U.S. President Donald Trump stops to speak to reporters as he departs the White House on March 20.Heather Diehl/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump is facing mounting pressure to find a way out of the war on Iran as air strikes targeting oil and gas infrastructure in the Middle East threaten an out-of-control escalation of the fighting, rising energy prices shake the global economy, and a majority of the American public remains opposed to the conflict.
In the past week, Mr. Trump has careened between threatening to destroy Iran’s main oil export facility and vowing that U.S. ally Israel would stop attacking the country’s major natural-gas field, alternating signals that he is preparing to broaden the conflict with promises to keep it contained.
With the President’s reasons for going to war and what he hopes to achieve regularly changing, it remains unclear if he can keep the fighting from expanding, let alone plan a way for it to end.
“We’re doing extremely well in Iran,” he declared on Friday at the White House, as he returned to the war’s original justification. “We’re not going to let them have nuclear weapons.”
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The war’s latest escalation came Wednesday when Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars natural-gas field in the Persian Gulf. Iran retaliated by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquified-natural-gas export facility, along with oil refineries in Kuwait, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
In an Oval Office exchange with reporters on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack South Pars and that such a thing would not be repeated. “We’re not doing that any more,” he said.
The President also insisted that he was not planning a ground campaign. “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”
It was a contrast with his rhetoric earlier in the week, when Mr. Trump threatened to “knock out” Kharg Island, through which 90 per cent of Iran’s petroleum exports pass.
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Administration leaks to U.S. media have outlined several possible scenarios, including blockading the island, seizing it or the Iranian coast with troops, or destroying it with air strikes. The aim would be to hobble Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, whose effective closing by Tehran has cut off up to a quarter of the world’s oil, and much of its natural gas and fertilizer.
The price of oil has spiked about 60 per cent since the start of the war last month and further increased after the attacks on energy infrastructure this week. Costs are likely to soon ripple through supply chains to food and transportation. The average price of gasoline in the U.S. is already up more than 30 per cent since last month, according to figures from the American Automobile Association.
Sahar Razavi, an Iran expert at California State University, Sacramento, said Tehran’s retaliation shows it is ready to step up the intensity of the war even as Mr. Trump’s apparent war aims keep changing. At times, the President has framed the conflict as a bid to overthrow Iran’s theocratic dictatorship while at others he has said he only wants to degrade its military.
“It is very unclear what it is that he wants, what he sees as the end game, what he’s prepared to accept,” said Prof. Razavi, director of the university’s Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center. “I don’t think he actually knows.”
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Mr. Trump is in precarious political territory domestically, with a majority of voters opposed to the war and a higher percentage against sending ground forces.
In a Data for Progress poll this week, for example, 52 per cent of respondents said attacking Iran was not worth it, including nearly a third of Republican voters. Sixty-eight per cent opposed putting U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq, including 48 per cent of Republicans.
“These numbers taken together should give pause to anyone in Washington who thinks this war has a blank cheque from the American people, including Trump voters,” Ryan O’Donnell, Data for Progress’s executive director, wrote in an e-mail.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent showed the level of administration worry over the ramifications of prolonged high prices on Thursday by floating a plan to lift sanctions on Iranian oil that is currently at sea. Such a move would be meant to ease pain at the pump but at the expense of handing relief to the U.S.’s war enemy.
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While Mr. Trump’s support has so far generally held firm with his MAGA base, he has endured some high-profile defections.
On Tuesday, Joe Kent quit as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and harshly criticized Mr. Trump for reneging on the anti-interventionist platform on which he ran for president. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote in a resignation letter.
Mr. Netanyahu likely did Mr. Trump few favours on Thursday when he said a “ground presence” was necessary to overthrow Iran’s regime.
Whatever Mr. Trump’s reasons for going to war, and whatever may ultimately persuade him to seek an exit strategy, some observers said he does seem serious about what he’s doing as opposed to simply being pulled along by a U.S. ally.
“He’s fully into this. He sees this as part of the legacy he leaves. He wants to say, ‘I really humbled this enemy of the United States and acted where everybody else would talk,’ ” Ned Lazarus, an international affairs expert at George Washington University, said. “He’s all in.”