Trump now scrambling to fix a mess he created
A new report revealed the grim outlook the White House has about the ongoing war with Iran, with one defense specialist noting that President Donald Trump is now stuck fighting a war to undo the fallout he created by going to war in the first place.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post released a report containing insights from White House sources, indicating that the administration now believes it is "unlikely" that they will be able to achieve the original goal of the joint assault with Israel, which was to unseat the current regime leading Iran. With that plan out the window, officials have seized on another goal that could serve as a reasonable endgame for the war and give Trump an off-ramp he desperately wants: taking control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran's closure of the Strait, through which most of the oil from the Gulf States is shipped to the rest of the world, caused a historically massive energy supply disruption and sent gas prices soaring at a time when voters are increasingly upset with Trump over high prices. Reopening the waterway and ending the war have now become political existential crises for the president.
"Reopening the strait — a critical conduit for global energy supplies — has emerged as perhaps the paramount objective of a war that security officials now believe is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli military operation, including overthrowing Iran’s theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of Tehran’s reach," the Post's report explained. "Instead, breaking Iran’s stranglehold on the strait could enable Trump to wind down the war while claiming victory, halt an expanding global energy crisis and deprive Iran of a potent deterrent against future strikes..."
Observers on social media noted, however, that this new goal for the war is to address a circumstance that only happened in the first place because of the war itself, essentially leaving Trump in a fight to restore the status quo, having fought a war that might ultimately have changed very little.
"The war aim is now re-opening a strait that would not have been closed were it not for the war itself," Shashank Joshi, a defense editor for The Economist, wrote in a post to X.
"Everything the pro-diplomacy camp warned about waging a war of choice against Iran is being proved right, day 24," Dylan Williams, the Vice President for Government Affairs at the progressive Center for International Policy, wrote in a post to X.
"A pointless war becomes even more pointless," Mike Nellis, a Democratic political strategist and podcast host, wrote in his own post.
"Afghan war resulted in replacing the Taliban with the Taliban," the account Iran News Now posted. "Iran war so far has resulted in replacing Khamenei with a cardboard Khamenei. Stated goal? Open the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war? Strait of Hormuz was open. [clown face emojii]"
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