Trump's 4-Week War With Iran Approaches Month 7
· Reason
Russia had its infamous "three-day special military operation" in Ukraine. America now has its "short-term excursion" into Iran. In February 2026, when he chose to start the war, President Donald Trump promised the public that it would last only "four or five weeks" and promised other leaders that it would be won in three to four days.
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Now the world is approaching month seven of the on-again, off-again conflict. In a déjà vu moment, Trump recited his favorite talking points to Axios on Thursday: A "big decision" is coming soon, and he might "annihilate" Iran, but the Iranian leadership wants a deal very badly. As a cherry on top, Axios reported that the White House is pursuing an Israeli-Arab alliance to contain Iran, the same trick for solving the Middle East that every recent administration has tried.
Trump has also repeatedly promised that the energy shortages caused by the war are just a "little glitch" and that gas would be even cheaper than before once the war was over. But the damage is looking to be growing more serious and persistent now. The price of diesel fuel in America is hitting record highs, and airlines are canceling flights due to similar jet fuel issues. On Friday, the Saudi state oil company Aramco canceled its deliveries to several European refineries for the month of October. The investment bank JPMorgan has simply given up trying to forecast the war's economic effects.
Tehran's approach to the war of attrition has leaned far more on free markets than Washington's. The U.S. government has tried to keep oil prices low, even to detach them somewhat from real supply and demand, at the price of future shortages. Meanwhile, the Iranian government is letting price inflation destroy demand (and immiserate Iranians) in order to stretch out domestic supplies, according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by the economist Esfandyar Batmanghelidj.
About a third of the U.S. Navy is tied up enforcing the U.S. blockade of Iran, not counting the forces fending off Iranian raids on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. (U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, a British navy office, has reported three separate "incidents" over the past three days.) The latest round of fighting involved neither Iranian nor U.S. troops directly.
The Houthi government in Sanaa, one of the two rival regimes in Yemen, seized the port of Mokha (the namesake of mocha coffee) last week, putting the Houthis in artillery range of Bab el-Mandeb, the strait at the entrance to the Red Sea. When forces from neighboring Saudi Arabia intervened, Houthi forces retaliated by blowing up a Saudi pipeline that was meant to bypass Hormuz and that carries 4 percent of the world's oil.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked Trump twice to step in and bomb Yemen, according to Reuters and CBS. While the president declined direct U.S. involvement, the two countries have formed a U.S.-Saudi joint command with around 100 advisers from the U.S. military, CNN reports. The Trump administration had previously launched air raids on Yemen, as did the Biden administration before it, and the U.S. was deeply involved in the Saudi-Houthi war from 2015 to 2022.
There is little domestic appetite for U.S. escalation. The war, which was unpopular from the start, is even more unpopular now, according to a poll released this week by the Institute for Global Affairs. A majority of Americans think the war was a mistake, cannot name a goal worth continuing it for, believe it has increased the cost of living, and give primary blame to either the U.S. or its co-belligerent Israel for starting it. Meanwhile, U.S. involvement in Yemen was so unpopular that Congress passed its first-ever war powers resolution in 2019 to get out.
Still, bipartisan hawks are pressing the Trump administration to do something about the Houthi gains. During a hearing last week, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D–Fla.) asked why "the Trump administration is not supporting [the] fight against one of the largest terrorist militant groups in the Middle East." Rep. Joe Wilson (R–S.C.) told the Saudi state TV channel Al Arabiya that he would like to see the U.S. military "back up" Saudi Arabia, and he proposed the Free Yemen from Iran Act, a bill to aid the Saudi-backed government in Aden, Yemen.
But the U.S. military simply might not be able to escalate on two different fronts. U.S. military sources have told both Axios and The Intercept that the current standoff is simply unsustainable.
The shortage of American air defense ammunition is a well-known problem, and the Pentagon's inspector general reported on Monday that there are significant "bottlenecks for munitions resupply." U.S. forces fired 60 to 70 Patriot missiles and more than 12 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles to defend bases in Jordan during clashes with Iran last week, The Wall Street Journal reported. The U.S. had 759–827 high-end Patriot missiles and 234–278 THAAD missiles left, according to July 2026 calculations by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which government sources confirmed to CNN were accurate.
Acting U.S. Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao told The Epoch Times last week that Iran "blew the hell out of Bahrain," the central headquarters of the U.S. Navy in the Middle East; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told an audience of sailors that the Navy has no plans to return "any time soon." Ships are now being resupplied from Diego Garcia, a faraway island in the Indian Ocean. The "extended sea transit" has created problems, according to Monday's inspector general report.
The standoff has lasted this long because both sides have become overconfident that they checkmated the other. As Trump's prediction of swift victory came undone, Iranian officials were boasting that their leverage over Hormuz was "greater than a nuclear bomb." Over the next few months, Trump worked to restore some shipping to Hormuz and impose a counter-blockade on Iran, bragging about his "total control" over the waterway. Then the Yemeni escalations showed that Iran could threaten other waterways and upstream oil infrastructure.
And so it continues into month seven—with no end in sight.
The post Trump's 4-Week War With Iran Approaches Month 7 appeared first on Reason Magazine.