No easy way out

THE US increasingly seems to be mired in a no-win war against Iran.

With the conflict in its second month, not only has Iran shown the resilience to resist and conduct effective asymmetric warfare but its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has given it extraordinary leverage over global energy markets and the global economy.

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, has come under mounting pressure at home and abroad. None of America’s allies — other than Israel — are prepared to back or get drawn into his military misadventure. America is internationally isolated in the war while domestically, rising anti-war sentiment is reflected in the recent massive nationwide protests against Trump’s policies.

Trump himself has been oscillating between talking about an exit from the war and saying the US will “blast Iran back to the stone age”. In his primetime TV address last week, his tone was particularly aggressive. Speaking to a sceptical domestic audience, he said the military operation was “nearing completion” but before that Iran would be hit “extremely hard”.

In recent days, he has also struggled to find an off-ramp. But he is caught in a bind of his own making. If he decides to exit from the war in the prevailing situation, with Iran having the upper hand, it will be seen as a defeat. If he continues the conflict, it will mire the US in a protracted war with no clear end and no sure outcome. Already the war’s economic fallout has plunged global markets into turmoil, sent energy prices spiralling and threatened a global recession, which will also hurt the American economy.

The disingenuous and conflicting statements Trump has made during the course of the war were repeated in his nationwide address. He claimed all his war objectives had been met because Iran had been “obliterated”, but then pledged to escalate the conflict. At the same time, he declared talks with Iran were “ongoing” while offering no details. The main emphasis of the speech, however, was on escalation not diplomacy. This validated the doubts expressed repeatedly by Iranian leaders about Trump’s lack of seriousness in negotiations.

Caught in a bind, if Trump orders a ground offensive that will be the biggest blunder.

The situation Trump finds himself is a consequence of a series of miscalculations he and his team made before and during the war. They assumed the Iranian government would capitulate in a few days. That didn’t happen. Decapitation of Iranian leaders was expected to plunge Iran into chaos. It didn’t. They thought Iran would not be able to withstand the combined military might of the US and Israel. It did. Washington also didn’t anticipate Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf countries. Or for that matter targeting of GCC states’ energy infrastructure and its damaging consequences for US allies whose security it committed to protect but failed to do.

Trump’s national security team underestimated Iran’s resolve to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz. The scenario emerging from this was also not contemplated by US officials. All this underlined Trump had no strategy and certainly no plan to deal with the consequences of the war. Even when the war didn’t go Trump’s way his military officials kept insisting the US was on course to meet its military goals — a throwback to the past when the US military kept telling their political bosses, for 20 years, that America was winning in Afghanistan.

With pressure mounting on Trump, he has been issuing ultimatums to Tehran, which have left Iran unmoved. He then had to extend deadlines for Iran’s “surrender”, denuding such threats of credibility. The latest deadline he set is for April 6 by which time Iran must agree to a deal otherwise, he said, the US military would target Iranian power grids as well as oil facilities. His latest pronouncements, coming in the midst of thousands of additional US troops being dispatched to the Gulf, have strengthened the view that he might order a ground offensive to take over Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal. This would be a very risky operation, if not a blunder, that would provoke Iran, advantaged by geography, into a fierce response, which could result in American casualties. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Trump, in characteristic style, said “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we won’t” and then suggested that if it was seized the US “would be there for a while”.

Trying to seize and hold Kharg Island or other Iranian islands close to Iran’s coast, would be the road to ruin. It would place American lives at risk but not strike a decisive blow to change the course of the war and force Iran to ‘surrender’. Tehran is well prepared for such an attack. As Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and other Iranian officials have said, their forces were “waiting for American soldiers” and will “rain fire” on troops seeking to invade Iranian territory as well as “punish” US’s regional allies. This would widen the war and propel it into a more dangerous, open-ended phase whose fallout on energy markets would be severe.

What the war has shown is that military might is not enough. It produces hubris but not the outcome sought. Meanwhile, US inability to protect its Gulf allies has exposed to them the sharp limits of relying on the American security umbrella. That did nothing to deter Iran from striking US bases and other targets on their soil. For Trump the response of Washington’s European allies must have come as a shock. Despite his entreaties to them for help in his war effort, they declined. Several European countries denied use of their airspace and US bases. A frustrated Trump lashed out at Nato countries, mocked European leaders and threatened to quit Nato.

This prompted France’s President Emmanuel Macron to reject Trump’s criticism of Nato, decry his unserious approach to the war and assert “When we are serious, we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before”. This rift between the US and its European allies is unlikely to soon mend.

There will be dire consequences of the war for the global economy and especially for economies of the Global South. But perhaps the biggest fallout of the war will be to America’s international standing and its credibility in the region and beyond.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2026