Nearly seven months in, the war in Iran seems nowhere close to a conclusion. Although talks between the United States and Iran continue, including this week, a disengaged Donald Trump appears uninterested in resolving the conflict; his administration has put forth no coherent plan and has not demonstrated the capability to win the war. Iran’s leadership seems unwilling to end it. (One can hardly blame them: It’s only once the shooting stops and the regime is left with an angry, impoverished population to govern that the leaders’ real troubles begin.) The most significant push for a resolution of some sort is coming from the Gulf States, whose economies are at stake and whose leaders appear inclined to agree to some degree of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, which would have been unacceptable—unthinkable, even—prior to the conflict.
This means that Trump, despite the fact that he has 27 more months in office, is most likely going to attempt to stick the next administration with the unenviable, messy task of resolving this quagmire. And if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are anything to go by, Republicans will be struck by collective amnesia regarding how this unnecessary, wasteful, destructive war started in the first place—especially if Trump’s successor is a Democrat.
This is the third time this century that the United States has begun a reckless, poorly planned war in the greater Middle East, and the lessons from how the others ended are instructive. In Iraq, the George W. Bush administration famously salvaged the war—at the expense of thousands of American and Iraqi lives—by surging troops into the country while it was in the middle of a brutal civil war, which Iraq’s Shia Arabs and Kurdish communities had decisively won by 2008. Those conditions allowed for the Bush administration to negotiate an honorable Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq in 2008 that affirmed Iraqi sovereignty and required U.S. forces to depart the country by the end of 2011. Implementing the agreement was, by necessity of time, left to the next administration.
All of this was in the public record, preserved for posterity. Yet none of it prevented Republican hawks from denouncing what they described as Barack Obama’s “decision” to withdraw from Iraq. Even today, many Republicans still talk about “Obama’s withdrawal” from Iraq as if it were something unilaterally decided by the 44th president. The media picked up on this at the time, amplifying Republican talking points and questioning whether “Obama’s decision” was also responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in 2014.
[Read: The Middle East still to come]
If this was not maddening enough, the pattern repeated itself in Afghanistan. The Trump administration, in 2020, negotiated—bilaterally with the Taliban, no less—the withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country. By the time Joe Biden took office 11 months later, its options in Afghanistan were severely constrained. The Biden administration, and especially the Department of Defense and the uniformed services, deserve plenty of criticism for the messy, chaotic way in which U.S. forces left the country in 2021. But listening to Republican critics of the withdrawal, you would be forgiven for thinking that the decision to withdraw had been Biden’s, and Biden’s alone.
Most likely, the Trump administration is going to leave its successor with some truly horrific strategic options in the Persian Gulf. Previous administrations deterred Iran from making the final push toward the acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But Trump exhausted the most well-publicized deterrent that the U.S. had available—an aerial campaign to set back Iran’s nuclear program—during his 2025 operation in Iran. And although he damaged the program, it was not, as he later claimed, “obliterated.” Developing a new, credible military deterrent will take many months, if not years.
The next administration would count itself lucky to be able to renegotiate an agreement akin to the much-maligned 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But that might not be possible with the current Iranian leadership, and it’s unclear if Iran would—or should—trust a future administration to abide by whatever terms had been negotiated. Many of the people who encouraged Trump to abandon that agreement in 2018, after all, are the same people who encouraged him to go to war with Iran in 2025 and, again, in 2026. Despite the political disaster this war has become for Republicans, those hawks somehow retain influence within the party.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Don’t ask how this war ends]
My hope—which is merely that, a hope—is that Iran now realizes that its newfound ability to close the Strait of Hormuz represents a nonnuclear deterrent against future strikes by the United States and Israel, which obviates Tehran’s need for a nuclear deterrent. The situation with the strait is untenable, however. Freedom of navigation through the waterway had previously been assured by another deterrent—the presence of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based out of Bahrain. But the future of U.S. bases in the Gulf is uncertain. And although the Navy has proved its ability to enforce a naval blockade of its own against Iran, it has failed in another core task—guaranteeing passage of friendly commerce through the strait. Iran, for its part, will be delighted with its new ability to choke off one of the world’s most important trade routes.
As for the United States, we have a painfully short memory. Many of the hawks who steered Washington into one strategic blunder after another in the years after September 11, 2001, were nonetheless granted platforms to defend their records and offer new policy advice in the weeks leading up to the 25th anniversary of those attacks. We forget, too quickly, how much damage these people have done to the American economy and to American power around the world. Which is why efforts to blame what happens next in Iran on the next administration are such good politics—and will likely succeed.
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