- Markets dip as Trump softens Strait of Hormuz ultimatum
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Early this morning, with Asian markets sharply down and oil tankers idling in the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump offered Iranian leaders a familiar mix of threats but also a reprieve. What had been, only days earlier, a 48-hour ultimatum—reopen the strait or face the destruction of energy infrastructure —softened into something more elastic: a five-day extension for what he described as “very good and productive” talks with Tehran.
The contours of the talks were not immediately clear, though Trump suggested while leaving Palm Beach this morning that both he and “the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is” should control the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. He boasted of “major points of agreement” and assured reporters that Iran, like the United States, wants “very much to make a deal.” Otherwise, he added, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
It was, by his telling, progress. By Tehran’s account, it was fiction.
The gap between Trump’s claims and Iran’s categorical denials underscores how little control either side has over the conflict—or its narrative. The White House is attempting to manage a large-scale military confrontation with an undefined exit strategy—a confrontation that is unnerving markets. As military strikes fail to reopen the waterway and allies worry about the expanding conflict, the administration is facing the limits of unilateral action.
Three foreign officials with knowledge of the U.S. efforts told us that Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has communicated with the Iranian government through Pakistan and other regional intermediaries in an effort to get the embattled regime to agree to demands regarding its nuclear program and uranium-enrichment efforts. They said that the U.S. presented a 15-point plan—based on the 15-point proposal presented to the Iranian government last year—to give the weakened regime a chance to concede and spare itself further bombardment. These officials, like others we spoke with, did so on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
Vice President Vance spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today about efforts to restart talks with Iran, a person with knowledge of the discussions told us. Vance, whose long-held isolationist views have put him at odds with some in the administration—including the president—may also take part in talks in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in the coming days, this person said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in a statement that the situation is fluid and that any “speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.” She added that the administration would not negotiate the conflict “through the press.” Iranian officials insist that there are no negotiations. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the Parliament speaker, dismissed Trump’s claims as market manipulation—they are an attempt, he said, to “escape the quagmire” and to reassure oil traders rattled by the strait’s closure.
The result is a war suspended between escalation and exit, its terms of victory as undefined now as they were at its outset.
Trump’s aides had previously urged him, advisers have told us, not to issue any ultimatums or deadlines that the U.S. would have difficulty enforcing—guidance that he followed for a time, even as his threats toward Tehran grew more belligerent. But the president grew frustrated late last week when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and refused to reopen it, even under heavy American and Israeli bombardment.
The strait’s closure sent oil prices soaring and stock markets tumbling, and it unnerved Republicans facing close elections this fall. (Trump has often taken the stock-market indexes to be the most important metric of presidential success.) By Saturday, Trump was seething that NATO allies had refused to help secure the strait—and that he had received criticism and negative news coverage for announcing that he was glad that Robert Mueller had died, two advisers who were aware of the president’s mindset over the weekend told us. That night, Trump issued his 48-hour ultimatum to Iran.
[Read: How much pain is Trump really willing to endure?]
But Iran showed no signs of budging, and some of Trump’s advisers and U.S. allies in the region warned that destroying Iran’s power infrastructure would be a mistake, one of those advisers and two other people familiar with the conversations told us. U.S. allies and experts warned that a strike of that nature might prompt Iran to attack its neighbors with much of its remaining arsenal.
And still, there would be no guarantees that the strait could be swiftly reopened. Allies also cautioned that extensive damage to Iran’s infrastructure might produce a failed state at the war’s end, which could create a refugee crisis and a dangerous breeding ground for terrorism and violence.
Since late last month, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed much of Iran’s senior leadership, the military campaign has moved quickly (but not smoothly) toward some of the administration’s discernible objectives. American forces have hit missile sites, naval assets, and fortified positions along Iran’s southern coast near the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has said that the bombing of Kharg Island, a centerpiece of Iran’s energy infrastructure, completely destroyed the island’s military sites, though oil facilities were conspicuously untouched.
The strait, effectively closed by threats of Iranian mines, drones, and attacks on ships, has proved more difficult to reopen than to threaten. Shipping traffic has dwindled. Insurance costs have spiked.
Trump is known to pay close attention to financial markets, and he announced the five-day extension just as Wall Street opened this morning. The markets immediately rebounded, and the price of oil fell. The president acknowledged the link to reporters soon after. “The price of oil will drop like a rock as soon as a deal is done,” he said. “I guess it already is today.”
One former administration official told us that even the prospect of resuming talks is enough to give Trump cover to extend his self-imposed deadline. It has also bought the president more time to consider whether he wants to deploy ground troops to the region, perhaps a strike force to seize Kharg Island. Such an operation—pushed vigorously in public and private by allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham—could force Iran to give up control of the strait but would also come at a cost: The fighting would likely be fierce, and Trump has expressed reluctance to risk numerous American casualties.
[Read: The Iran war’s next threat is to food and water ]
Allies, too, have hesitated to turn to force to reopen the strait. European and Indo-Pacific partners—Japan, Australia, and several NATO states—have resisted direct military involvement, instead urging diplomacy or limited escort missions through the strait. The coalition Trump once envisioned has not materialized.
Against this backdrop, the president’s messaging has grown more improvisational. On Truth Social, Trump has alternated between declaring overwhelming victory and calling for other nations to assume responsibility for the strait’s security. His suggestion today that the passage could soon reopen under U.S.–Iranian management lacks confirmation from Tehran. The strikes threatened on Iran’s power grid—once imminent—have been paused, not canceled, and made contingent on diplomatic momentum that one side insists exists and the other denies outright. Meanwhile, the fighting continues, with no clear end in sight.
- The hostage crisis was never about leverage, it was about optics.
Among the first lessons that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries learned after coming to power in 1979 was that their best ally against American power was American democracy. Their first test case was the seizing of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, an act that devastated Iran’s economy and international reputation but succeeded in humiliating Jimmy Carter and ending his chances of reelection. Over the decades, Iran gained repeated proof that it didn’t need to defeat America on the battlefield; it just had to make the American people feel the war in their living room. And now, in a war for its survival, Tehran is attempting the same play.
In April 1983, Iran—via its newly created Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah—carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in history. “First word is that Iranian Shiites did it,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, “d__n them.” Although Reagan remained outwardly steadfast, he was briefed that his approval ratings were beginning to sour because of Lebanon. “The people just don’t know why we’re there,” he wrote in his diary. “There is a deeply buried isolationist sentiment in our land.”
Months later, in October, Hezbollah struck again, this time with two simultaneous truck bombs that killed 241 American service members and 58 French soldiers as they slept. Four days after the attack, Reagan addressed the nation and asked: “If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?” He answered himself four months later, when, under pressure from Congress, he ordered the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.
[Eliot A. Cohen: The strategic follies of the Islamic Republic]
Tehran also tried the living-room strategy in Iraq. When George W. Bush invaded in 2003, Tehran feared that a stable, democratic Iraq could become an American platform to threaten or subvert the Islamic Republic. Rather than confront the United States directly, Iran did what it had learned to do in Lebanon: create enough chaos to make the war unwinnable. According to declassified interrogation records, the Iran-backed Shiite-militia leader Qais al-Khazali told his American captors that Iran supported virtually every faction capable of fueling the disorder and making Iraq ungovernable. Iran-supplied weapons, including improvised explosive devices, were responsible for as many as 1,000 American deaths. The United States was spending billions of dollars unsuccessfully trying to stabilize Iraq; Iran was spending millions successfully destabilizing it.
Iran’s path to victory was not on the Iraqi battlefield but at the American ballot box. Bush understood this, telling the American public in July 2007 that “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers.” By then, however, nearly six in 10 Americans already said that the war had been a mistake. Bush, thanks greatly to Iran, had lost the support he needed at home.
Today, with its existence at stake, Tehran is once again trying to make war too unpopular with the American public for America’s president to continue. The weapons being employed are no longer truck bombs and IEDs; instead they are missiles, drones, and geography.
Unable to compete militarily with the United States and Israel, Tehran has fallen back on its most important strategic card: the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian threats have collapsed the number of ships transiting the world’s most crucial energy corridor each day from an average of 138 to single digits—on some days, just one. At least 20 commercial vessels have been attacked, sending insurance costs soaring to as much as $5 million a ship. Tehran’s $20,000 drones are disrupting hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo for each attack. Oil prices have surged more than 40 percent since February 28; Brent crude oil peaked near $120 a barrel. Americans are paying a dollar more a gallon than they were when the war began.
Donald Trump has threatened to destroy Iran if it refuses to reopen the strait, but the resulting chaos would undermine his own objective: His goal was to turn Iran into a pliant state, not a failed state.
Trump’s war on Iran has not unified Americans like previous Middle Eastern conflicts did; nearly eight in 10 Americans supported both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq immediately after each of those hostilities began. Today, nine in 10 Democrats oppose the Iran strikes, as do most independents, and an average of polls taken from February 27 to March 11 found that 50 percent of Americans are opposed and only 40 percent are in support. Even within the Republican Party, the divide is striking: About 90 percent of MAGA-aligned Republicans back the war, but non-MAGA Republicans are split; about 54 percent are supportive. Although Trump’s MAGA base has remained remarkably loyal to him, these Americans are acutely vulnerable to the war’s economic costs, paying more for gasoline, diesel, and groceries, whose prices have been swollen by a fertilizer shortage that the Strait of Hormuz’s closure has helped create.
Islamic Republic officials have actively sought to fracture Trump’s base by evoking anti-Zionist conspiracies. “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First,’” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted, adding, “which always means ‘America last.’” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is close with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, referred to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “Epstein Axis” and posted that “American families deserve to know why Trump is sacrificing their sons and daughters to advance Netanyahu’s expansionist delusions.”
Iranian state TV has also amplified the commentary of Tucker Carlson—an outspoken conservative critic of the war—including a recent interview with Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned after blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for the conflict. Tehran doesn’t want to turn Americans against just the war. It wants to turn Americans against one another.
[Rogé Karma: Iran might use its economic-doomsday option]
Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president’s will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn’t. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran’s greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.
The Islamic Republic’s decision to build its political identity around “death to America” has been a 47-year war of choice. Trump’s decision to try to end Tehran’s malign capabilities, rather than merely contain or counter them like past administrations did, has also been a war of choice.
If Iran’s strategy depends on Peoria, Trump’s presidency depends on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump cannot withdraw so long as Iran controls it, but securing it risks the kind of mass American casualties that ended Reagan’s and Bush’s resolve. If Trump reopens it, his appetite for regime change may grow. If he doesn’t, the economic pressure on his base will mount. This is ultimately a war between a democracy’s impatience and a theocracy’s ruthless endurance. The question is whether, for the first time since 1979, Tehran has finally met a U.S. president more committed to destroying the regime than the regime is to destroying him.
- Trump's Iran whiplash is getting harder to follow.
Donald Trump’s way of talking about war has always swung between extremes. He threatens “fire and fury” one day and extols his dictator buddies for their kind and thoughtful gestures the next.
Since the conflict with Iran began, however, the cycle between aggression and conciliation has spun more rapidly. The president issues new and more terrible threats against Tehran, then backs off with soothing praise. He has now begun to do these things simultaneously.
The reason may be that world markets, especially for oil, want the war to end, so that shipping can presumably resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has learned that he can encourage the markets to expect a speedy end to the war by promising that talks are proceeding toward a settlement, or at least that he intends to quit the conflict and frame it as a victory.
However, the Iranians can also read these messages. Every time Trump signals that he wants the war to end, they recognize his desperation. So, to counter this effect, Trump attempts to threaten Iran with new punishments should it fail to make a satisfactory deal. But of course, the markets can also read the threats. So Trump must counteract the impression caused by his saber-rattling with promises of peace.
[Read: Six days of war, 10 rationales]
A little more than a week ago, Trump warned, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”
Then he extended the deadline twice, explaining that he was holding promising talks with the Iranians. The Iranians have responded that no such discussions have occurred. It is difficult to assess which of these notably unreliable parties is accurately conveying the state, or non-state, of negotiations.
Even so, a discouraging sign emerged yesterday in the form of a morning Trump post on Truth Social. It begins by reiterating his most dovish claims that the Iranian regime has changed, thereby fulfilling his prewar objective, and is now negotiating with him: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran.”
Regime change, in fact, refers specifically to ending a country’s system of government, not merely changing the individual people running it. The revolution that deposed the shah and replaced him with an Islamic theocracy was regime change. Replacing one leader with his son does not constitute “regime change” any more than electing a Republican president to succeed a Democratic one does.
At least this fiction is consistent with Trump’s apparent attempt to find a way out by spinning his adventure in Iran as a success. Praising the “new” regime as reasonable likewise advances this goal.
Yesterday’s Truth Social post reiterates that the U.S.-Iran negotiations—which, again, may or may not be happening—are making progress, and will probably succeed. But Trump also vows that failure will be met with terrible violence: “Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
Threatening to commit war crimes—and destroying civilian infrastructure such as desalination plants would certainly qualify—is generally an uncomfortable rhetorical pivot in any presidential text. It is even more awkward when the threat immediately follows praise of the prospective target’s leadership for its reasonableness.
Trump does try to supply a moral justification, of sorts, for such a crime: “This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’”
If the president is planting a defense for a future war-crimes trial at The Hague, he has not given his prospective legal team much to work with. As a motive for committing atrocities, “retribution” is more of a confession than an alibi. What’s more, whatever moral force Trump generates by citing the regime’s “Reign of Terror” as a rationale for harming its citizens is undercut by his casually noting that those offenses were committed by the old regime, the one that Trump claims has changed. The Allies bombing Dresden in 1945 was notorious, but bombing it in 1946 would have been altogether worse.
[Watch: Trump’s mixed messages about Iran]
A normal politician would attempt to convey that he is being reasonable and negotiating in good faith, whereas his adversaries are violent war criminals. Trump is arguing the reverse. Perhaps he is calculating that Iran has blundered by surrendering its well-honed “unstable aggressive fanatic” identity, and now he has a chance to own that brand. Or, more likely, he is desperately flailing for a message that will reassure the stock market and scare the Iranians—rather than the other way around.
To be sure, there is another group that is alarmed both by Trump’s wild threats of escalation and by his intimations of peace: the rest of the world, which is coping with an economic crisis caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump proposes in a new post this morning that, having changed the regime, he will leave the wee problem of the strait for our former allies to deal with. Not our problem; they should have thought of it before we started the war.
