‘No clear strategy’: how Trump went from shock and awe to wait and see in Iran

Original article by Andrew Roth in Washington

Nearly eight weeks after Donald Trump launched his assault on Iran, the White House has shifted from a strategy of shock-and-awe bombardments and leadership decapitation to a plan of sustained economic pressure as it tests the will of a regime practiced over decades at wars of attrition.

Since the negotiations stalled, the White House has begun to shift its messaging to say it is willing to wait to strike a more durable deal with Iran – despite the growing economic toll inflicted on the world economy by the closure of the strait of Hormuz. The reason, senior officials have said, is because the joint US-Israeli strikes were so successful that they have fractured Iran’s leadership and prevented a new consolidation of power.

“Don’t rush me,” Trump told reporters on Thursday when asked how long he was willing to wait for Iran to respond to the US’s latest ceasefire proposal. “We were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years … I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”

Reminded that he told people in the US that the war would end in four to six weeks, Trump added: “Well, I hoped that, but I took a little break.”

The whiplash of Trump’s diplomacy – as well as the growing cost of the war – has unsettled career officials at the Pentagon and state department, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as foreign allies who increasingly view the US as a destabilising force.

The White House’s latest strategy coalesced earlier this week during a meeting of Trump’s national security team – including Vance and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state: continued economic pressure on Iran to open the strait while waiting for Tehran to provide a unified response to US offers for a ceasefire deal.

But the lack of a sustained strategy to end the Iranian war – and in particular to address the closure of the strait of Hormuz – has convinced US allies that the White House is running out of ideas to manage the threat from Tehran.

“We don’t see a clear strategy – and we don’t think that there is one,” said one senior European diplomat in Washington. “And we are worried we will be left with the fallout.”

Increasingly, Washington has signaled that it will punish its Nato allies for failing to support it more openly – while they suffer the worst economic consequences from the closure of the vital waterway. “We are not counting on Europe but they need the strait of Hormuz much more than we do and might want to start doing less talking and having less fancy conferences in Europe – and get in a boat,” said Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, during a press conference on Friday.

While oil futures have remained stable, an energy crisis is spreading across the world from Asia to Europe, with airlines beginning to cut thousands of flights as supplies of jet fuel run critically low. Former negotiators have said that the closure of the strait of Hormuz is a powerful new bargaining chip for Iran that will complicate any hope for a new deal that would allow the US to walk away from the conflict and claim victory.

And with Republicans bracing for a brutal midterm election in November, the administration is increasingly facing a time crunch to open the strait of Hormuz and stabilise markets and prices before the expected economic shock.

Yet even as a third US aircraft carrier arrives in the region – the highest number in decades – and other military assets continue to flow in, it appears the White House is hesitant to seek a military solution to reopening the waterway.

The US could theoretically begin escorting ships through the strait of Hormuz in an operation that has been loosely compared to the 1980s Operation Earnest Will to protect Kuwaiti tankers traveling through the strait of Hormuz during the “tanker war” period of the Iran-Iraq war.

But the US was not a combatant in that conflict, just one factor that could fail to persuade shipping companies and insurers that a US escort would provide sufficient protection. And over four years nearly 450 ships were struck in the strait in a costly period that left more than 400 civilians and dozens of US sailors killed.

“We have done this in the past,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington DC-based thinktank. “The whole thing was extremely costly. It did keep the oil flowing, but I just don’t know if there’s the appetite for that risk today.”

And that emerged before the US faced the growing threat of drone strikes in the region, which have depleted prewar stockpiles of key munitions that would be needed for other conflicts. According to an analysis this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US has expended up to 1,430 of its estimated prewar stockpile of 2,330 of Patriot missiles. Each costs nearly $4m.

“The diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk,” read the report. “A war against a capable peer competitor like China will consume munitions at greater rates than in this war. Prewar inventories were already insufficient; the levels today will constrain US operations should a future conflict arise.”