes against Iran carry no credibility, pointing to two critical constraints on U.S. action. First, the U.S. military has depleted its stockpiles of precision munitions after months of bombing. Second, key U.S. regional allies in the Persian Gulf have flatly rejected any further escalation, warning that Iran has publicly pledged to retaliate by destroying critical Gulf infrastructure including major oil production facilities and desalination plants that supply drinking water to Gulf populations.
Mearsheimer’s grim assessment was echoed by Vali Nasr, a leading international affairs professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who agreed that Tehran now holds the strategic upper hand in the conflict. Nasr argued that the era when the U.S. could force Iran into total submission via external pressure has permanently ended. He noted that Iran’s demand for concessions in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not overreach, as many in Washington’s foreign policy circle still claim; it is simply Tehran exercising the strategic advantage it gained after Trump launched the unprovoked war.
“Many in the Washington foreign policy establishment had yet to understand this fact,” Nasr added. “In reality, Iran is not overplaying its hand. It’s just playing its hand.”
Independent analysis from defense policy expert Daniel DePetris, a fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, published Monday reinforced the scholars’ conclusions. DePetris confirmed that the U.S. has no viable alternative but to accept Iran’s current terms for transit through the strait. He traced the current crisis directly back to Trump’s decision to launch the military campaign without the required congressional authorization, a move that handed Iran an immediate strategic opportunity to leverage its geographic control of the Strait of Hormuz.
While DePetris acknowledged that the current status quo is far from ideal for U.S. interests, he added that it became inevitable the moment the war was launched. “Trump’s war handed Iran the perfect excuse to leverage its geography, and the Iranians didn’t hesitate to do so,” DePetris wrote. “Over time, the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to Iran’s more aggressive posture toward its neighbors writ-large, has become something far more valuable: a strategic card Iran can play whenever Trump threatens to accelerate military operations.”