Excerpts:

President Trump often celebrates his unpredictability, declaring that it keeps allies and adversaries alike off balance.

But in recent weeks, he has seemed trapped, his presidency gradually consumed by a war he cannot find his way out of.

He has discovered limits on his power that he could have scarcely imagined as he began full combat operations on Feb. 28, when he set out goals for a swift end to Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the country’s government.

Five months later, those goals remain almost entirely unaccomplished. And Mr. Trump, once confident that overwhelming force would enable him to pursue in Iran what he proudly called the “Venezuela model” — a change of government to one amenable to U.S. control — is now hesitant to plunge back into major combat operations that his intelligence agencies assess are unlikely to work as well in Tehran.

Having entered the conflict with little strategy for victory, he now is struggling for a face-saving way to exit.

A month ago, he exuded confidence that he had found the way to declare victory. On June 17, Mr. Trump signed with a flourish — at the Palace of Versailles, where World War I officially ended in 1919 — a hastily written, 14-point cease-fire agreement.

At the time, Mr. Trump said that a new, more “reasonable” set of Iranian leaders had seen the light, and were being driven by economic interests.

“I believe they have had enough,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times on June 14. He argued that he was able to get the deal because he was threatening a massive attack, prompting Iran to fold.

“We were going in for the big one, and they said, ‘Please don’t do it, we will make a deal.’ And we made a deal right after that,” he said.

It lasted only two weeks.

The Iranians who negotiated the deal appeared to have been in conflict with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose forces opened fire on ships that refused to use the channel of the Strait of Hormuz that Iran controls. While Mr. Trump said in the recent interview with The Times that Iranian leaders wanted billions of dollars in Iranian overseas funds unfrozen and oil shipments flowing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps seems more interested in demonstrating control.

Now Mr. Trump has three main options: military escalation, economic crackdown or declaring victory and getting out.

Each option seems unpalatable, for different reasons.

On Friday, after signaling all week that he was planning a return to major combat operations in Iran, he pulled back. In briefings, according to several officials, aides cast doubt on whether a massive bombardment, one that cut off electricity and went after Iran’s resilient missile capability, would result in Iran’s return to meaningful negotiations.

But his real hesitation may come from the fact that the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors. In April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that half the U.S. inventories of some key interceptors might have already been used. After 13 consecutive nights of attacks and counterattacks this month, those numbers, some officials say, have reached critically low levels, and were a factor in Mr. Trump’s decision in recent days to hold off on a major escalation in the war.

U.S. officials now worry that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China could be factoring the shortages into calculations of their next moves, in Ukraine and Europe for Mr. Putin and perhaps against Taiwan for Mr. Xi.

Mr. Trump’s second option is to let sanctions sink in, hoping that further crackdowns on oil exports, enforced by the renewed blockade of shipments into and out of the Strait of Hormuz, will have their intended effect.

But those are slow, and Mr. Trump has been predicting economic collapse in Iran since he first pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called crushing controls on Iran. Eight years later, the regime lives, under a new leader who could be more dedicated to a covert nuclear program.

That strategy may yet work. But it will require a costly, continuous U.S. military presence, and the possibility of on-again, off-again exchanges of fire that risk more American lives and more attacks on Gulf allies.

The third option is to declare victory and go home. Mr. Trump seemed to be headed that way a month ago, when he said he had chosen a cease-fire and negotiations because he did not want to risk a depression that would invite comparisons to Herbert Hoover.

But exiting comes with costs. If Mr. Trump leaves Iran with its near-bomb grade nuclear fuel buried under rubble and with the Strait of Hormuz under de facto Iranian control, he will have failed to address the problem that triggered his attack and created a vast new one for energy markets.

It would define his legacy. And it would make clear that there are more constraints on his power than he believed in January, when he declared that his reach was limitless.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/politics/trump-trapped-in-iran-war.html