WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and Iran are back to bombing every day in a bid to control the Strait of Hormuz. And neither is backing down, showing the limitations of President Donald Trump’s reliance on escalating airstrikes to bend Tehran to his will.
While the Trump administration says it is open to diplomacy, Iran so far has refused to loosen its grip over the crucial oil shipping corridor in the Persian Gulf. It is raising questions about the strategy for the next phase of the conflict as intensifying attacks have collapsed an interim ceasefire deal, left additional American troops dead and sent U.S. gasoline prices back up — posing new problems for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
Even with glimmers of hope for talks, the sides could be headed back to all-out war, with Trump warning that “every time Iran kills an American Soldier” going forward, “they will pay for that killing many times over.”
The renewed escalations reflect "a fundamental misreading of the Iranian psyche and a lack of learning” from previous fighting, said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“I think it’s driven by a calculus on either side that they can double down on military escalation as a way of breaking the impasse and getting the other side to relent,” Yacoubian said. “The danger, of course, is that the more escalatory it becomes, the harder it will be to seize any potential opening back to diplomacy.”
The Trump administration says the door to diplomacy is open
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. is still open to negotiating, telling reporters Sunday night that Iran continues "to send signals that they want to talk, that they want to negotiate, but their behavior is what we’re responding to. And their behavior is they’re launching missiles and drones at ships” in the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world's oil normally passes.
“The United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution, and we’ve tried multiple times with Iran, and we’ll continue to try," he said. "If that door opens, we’ll be happy to see it open.”
Trump is focused on making Iran pay for the recent deaths of U.S. troops, violations of the interim deal reached last month and attacks on ships in the strait, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official said that military strikes on Iran would continue until Trump decides otherwise, but that talks between the countries also would go on.
For some outside observers, the administration appears to be struggling to find an off-ramp, both militarily and diplomatically.
“This administration currently is flustered,” said Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat once involved in past nuclear negotiations with Tehran and now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “It really doesn’t have a coherent and consistent strategy as to how to extricate itself from this quagmire.”
There are some limitations to Trump's air war
The U.S. military can only accomplish so much as it ramps up attacks on Iran, experts say.
The conflict has demonstrated the limits of relying solely on air power, said Christopher Preble, a scholar at the Stimson Center think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy. But he noted that sending in ground troops would be unpopular with many Americans and members of Congress.
“It seems that President Trump certainly has the capability to continue to bomb, and Iran will have the capability to continue to keep the strait closed — or closed well enough,” Preble said.
David Schenker, a former official in the first Trump administration who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the renewed strikes on Iranian infrastructure are a repeat of attacks during the early weeks of the war. And those did not result in Iran’s capitulation.
“The U.S. hit 13,000 targets in the first 6 weeks of the war, and this didn’t sway Iran to take a knee,” he said.
Retired Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under President Joe Biden, said previous wars such as Vietnam showed the limitations of air power alone.
“Generally, you have to couple air power with ground operations, sometimes naval operations as well, and certainly space today,” he said.
When launching the war on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel struck many fixed targets identified before the conflict began. But Iran had a long time to prepare for the attacks by concealing and dispersing weapons.
“So the easy targets are pretty much gone,” Kendall said. “They can hide ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and small air vehicles pretty easily. So it’s a very hard job to try to suppress that kind of a threat over a period of time. And that’s why they’re still able to attack not just ships in the Straits, but also our bases in the region and so on.”
Diplomacy has struggled with a lack of trust between the US and Iran
A diplomatic solution also could prove elusive.
Eyre, of the Middle East Institute, said the Trump administration has shown no preference for “actual diplomacy,” relying instead on close advisers with little international relations experience while outsourcing some of the work to mediators such as Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt.
“We’ve got a tough road ahead of us, but it theoretically could be done,” Eyre said of potential negotiations to end the conflict. “Unfortunately, there is so little mutual confidence in the other side. There’s so little bilateral trust between the U.S. and Iran that it makes everything so much harder.”
Both Schenker and Yacoubian said recent comments from Trump, Rubio and their Iranian counterparts reflect some openness to diplomacy.
Yacoubian pointed to the “measured” response from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the recent killing of U.S. service members in Jordan, indicating a possibility for an off-ramp. Iran’s release last week of an Iranian-American woman who had not been allowed to leave the country also showed a sign of goodwill from Tehran, she said.
But these small, positive signals could quickly become moot if the decision by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels Monday to announce a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia expands to a complete shutdown of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
That, Yacoubian says, could constitute “a perfect storm of disruption” for the already precarious global economy.
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