Where Things Stand
Sixty-one days after Operation Epic Fury began, the war has settled into a structure neither side wants to call by its real name. The shooting has mostly stopped. Nothing else has been resolved.
A two-week ceasefire took effect on 8 April after Pakistani mediation. Trump has since extended it indefinitely. Both sides have accused each other of repeated violations. On 11 and 12 April, US and Iranian officials met face-to-face in Islamabad for twenty-one hours, the highest-level direct talks since 1979. They produced nothing. By 12 April Vance had publicly conceded no agreement. By 13 April the US Navy had imposed its own blockade on Iranian ports. By 18 April Iran had reimposed the Hormuz closure it nominally lifted the previous day.
This is the war now. A dual blockade with no agreed terms, no fixed deadline, and no visible off-ramp. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. The United States controls Iranian ports. Both sides are inflicting sustained economic pain on each other and on third parties who never asked to be involved. US Central Command (CENTCOM) has redirected 38 ships from Iranian ports. Iran has reduced Hormuz traffic to a trickle. The Pentagon has assessed that mine clearance alone could take six months.
Brent crude touched \$126 overnight on Wednesday, a wartime high and the highest level since June 2022. It closed Thursday at \$114 on news that Witkoff and Kushner would travel to Pakistan this weekend, combined with an Axios report that CENTCOM is preparing fresh military options for Trump. The dip is from a wartime high, not from a settled price. Brent is up roughly 60 percent since the war began. WTI closed Thursday at \$105. Goldman Sachs estimates that exports through the Strait of Hormuz have fallen to just 4 percent of normal levels. US headline CPI hit 3.3 percent in March, the highest since May 2024. Goldman Sachs has revised its 2026 headline PCE inflation forecast up by 1.25 percentage points. The European Central Bank has postponed rate cuts and warned of stagflation. Australia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and others are managing potential fuel shortages. Container shipping companies have suspended Strait transits. The UAE has announced it is leaving OPEC.
That is not a war winding down. That is a war that has changed shape into something more durable than the original engagement, and considerably worse.
The False Siren Calls
Trump has spent the past two months announcing breakthroughs that did not exist.
On 9 March he claimed the Iranian military had been destroyed and the Strait of Hormuz had re-opened. Neither was true. By 10 March, only fifteen ships had made it through.
On 23 March he said a “top person” in Iran had called him to make a deal. The IRGC-affiliated Fars News denied any negotiations had occurred. The Iranian foreign ministry said it was reviewing proposals delivered through mediators. There was no call.
On 1 April he claimed Iran had just asked the US for a ceasefire. Iran’s foreign ministry called the claim “false and baseless.” The IRGC said the strait would not be opened “through the ridiculous spectacle by the president of the US.” The same day he announced his intention to withdraw US forces within two to three weeks. No withdrawal followed.
On 8 April, after the actual Pakistan-mediated ceasefire was agreed, he declared at a press conference that the deal included Iran’s commitment that “there will be no enrichment of Uranium.” The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said within hours that Iran would not accept limits on its enrichment. The agreement Trump described did not exist.
On 25 April he cancelled the second round of Pakistan talks, citing Iranian “infighting” and a deal offer “that should have been better.” He told reporters that within ten minutes of his cancellation, Iran sent a “much better” paper. No such paper has surfaced. Four days later he reversed and announced that Witkoff and Kushner would go to Pakistan after all.
On 30 April he told Reuters that Iran “will be making an offer,” adding that he did not know what it would be. Iran has not confirmed any offer.
This is now a long enough record to be evidence rather than anecdote. His public statements about the war have a hit rate that is low and declining. They are not data about the situation. They are data about him. A specific subgenre of these statements is worth flagging: the “on the verge of a deal” post that cannot be falsified in the moment because the verge is always now. The Witkoff-Kushner trip this weekend is likely to produce the next one regardless of what happens in Islamabad; the most likely output is a Truth Social post that we are close to a historic deal, that Iran has finally come to its senses, that great things are about to happen. The deal will not arrive. The post will manage expectations and buy another news cycle. The pattern repeats. The Western press has nonetheless treated each new statement as potentially decisive, producing a recurring cycle of “diplomatic breakthrough” headlines followed within days by quiet retraction. The pattern has become its own news cycle.
The Receipts Arrived
On 8 April, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman published in the New York Times the most detailed reconstruction yet available of how the United States went to war. Their reporting draws on roughly 1,000 interviews for a forthcoming book. It identifies named participants, seating positions, and direct quotes from the Situation Room meetings of February 2026. The White House has not authenticated the details. It has not credibly disputed them either.
The picture the reporting paints is not one of sober deliberation that produced a flawed conclusion. It is one in which the deliberation never seriously occurred.
Netanyahu briefed Trump in the Situation Room on 11 February. When he finished, Trump responded “Sounds good to me.” Advisers interpreted this as a near green light. By the time Trump formally polled his senior team on 26 February, two days before he gave the final order, multiple advisers cited by the Times said he had effectively made up his mind weeks earlier. The poll was not deliberation. It was ratification.
Vance was the only senior figure who told Trump directly that going to war with Iran was a terrible idea. He warned that the war could cause regional chaos and untold casualties, break apart Trump’s political coalition, and be seen as a betrayal by voters who had bought the promise of no new wars. He was overruled. CIA Director Ratcliffe methodically dismantled the Israeli plan’s assumptions, calling regime change through a rapid strike “farcical.” Trump discounted the assessment. Defense Secretary Hegseth, the most enthusiastic advocate for war, told the group on 26 February: “We’re going to have to take care of the Iranians eventually, so we might as well do it now.” That sentence was the substitute for the strategic analysis that did not happen.
Tucker Carlson had warned Trump for over a year that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. A couple of weeks before the war began, Trump tried to reassure him by phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but it’s going to be OK.” Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is.”
That is the epistemology of the war, captured in a single exchange. Not strategic analysis. Not intelligence assessment. Just a feeling, on the part of a president, that things tend to work out for him. The room around him was structurally incapable of correcting that feeling because correction was not what the room was for.
The NY Times account closes one of the analytical questions that hung over my 30 March piece on this. I argued then that the pathology was groupthink with a group of one: a decision-making process collapsed to a single point of failure. The argument was inferential. The outcomes were visible. The process that produced them was not. The process is now visible. It was worse than the inferential case suggested. The dissent was real. It was crushed. The decision was made on instinct and then ratified by a straw-poll that discovered, surprise, that the room agreed with the president it had spent weeks watching make up his mind.
The Current Standoff Is Not Stable for Trump
Iran is suffering. The US naval blockade has prevented at least 38 ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports. Tehran is facing an oil storage crisis. Domestic unemployment is rising. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen publicly since the war began and is widely believed to have been wounded in the same strike that killed his father. The regime is genuinely strained.
But Iran’s economy was already wrecked when the war began. Inflation exceeded 40 percent in 2025. The rial had collapsed. The January 2026 protest crackdown killed thousands. The marginal cost to Iran of the US blockade is real but bearable, because the baseline against which it is measured is already catastrophic. And Iran has discovered something it did not have before the war: leverage over the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Hormuz tolls are a new revenue stream. The Iranian parliament is reportedly preparing legislation to formalise them and to exclude vessels from “hostile” countries. What began as wartime improvisation is becoming statutory.
Iran’s external position has also strengthened in ways that matter. Russia has offered to take its enriched uranium and is providing diplomatic cover. China has continued to buy Iranian oil and to oppose the reimposition of sanctions. Both have aligned interests in non-resolution. A standoff that bleeds the United States of attention, capacity and political capital is a standoff that suits Moscow’s Ukraine position and Beijing’s Taiwan position. The financial lifelines extended to Tehran are not charity. They are payment for a service Iran is providing by tying the United States down and depleting its munitions.
Trump’s clock runs faster. US headline inflation is at a two-year high and forecast to remain elevated through the year. Gasoline crossed \$4 a gallon at the start of April for the first time in nearly four years and hit \$4.30 on Thursday. Goldman Sachs estimates that 3.6 million barrels per day of global oil demand has already been destroyed since February as buyers pull back from elevated prices. UBS has warned that global equities are underestimating the fallout.
His approval rating has fallen to a second-term low. Silver Bulletin’s average has him at 39 percent approve, 57.7 percent disapprove, a net minus 18.8, around where he sat at the end of his first term in the immediate aftermath of January 6. AP-NORC has overall approval at 33 percent, with support for the war at 32 and approval of his handling of the economy at 30. Approval on cost of living has fallen to net minus 40, blowing past its previous second-term low.
The midterms are six months away. There is no rally-around-the-flag effect; the public never internalised the nuclear justification, and the proliferation of rationales produced no clear emotional response. Americans are paying real costs without feeling personally threatened, which is the politically toxic combination my March piece flagged.
Iran knows all of this. Every week, the price of any deal Trump could plausibly accept goes up. Tehran’s 28 April proposal made the asymmetry visible. Reopen the Strait. Lift the blockade. End the war. Defer all discussion of the nuclear programme to a future negotiation.
That offer is the analytical key. Iran is willing to give up almost everything except the latent nuclear capability. The 440 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium at Isfahan are the only thing Tehran will not trade. IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told the AP on 29 April that the bulk of the stockpile is still there, “entombed” by the bombing but, in his phrase, “accessible if there’s a wish to go there.” The motivation to weaponise has increased. The capacity has been buried, not destroyed. Iran has spent two months refusing to put it on the table because it is the one piece of the regime’s survival insurance the war has not been able to take away.
Trump cannot accept that offer. The war was justified on nuclear grounds. A ceasefire that explicitly defers the nuclear question concedes the central objective in exchange for a return to the pre-war oil flows the war disrupted in the first place. He has spent two months saying zero enrichment is non-negotiable. Hegseth, Graham, the Israel relationship and his own self-image all push against the climbdown.
Iran cannot offer more, because more would mean conceding the only thing the regime believes guarantees its survival. Trump cannot accept less, because less would mean admitting the war was for nothing. Both positions are internally rational. The intersection is politically inaccessible.
The Bellicose Standoff and Where It Leads
What Trump is running, today, is a pressure campaign. Carrots and sticks pointed at a single lever: Iran’s red line on enrichment.
The carrots are real and on the table. Sanctions relief, partial or full. The release of frozen Iranian assets held in third-country accounts. The implicit promise of post-war reconstruction money. A path back to the global financial system. The framing is that Iran can have an economic rehabilitation if it gives up the nuclear programme.
The sticks are the daily threats. Resumption of bombing. Power plants. Bridges. “A whole civilization will die” if Iran does not reach a deal. Marines and airborne units deployed to the region. CENTCOM briefing Trump on military options. The naval blockade tightening; thirty-eight ships redirected from Iranian ports. Hegseth telling European allies, in public, to “do less talking and having less fancy conferences in Europe and get in a boat.” The framing is that the alternative to the financial deal is destruction.
The whole apparatus is calibrated to break Iran’s nuclear red line. It has not broken it. Iran’s 28 April proposal made the asymmetry visible: everything else is on the table, the nuclear programme is not. The pressure campaign is not producing its objective. It continues anyway because the alternatives are worse for Trump than continuation.
There are three ways the bellicose standoff resolves. Trump’s political logic, more than his strategic preferences, will determine which.
The Long Grind. The standoff continues. The pressure campaign neither breaks Iran nor produces an exit. Daily threats, intermittent talks, the dual blockade running on, oil drifting higher, gasoline above \$4. This is the most likely near-term outcome and what Trump will choose for as long as he can, not because it is good but because the alternatives are worse for him. The Long Grind is sustained by a steady supply of “on the verge of a deal” posts that buy a news cycle each, manage expectations, and let Trump kick the can down the road without ever having to deliver the deal itself. The Long Grind becomes politically less sustainable as the months pass. Inflation persists. The global oil shortage intensifies. The midterm clock ticks. The Republican House caucus, already privately conceding the chamber is slipping, gets more anxious. By the autumn, the Long Grind is politically brittle. Something probably has to give before November.
Taking a Bath. Strategic retirement dressed up as a great victory. Trump accepts a financial settlement that defers or fudges the nuclear question. He calls it historic. He claims Iran has been brought to heel, that enrichment is paused, that the world is safer. The substance is the deal Iran has been offering since late April, with cosmetic adjustments. The Afghanistan template; he has done versions of this before. The barrier is psychological. He needs a deal better than Obama’s to save face, and Iran will not give him one. So the bath, when it comes, is a deeper bath than it would have been six months earlier. Every week he waits, it gets deeper. Taking a Bath becomes more likely as the Long Grind exhausts. By the autumn, with the midterm wreckage visible on the horizon, it becomes the instrumentally rational choice. Whether Trump can take a rational choice when it requires acknowledging the war was for nothing is the question that determines whether the third resolution becomes operative.
Another Vietnam. Bombing escalates to ground operations. Mine clearance, a contested landing somewhere on the Iranian coast, an extended military presence with no exit doctrine. This is the gamble. The best case is the decisive military outcome that gives Trump a sellable win, the historic victory that justifies the war retrospectively. The probability of the best case is low. Iran is ninety million people, mountainous terrain, asymmetric warfare experience going back to the Iran-Iraq War, and external backing from Russia and China. The modal case is a more bellicose version of the standoff with American casualties added, the worst political environment imaginable for the midterms, and an extended presence with no clear exit. The worst case is Iraq War Two with Vietnam features.
Trump can read this expected value. He will avoid Another Vietnam for as long as he can, because the modal case is genuinely worse for him than the Long Grind, and the worst case is worse than Taking a Bath. Another Vietnam is not his preferred resolution. It may be the resolution that happens anyway.
Three things keep it on the table. First, the room. Swan and Haberman documented the structure that produced 28 February: a small group, dominated by hawks, with Vance the lone forceful dissent. The same room would be presented with Another Vietnam when the Long Grind exhausts. Hegseth, who told the group “we might as well do it now” before the war, will tell them the same thing about the next escalation. The personnel signals matter. Vance is staying home from this weekend’s talks. Witkoff and Kushner are going. Both were on the eager-buyer side of the original decision. Vance was the lone forceful dissent then and is conspicuously absent now. If Trump were preparing the climbdown, he would push Vance forward as the cover. Vance kept in reserve is consistent with Another Vietnam being kept warm.
Second, an incident. An attack on US personnel that makes restraint politically impossible. Iran has been careful to avoid this so far; the Strait and Gulf infrastructure have been the preferred pressure points. They could miscalculate. A proxy could miscalculate. An Israeli action in Lebanon or Syria could trigger Iranian retaliation that escalates beyond either party’s intent. Another Vietnam does not require a deliberate decision. It can arrive through a tactical event that makes the deliberate decision unavoidable.
Third, Trump’s own reading of the dice. “Because it always is” was the epistemology of the war’s beginning. The same epistemology can produce its escalation. He convinces himself, against the modal expectation, that the decisive outcome is reachable. He has spent a lifetime betting on himself and winning. Lifetime patterns do not always survive contact with the specific situation that breaks them, but they shape the situations the bettor is willing to enter.
Congress may not stop him. The 60-day War Powers Act mark fell this week, with Congress disputing the exact date. Constitutional scholars note the war has entered, on the plain text of the statute, an illegal phase without congressional authorisation. The administration’s response has been to argue that the 8 April ceasefire pauses the clock; Hegseth made the case in two days of testimony this week, the first congressional appearance by the Defense Secretary since the war began, and survived withering Democratic questioning without yielding the position. Republicans control both chambers, have scuttled successive resolutions to rein in the war powers, and the leadership of both Thune in the Senate and the House Republican conference have indicated no intention of bringing authorisation legislation forward. The handful of Republican senators expressing unease - Murkowski, Curtis, Moran, Hawley - have not forced a vote and are not enough to force one. Whether they would force a vote against an active deployment with American forces engaged is unproven and trending in the wrong direction. The constitutional mechanism exists. The political will to use it does not, on the present evidence.
The Coalition That Wasn’t
There is a second war happening underneath this one, and it has further to run than the first.
When Trump took the United States to war on 28 February, he was not building a coalition. He was running a quick decisive operation, fresh from the 48-hour Venezuela campaign, expected to wrap in four to six weeks. Allied participation was not part of the plan because the original plan did not require it. By mid-March that plan was visibly failing.
On 15 March he publicly demanded that NATO and China help reopen the strait, the moment the missing coalition became politically necessary. The demand was refused. Europe declined to police the strait. NATO produced no operational support. The Gulf states whose oil exports were on the line refused to host or participate. China, which buys most of the oil that transits Hormuz, refused to lean on Iran. The coalition Trump did not build in February was the coalition he could not summon in March.
The Gulf states have been worse for Trump than the European silence, because they have been quietly working against him. Bloomberg reported on 2 March that the UAE and Qatar were privately lobbying allies to help persuade Trump to reach for an off-ramp. The Council on Foreign Relations documented in late March that Gulf leaders did not want the war and had privately expressed frustration with the United States and Israel. The UAE is now leaving OPEC. None of the Gulf states has agreed to host or participate in any operation to reopen the strait. The forces Trump would need for Another Vietnam would have to come from somewhere, and the somewhere is increasingly the United States acting alone.
China has continued to buy Iranian oil. Russia has offered to take Iran’s enriched uranium and is providing diplomatic cover. Both have rejected reimposed sanctions. Both are extending Iran the financial and political space to wait Trump out. Neither will pay any cost for doing so that Trump can credibly impose.
Trump probably believes this is temporary. The same instinct that assumed allies would back the original strikes is now likely operating on the blockade. He probably thinks Europe and the Gulf states will come around as the global oil crisis deepens, that pain produces compliance, that the world will eventually be forced to ratify what it would not endorse. The pattern from February is being repeated. The misread is being repeated with it. Pain in this episode has produced divergence rather than compliance. UAE leaving OPEC, Gulf states quietly lobbying for an off-ramp, European capitals refusing to participate in any reopening operation, Trump pulling US troops out of European bases in retaliation. The blockade does not bend the world toward him. It bends the world away. He may be the last person in his administration to see this.
This matters for two reasons.
First, it shapes the resolution path in real time. Another Vietnam becomes harder, not easier, as it becomes more obviously unilateral. A US ground operation to reclaim Hormuz, conducted without Gulf hosting, without European support, without NATO ratification, against a counterparty backed by China and Russia, is not the same operation as one conducted with allied participation. It is a larger commitment with fewer escape routes. The room of his advisers may push it; the personnel may signal it; the absence of allied support makes the gamble worse.
Second, and more lasting, it shapes the post-war reckoning. Trump does not let perceived slights pass. The first-term Article 5 wobbles, the trade wars with allies, the abandoning of the JCPOA partly because Obama negotiated it, all show the pattern. NATO refused to bleed for what he framed as a shared interest. Europe is likely to pay for that, through some mix of tariffs, withdrawn security commitments, public humiliation of individual leaders, and pressure on the alliance’s structural foundations. The pattern is already visible in real time: Trump told CNN on Wednesday he is considering reducing US troop levels in Spain and Italy, explicitly citing disagreements with European allies over the Iran war. The Gulf states are likely to pay through harder weapons deals and reduced security guarantees. None of this requires fresh decisions; it requires only that Trump keep being Trump, with a fresh and substantial grievance to draw on.
The structural damage to the transatlantic relationship is the war’s most lasting consequence outside the Middle East. Even if the oil crisis is somehow averted, the alliance damage is not. European capitals watched the Swan and Haberman reporting too. They saw what the decision room looked like. They have to assume the same room will produce the next decision, and that they will again be presented with a fait accompli and asked to ratify it. The lesson Europe is taking from this war is that the United States cannot be relied on to consult before acting and cannot be relied on to forgive non-participation after the fact. That lesson outlasts any ceasefire.
Where This Points
There is no clean off-ramp visible from where I sit. The slow march is to a real global oil crisis, not because anyone wants it, but because the resolutions narrow and the room that narrows them is the same room Swan and Haberman documented in February. Markets have started to price this. Brent at \$126 on Wednesday is not a forecast about a crisis in six months. It is the visible expression of a crisis happening in real time, with the relief rallies on diplomatic noise getting smaller and the underlying direction unmistakable. Analysts are openly modelling \$140 to \$150 if disruptions persist.
The CNBC reporting on this weekend’s talks notes that the administration originally said operations would conclude in four to six weeks. We are at sixty-one days and counting. The administration has reframed the timeline. The reframing will continue. The underlying reality will not.
This is how it looks at the moment. A bellicose standoff with carrots Iran will not take and sticks that have not broken its red line. The standoff continues for as long as Trump can sustain it, which is less long than he would like, because the political clock runs against him. The Long Grind exhausts. Taking a Bath becomes the instrumentally rational choice. Whether Trump can take the rational choice when it requires acknowledging the war was for nothing is the question that determines whether Another Vietnam happens instead. He will resist that turn for as long as he can, because the modal case is worse for him than the standoff and the worst case is worse than taking a bath. The advisers around him will keep the option warm. An incident could force it. His own reading of the dice could choose it. Congress may not stop him.
Underneath all of this, a transatlantic alliance that has watched the United States act unilaterally and will be punished for not joining in, regardless of which path Trump eventually takes. None of this is the war he thought he was starting. None of it is the war the decision-making process around him proved capable of avoiding. The cost of the decision made in the Situation Room on 11 February is still being totted up. Most of it has not yet been paid.
Housekeeping: A Note on My Earlier Pieces
The first piece in this series, The Most Dangerous Scenario, argued that the most strategically coherent rationale for the war was preventing the worst proliferation scenario imaginable: a dying regime transferring fissile material to a non-state actor. I said the bear case was that the transfer had already happened, and that everything depended on intelligence we could not see. The IAEA’s late-April assessment partly retires the bear case. The bulk of the stockpile is at Isfahan. So the worst version of the scenario, on the available evidence, has not been confirmed. The frame still holds. The nuclear question is still everything. Reconstitution is the post-war problem the war has guaranteed rather than solved.
The second piece, Groupthink with a Group of One, made an inferential argument about the planning failure. Swan and Haberman have now provided the documentary support. The diagnosis was right. The decision-making collapse was real, named, and witnessed. The receipts arrived in April.
The mistake was the postscript. On 1 April, Trump announced he would withdraw within two to three weeks. I treated the signal as analytically meaningful. I read it as either genuine exhaustion or tactical bluff. The third option was that it was just words. That is what it turned out to be. Three weeks later there was no withdrawal, and a fresh round of “Iran has just asked us for a deal” claims that Iran kept denying. The record over two months is now long enough to see clearly. His public statements about the war have a hit rate that is low and declining. They are signals about him, not about the situation.
From here on, when Trump says the strait is open, I will check whether ships are moving. When he says Iran has called, I will check whether Tehran confirms. When he says a deal is imminent, I will check whether either side has moved on the actual gap. The boy cried wolf too many times. The next time he cries it, the appropriate response is to look at the sheep.
This is the third piece in a series on the 2026 Iran War. Previous pieces: The Most Dangerous Scenario (17 March) and Groupthink with a Group of One (30 March). The Swan and Haberman reporting referenced is “How Trump Took the U.S. to War,” New York Times, 8 April 2026.
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