IMAGE: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ-ROLL CALL, INC./GETTY IMAGES
DONALD TRUMP once promised to end wars. Yet he has shown a surprising appetite for one. The American president spent weeks bombing Iran, dispatching warships to the Persian Gulf and building up a force that can now, by most estimates, strike any target in the country at will.
Yet on March 31st he declared that the whole thing could be over in two or three weeks. “We’ll leave whether we have a deal or not,” he said. It was the sort of remark that leaves allies as well as enemies and markets alike wondering what exactly America’s war goals are, and whether the administration is now scrambling to find an exit before the conflict does lasting damage to its own political prospects.
The war is a month old, and it has already done things that wars do. Brent crude settled at $118.35 a barrel onMarch 31st, near its peak since fighting began. American petrol prices have hit $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022; diesel, the stuff that moves goods across the country, now fetches nearly $5.50.
For a president who campaigned on taming inflation, these numbers are poison. The midterm elections loom in November. So when Mr Trump speaks of leaving “within two or three weeks”, he is not only signalling impatience with Tehran. He is also acknowledging that a war that raises costs for voters is a war that cannot be allowed to drag on.
Yet the administration’s attempts to present an ending have started to feel strange. On March 31st Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, published a video listing four goals: destroying Iran’s air force; destroying its navy; “severe diminishing” of its missile capability; and destroying its factories. Notably absent were the objectives Mr Trump himself had touted in recent days such as regime change as well as seizing Iranian oil and forcing the Islamic Republic to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Rubio earlier had promised the destruction of Iran’s missile programme; the new phrasing, “severe diminishing”, suggests even the Pentagon now doubts that complete eradication is possible.
That narrowing of ambition looks like an off-ramp. If the administration can declare victory on a set of limited military goals, it can pull back without admitting that the wider goals—from preventing Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon and securing the Strait of Hormuz to bringing about a friendlier government in Tehran—remain unfulfilled. Mr Trump has already tried to claim regime change, saying that America had “knocked out one regime, then we knocked out the second regime”. In fact the theocratic leadership that has ruled Iran since 1979 is still in place, its authority battered but intact.
The tension between the desire to leave and the desire to declare victory can be seen in the president’s own words. He says he will pull out “whether we have a deal or not”. But he also says that before leaving, he would “want to knock out every single thing there”. That is the paradox of this war: the same man who wants out also wants to make sure that when he goes, nothing is left standing. The two impulses are not easily reconciled, particularly when Iran still holds near-bomb-grade nuclear material at its Isfahan site and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, choking off global energy trade.
That closure is the war’s most consequential aftershock. Mr Trump has suggested that NATO allies and other countries should clear the strait themselves. “Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” he wrote on Truth Social. The message was vintage Trump: a demand that others assume the costs of a conflict he initiated, paired with an assertion that America’s part is effectively done. But the Strait is the jugular of the global oil market. Leaving it blocked while declaring victory would be like a surgeon walking out of the operating room with the patient still bleeding.
Perhaps that is why Mr Trump is also leaving room for diplomacy. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president, has said his country would end the war in exchange for guarantees against future American or Israeli attacks. That is a long way from surrender but it is also not a refusal to talk. Mr Rubio has said that direct meetings remained a possibility. Yet a peace deal would call for Mr Trump to accept that his bombs did not produce the total capitulation he once promised. For a president who built his political identity on winning, that may be the hardest part of ending a war.
The coming days will show if Mr Trump’s two-to-three-week timeline is a negotiating gambit or a real plan. What is already clear is that the conflict has exposed a gap between the ambition of American power and the limits of American endurance. The war may soon end. But the problems that started it—such as a government in Tehran that prizes survival above all and a global economy built on oil that must pass through a narrow strait—will stay. Exits are easier to announce than to execute. ■
