Two full months have passed since the outbreak of open conflict between the United States and Iran, and the core justifications Washington initially laid out for launching military operations, along with its stated minimum benchmarks for declaring victory, have collapsed into incoherence. The confusion has grown so severe that senior US officials now claim the conflict already ended in an American victory nearly a month ago, when a temporary ceasefire took effect.
Few examples illustrate the utter failure of Donald Trump’s catastrophic Iran war more starkly than the remarks Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered to reporters on May 5. Rubio told press that Washington’s top remaining priority was restoring the Strait of Hormuz to its pre-war status: open to all commercial traffic, free of naval mines, and unburdened by unauthorized transit fees. This mission, he insisted, was a standalone defensive and humanitarian operation, one that would only escalate back to full war if US vessels came under direct attack. That same day, US ships were targeted. What Rubio failed to acknowledge was the glaring contradiction: the humanitarian operation he touted was only necessary because of the same war he had already declared a success.
The day’s absurdities did not end there. Within hours of Rubio’s briefing, Trump announced he was suspending “Project Freedom” — the US Navy’s planned tanker escort mission through the strait — just one day after it launched. The president cited “great progress” toward a negotiated settlement with Iran. In a pattern that has repeated throughout the conflict, global stock markets initially rallied on the news of a potential breakthrough before retreating to previous levels as the lack of concrete progress became clear.
While there is no question Trump is eager to put the disastrous war behind him, especially ahead of his scheduled May 14 trip to Beijing, he has vastly overstated the scale of any diplomatic breakthrough. All Iran has agreed to do is consider a 14-point framework for 30 days of negotiations aimed at reaching a durable end to hostilities — nothing more.
A far more credible explanation for Trump’s sudden cancellation of Project Freedom is that the initiative was already clearly doomed to fail. Of the roughly 1,500 commercial vessels stranded on either side of the closed strait, most ship owners refused to risk transit even with US naval protection. Meanwhile, Iran’s retaliatory strikes on commercial shipping and missile attacks against the United Arab Emirates had already put the fragile ceasefire itself at serious risk.
Washington faces a core bargaining obstacle: Iran has made clear that talks cannot formally begin, and the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen, unless Trump first agrees to lift the economic blockade on Iranian maritime trade. The US embargo has already inflicted severe damage on the Iranian economy, and Tehran views its removal as a logical reciprocal gesture to match any opening of the strait. Iranian leaders also recognize that the prolonged closure of the strait — one of the world’s most critical energy and trade chokepoints — is already causing lasting structural damage to the global economy, a reality that strengthens their negotiating hand dramatically.
Even if formal negotiations get underway, the same fundamental barrier that blocked a deal before the war still stands. Trump lacks the disciplined, well-resourced institutional policy framework that Barack Obama relied on to negotiate the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, the agreement Trump has long sought to surpass. Obama’s landmark deal required 20 months of intensive, detailed diplomacy to finalize; Trump has neither the patience, technical policy expertise, nor established direct diplomatic channels to replicate that achievement.
The war has also introduced new layers of uncertainty. Iran’s internal decision-making process has grown more fragmented, and hardline elites who tolerate higher levels of military and economic pressure have gained greater influence. Most importantly, Iran has now fully recognized the extraordinary leverage it holds through its ability to shut down a critical artery of the global economy.
On the core issue of Iran’s nuclear program, any eventual agreement will likely be a messy compromise. Iran could agree to a temporary moratorium on uranium enrichment, without committing immediately to shipping its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium out of the country or diluting them — a fudge that would allow negotiations to continue. If relatively more moderate factions in Tehran gain the upper hand (a very large if), this would be a straightforward concession to make: Iran’s geographic advantages and advanced ballistic missile program already provide a credible deterrent against any future large-scale attack.
The open question remains whether anything short of total Iranian surrender on the nuclear issue will be acceptable to Trump, and whether he is willing to push back against inevitable fierce opposition from Israel to blurring Washington’s stated red lines. If no compromise can be reached, Trump has already threatened to resume bombing campaigns at a far higher intensity than before. Yet analysts widely doubt Trump has the political appetite for a renewed escalation, and even if he does move forward, there is little reason to believe that any amount of US and Israeli bombing can force the Iranian regime into total capitulation.
Trump’s constantly shifting war aims and frantic scramble for an exit strategy make one conclusion unavoidable: the entire US military enterprise in Iran has been a colossal strategic failure. The war will shape Trump’s political legacy, reorder the balance of power in the Middle East, and deepen the humanitarian suffering of the Iranian people — all outcomes that are the exact opposite of what Trump repeatedly promised to deliver.
The conflict has also shattered confidence among Washington’s regional allies in the US government’s ability to provide security and predictability. It has alienated long-standing traditional US partners, who have been blamed and punished for failing to resolve a crisis they did not create and could not fix. The combined US and Israeli military campaign has further entrenched hardline rule in Iran, made future negotiation far more difficult, and completely sidelined moderate political voices within the country.
If negotiations do ultimately succeed, the limited gains that Trump and his advisors have touted — the destruction of portions of Iran’s military industry and naval fleet — are technically real. But the damage to military industrial capacity will likely only be temporary, and the degradation of Iran’s navy has done nothing to meaningfully restore freedom of navigation through the strait.
The only bright spot in this saga is that Trump’s brief experiment with unilateral military adventurism — an aberration even within his own inconsistent political trajectory — appears to be coming to an end. This analysis is by Christian Emery, Associate Professor of International Politics at UCL, republished with permission from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
