President Donald Trump continued to claim the United States and Iran were in active peace talks on Monday, despite denials from Iranian and U.S. officials. 

“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They ask for a meeting, some would say’ beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman.'”

Trump told reporters over the weekend that Iran came to the U.S. hat in hand to avoid further airstrikes. The president said that the Pentagon had planned “the biggest attack since World War II.”

“It would have been disastrous for them,” he said. “They didn’t want us to do it, and frankly, Saudi Arabia didn’t want it either.”

Iranian officials denied any such communication and said they had no planned talks with the U.S.  

“We currently do not have negotiations with America,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei shared, per NBC News.

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Trump called the denial a bit of “their usual bather.” He said that Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S. or surrender unconditionally. Speaking to a reporter in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he was offering Iran “every last chance before decapitation.”

“Very tough to do what we have planned, still planned,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

The post “Last chance before decapitation”: Trump threatens Iran over stalled peace talks appeared first on Salon.com.

Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

There was a backup plan for getting oil out of the Middle East. We may need another one.

 On July 20, the Iran-backed Yemeni rebel movement known as the Houthis declared a “blockade” against their long-time enemy Saudi Arabia, and a short time later attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. Shortly afterward, several ships carrying Saudi crude oil through the Red Sea made abrupt U-turns to avoid going near the Yemeni coast.  

With Iran now blocking shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea was supposed to be an alternative way to get oil out of the Middle East and to the world market. Now, though, the importance of the route has merely created fresh leverage in the long-simmering conflict between the Houthis and their longtime enemies in Saudi Arabia. These attacks were a major factor in pushing oil back over $100 a barrel last week.  

The Houthis have their own agenda partly unrelated to the Iran conflict. But in launching the Iran conflict, the US has inadvertently given them outsized influence in the region: The sea lane they control is more important than ever. Now, in opening up a new front, they may have just made the war harder to end. 

The Red Sea has become increasingly important to Saudi Arabia and energy markets as shippers have avoided Hormuz in recent months. Saudi Arabia has diverted around 70 percent of its oil exports via a pipeline connecting the oil fields on the Persian Gulf to the port of Yanbu on its Red Sea coast. This means that tankers need to use the Red Sea to get oil to Asia. As a result, the Red Sea now accounts for around 7 percent of the world’s energy supplies. 

This release valve is one reason why the price of oil — and the price of gas for American drivers — has not risen as much as many experts expected when the Hormuz crisis began shortly after the US-Israel strikes on Iran. 

But now, that release valve is also under threat, putting the region and the world in what shipping experts call a “double chokehold.”

The Houthis have used their location to cause chaos before: In 2023 and 2024, they attacked over 100 ships they accused of links to Israel, and dramatically drove down shipping through the Red Sea. Those attacks stopped after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last year, but shipping has still not fully recovered. 

President Donald Trump has threatened both the Houthis and Iran with “major military punishment” over the attacks in recent days. And the attacks also make it likelier that the conflict in Iran could make oil pricier than ever, increasing political pressure on Trump. 

What do the Houthis want? 

The Houthis are a member of Iran’s network of regional proxies, known as the “Axis of Resistance,” along with Hezbollah, Hamas, and a number of Iraqi militias. But most experts believe that while they rely on Iranian support, they operate independently and don’t take their marching orders from Tehran. 

Officially known as Ansar Allah, the Houthis are members of the minority Zaydi sect of Shia Islam. They’ve been fighting for control of Yemen since the 1990s and took over Yemen’s capital city, Sanaa, in 2014, though most countries do not recognize them as Yemen’s legitimate government. 

The Houthis fought a brutal decade-long war against Yemen’s internationally recognized government and an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which ended with a UN-mediated ceasefire in 2022. 

The Saudi-Houthi peace has largely held since then, even as the Houthis gained global notoriety during the Gaza war. When this year’s war began, many expected the Houthis to join the fight against Iran’s enemies, the United States and Israel, but for the first few weeks of the conflict, they were conspicuously quiet. Their impact was felt in a different way, though. 

Iran’s success in using cheap drones and missiles to effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz almost certainly drew on lessons gained from the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024.

In March, the Houthis made their first move toward actively joining the Iran war when they launched a round of missiles at Israel. But things really escalated in mid-July when they began launching attacks on Saudi Arabia in response to an attack on the Sanaa airport, which they blamed on the Saudis. (The initial attack was claimed by Yemen’s internationally-backed government.)

In addition to the Red Sea attacks, the Houthis also claimed an attack on a Saudi oil refinery last Saturday, the group’s first attack on Saudi energy infrastructure since 2022, followed by attacks on oil depots along the Red Sea coast on Sunday. Several Iran-backed militias in Iraq also carried out their own attacks on Saudi Arabia over the past few days. 

The Houthis have now entered the conflict, but it would be a mistake to view them just as Iranian proxies. They have their own demands and agenda in this fight. 

“When the whole Iran war started, they were kind of observing and waiting for the right moment,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a US-based security analyst and Yemen expert. Basha suspects that the Houthis saw the leverage and concessions Iran had gained throughout the region and wanted to exert some leverage of their own. “Their aggressiveness went from zero to 60 last week,” he said. “They’re all in.”

All in for what, exactly? The Houthis’ demands from the Saudis include billions in reparations payments and full control of their coastline and airspace. In the long term, they aim to be Yemen’s internationally recognized government. 

The Saudis, then, who fought a brutal and unpopular war against the Houthis that ended in a stalemate, are faced with the unappealing choice between placating the group by agreeing to its demands or a return to war. 

What about the US? The US carried out more than 1,000 airstrikes over 52 days against the Houthis in 2025. While this campaign, known as Operation Rough Rider, caused significant damage to the group’s infrastructure, it did not succeed in fully restoring shipping in the Red Sea. 

Trump has threatened retaliation, but given concerns over munitions stockpiles, the US capacity to retaliate, much less expand this war to a new front, is probably limited.

How many chokeholds is too many?

For the moment, the Bab el-Mandeb is not completely closed — shipping is down around 22 percent since the blockade was declared, but 28 ships were able to transit the strait on Monday. The Houthis maintain that their blockade targets only Saudi Arabia, but Chinese supertankers have been allowed to leave the Red Sea carrying Saudi oil.  

But shippers recall that during the Houthis’ last Red Sea campaign in 2024, they were theoretically only targeting ships linked to Israel, but had a pretty broad definition of “linked to Israel.”  Under these circumstances, many shippers, and more importantly their insurers, might not want to take the risk. 

“We’ve seen what the Houthis can do,” said Noam Raydan, an expert on energy and maritime shipping at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We know that they can sink ships. We know that they can hit a ship with drones, missiles, and then even board the ship. We know that they can hijack a vessel. This is why a lot of operators, in my opinion, would really be hesitant right now to go through the Bab al-Mandab.” 

There’s also still the risk that this new front in the war could escalate. Iran’s government has asked the Houthis to shut the Bab el-Mandeb entirely if the US launches airstrikes against Iran’s power network, which Trump has repeatedly threatened to do.

This adds a new complicating factor to the larger conflict in the Middle East. The fact that the price of oil never rose as high as many experts had predicted during Operation Epic Fury, the initial strikes in the spring and early summer, is probably one reason why Trump has often seemed willing to continue the conflict, rather than cutting a quick deal on Iran’s terms. But Saudi Arabia’s access to the Red Sea is one important reason why oil has not reached $120 or even $200 a barrel. A full closure of the Bab el-Mandeb would test even the ever-adaptable global oil industry’s ability to adapt.

It’s possible the Saudis may still be able to cut a deal with the Houthis that ends the attacks. But it’s also clear that for the foreseeable future, two of the Middle East’s most important energy chokepoints are going to be under continual threat of closure by adversaries of the United States. 

For now, oil can still leave the Red Sea via the Suez Canal at its northern end, then head toward Asia around the southern tip of Africa. (Since the largest tankers aren’t able to transit the Suez while fully loaded, this is a complicated process that involves them pumping their oil into a pipeline, then meeting it at the other end in the Mediterranean.) 

“It just gets harder and harder,” said Robin Mills, CEO of the Dubai-based energy analysis firm Qamar Energy. “Can they get all of the oil from Yanbu out through the Suez? I think they probably can but it’s a little bit tight. If [the Houthi campaign] were to expand, it becomes more of a problem.” 

The Suez Canal itself is also a potential target for disruption or sabotage, retired US Adm. James Stavridis recently warned. 

The disruptions at sea will increase interest in workaround projects such as a proposed pipeline from Iraq to Turkey, bypassing sea routes entirely, but these are still a long way off. The Houthis and their allies in Iraq also demonstrated this week that they can attack oil infrastructure and pipelines in addition to ships. 

The oil and shipping industries are nothing if not adaptable. Previous disruptions, whether the tanker that ran aground in Suez in 2021, the container ship pileups caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, or the Houthis’ previous Red Sea campaign, have been temporary. Goods eventually find their way to market, even if that means another month sailing around Africa.

But as the number of armed conflicts grow, and actors like the Houthis and Iran learn how to effectively weaponize the global economy’s chokepoints to punish much larger and more powerful adversaries, the stresses on the system are growing, and the question becomes whether there’s a breaking point.   

Last week, the Trump administration announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear power using American technology and could eventually pave the way for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. But the agreement must first undergo congressional review — and survive President Donald Trump’s social media feed.

When the Trump administration announced its agreement, it made no mention of the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that omission and the possibility that Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium alarmed Israelis — and Trump quickly threw in both conditions in a Truth Social post.

The chaos around the agreement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, this week to meet with Trump. The Saudi deal — as well as growing friction over differences on the goals and trajectory of the renewed US war with Iran and frustration in Washington over Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon — will undoubtedly be topics.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswame spoke with Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, about the relationship between the two countries and its leaders ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are we expecting from the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump?

I suspect this will be among the most tense meetings that they have had because there are a number of issues on the table where President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on different pages. The issue that they used to be on the same page about was Iran, and I don’t think that is the case anymore. 

As we’ve seen the Iran war unfold, the Israeli view is still the view that they had at the outset of the war, which is that this is necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, with its ballistic missiles, with its proxies. And ultimately what the Israelis wanted to see, and what they still want to see, is a different regime in Iran. President Trump may still share those goals, but it’s pretty clear that, as the war has not gone the way he anticipated, he’s looking for an exit strategy and his main focus is the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something that the Israelis care about at all. 

I think at this point, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives at the White House, he’s probably going to try to convince the president that the original goal should be on the table, that the US and Israel should keep going, and President Trump seems to have a different view of things.

And now we have this new deal with Saudi Arabia. Was Israel taken by surprise by the deal? 

It absolutely took Israel by surprise. When the deal was announced on Wednesday, it was a deal to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear power and nuclear infrastructure. There was no mention of Israel. There was no mention of normalization. There was no mention of anything outside of the bounds of a nuclear agreement. 

President Trump on Thursday put out his Truth Social where he said that the deal is absolutely contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. And what’s curious about that is that when the deal was announced, there was no mention of it, and the deal was actually signed. So either the president is intending to change the terms of the deal after it’s been signed, or he’s willing to back out of it if this new condition is not met. 

Or, and I suspect that this is the actual answer, he will secure some sort of commitment from the Saudis to examine joining the Abraham Accords at some point down the road when Israel has met a number of conditions and there’s been progress toward a Palestinian state. And if that is how it unfolds, it will leave the Israelis behind. And I think this comes as a pretty big shock to [Israel] given that President Trump’s previous policy was that a deal between the US and Saudi Arabia would involve normalization.

Was Netanyahu himself surprised by this deal? 

I think he must have been surprised by this deal. It is true that Trump and Netanyahu have seemed to have had a very cushy relationship, not only during this term, but during President Trump’s first term as well. But it’s not a relationship of equals.

We’ve seen President Trump — particularly over the past few months, I think in response to criticism here in the United States over the role that Israel and the role that the prime minister may have had in convincing President Trump to go to war — repeatedly talk about the fact that he is in charge, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to do what he says, that he is the decider and Prime Minister Netanyahu is not. 

I do think they have a good relationship, but President Trump, at least publicly, seems to be signaling that he is in charge and he wants everybody to know that. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu undoubtedly is feeling some stress in this relationship. And when he shows up here tomorrow, he’s going to do whatever he can to try and repair any rifts that there are.

Israel wanted this war, but hates this deal that the president may very likely complete with Saudi Arabia. Did they miscalculate somewhere in here? 

I think the Israelis have miscalculated in a number of ways. And the biggest is that consistently since 2017 or 2018, you hear Israeli officials, political officials, security officials, even ordinary Israelis, talk routinely about President Trump being the best friend that Israel has ever had and exhibiting a faith in President Trump that he will never do anything that will hang Israel out to dry. 

And a lot of what they’ve done has proceeded on that assumption. And even though everybody is aware of President Trump’s transactional nature, even though everybody is aware that he is relatively volatile, that he slips on policy issues all the time, the Israelis had this faith that they would always be an exception to that rule. And I think what we’re seeing is that they’re not necessarily an exception to that rule. 

And it’s important to stress that when it comes to this Saudi nuclear deal, the problem for the Israelis is not just that it was signed without any hint of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia being part of the deal itself. It may open the door for countries that have signed more restrictive agreements in the region, like the UAE, to do the same. And ultimately, all of this is a bet that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia is going to continue, that it’s going to continue modernizing, continue becoming more moderate and pragmatic, and continue improving relations with Israel. 

If that’s not the case, once you’ve handed the Saudis a nuclear program, that’s irreversible. People shouldn’t forget that Iran’s nuclear program started off as a civilian nuclear program that the United States provided for it under the days of the Shah. So for Israelis, the normalization part of this is absolutely worrisome, but the deal itself is problematic too. And I think that’s where the Israelis are feeling panicked.

It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States. 

But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model. 

If this is a safe space, I will admit here that at one time I was around one-third vulnerable to such arguments. I don’t mean the part about Trump being a force for progressive change in any sense, even if entirely by accident, since that was obviously and hilariously wrong, not to mention based on the same “enemy of my enemy” pretzel logic that produced the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. But on the level of a sophomore-seminar intellectual exercise, I could understand why self-appointed contrarians like Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald saw Trump as a disruptive force who might upend the softcore imperialism of the previous three or four decades, which had led to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hegemony of corporate capital. 

You didn’t have to be an unregenerate Leninist or an online troll or a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative (or all three at once!) to be momentarily seduced by Trump’s “America First” nonsense. Disgruntled Americans of all varieties voted for Trump by the millions, based in large part on his populist, isolationist rhetoric. Maureen Dowd’s notorious “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” column from 2016 should be inscribed above the gates of one of the lower circles of hell as a permanent warning to know-it-all media commentators. 

It was, of course, immensely helpful to Trump’s agenda of fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies that we experienced the failings of mainstream U.S. foreign policy all over again during the strange interregnum of Joe Biden’s presidency, with its pious invocation of a “rules-based order” — where the rules are set by America, of course — and its theological commitment to a now-entirely-imaginary “two-state solution” in the Middle East. Several things can be said in retrospect about Biden’s fateful embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tel Aviv tarmac after the Oct. 7 attacks: It was an authentic and heartfelt gesture, it was a grievous political error and it paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe now widely perceived as genocidal. 

Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value, and has also dispensed with the contradictory or two-faced rhetoric of the Biden years. There’s no more talk of universal human rights or the spread of democracy. The fundamental logic of Trumpian policy is cynicism all the way down: We don’t care about any of those things and we never did. To paraphrase Stephen Miller, surely the most instrumental figure in the Trump White House, the only thing that matters is power. 

Maybe we should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration, since Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft surrounding him. (Miller strikes me as a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels.)

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As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic, not to mention increasingly dangerous. Trump’s dance of death with the Iranian regime might have a comical aspect if the lives of many thousands of people and the future of the global order were not at stake. By goading the president into restarting the war for the third time (by my count), the new roster of hardline leaders in Tehran, at least for now, have strengthened both their domestic control and their international reputation. It’s difficult to imagine, in fact, how Trump and his ludicrous cast of advisers could possibly have screwed this up worse than they did. (D.C. rumors suggest that high-testosterone “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth will ultimately be compelled to walk the plank over this fiasco.)

Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues. Trump has never given up on his dream of seizing or annexing Greenland, but it was always more like an extortion scheme or a real estate scam than a military threat. Roughly the same applies to his improvised plan to rebuild Gaza as a Trumpified new Riviera, which took even Netanyahu by surprise and was never likely to escape the uncanny valley of AI fantasy. 

I’m inclined to feel similar about this week’s reports that Seb Gorka, an unhinged far-right free radical with some sort of roving-ninja role in the Trump White House, is urging a military assault against Islamist militia groups in Mali, a West African nation with complicated internal dynamics and no relationship whatever to U.S. national security. Again, this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups instead of humanitarian and healthcare NGOs. (Read this ProPublica report for more on that.)

Things have truly gotten dark if we’re looking to JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the proverbial adults in the room, managing the worst impulses of their increasingly disinhibited and incapacitated boss. I don’t know which of those two geniuses signed off on the reported nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which may fall apart, goddess willing, under the weight of its impromptu idiocy and the fact that literally no one thinks it’s a good idea. Mohammed bin Salman, that kingdom’s journalist-murdering leader, is roughly the last person in the world who should have access to nuclear materials. If this deal goes through, it could rank among the very worst of Trump’s foreign policy blunders. Of course there’s still time for more. 

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate. 

That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.

During a combative appearance on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth asked for another $67 billion in supplemental funding for the rest of the budget year. But the shock of that request paled in comparison to another number. Hegseth estimated that the Iran war has cost $37.5 billion so far, far higher than the $30 billion figure the Pentagon only recently gave to lawmakers. 

That number is astounding on its own, but according to most sources and experts, it significantly lowballs the war’s true cost, which continues to mount. NBC News reported that, according to internal estimates by the Defense Department peg the amount at $80 billion to $100 billion. 

It’s not unusual for administrations of both parties to bulk up the Pentagon budget, although the Republicans have always been the most passionate about it. But this is beyond the wildest dreams of Pentagons past. With all the cuts the Trump administration has made to everything else in the government, you’d think they would be a little less greedy. But that’s not how they roll. In Trump’s first term, military spending was profligate, and this time it’s a free-for-all.

Hegseth is basically asking for an unlimited supply of money to finance an extremely unpopular war and such “generational investments” like the “Trump-class battleships,” otherwise known as the Golden Fleet. We needn’t worry that they are being irresponsible, though. They are committed to rooting out “woke” wherever they find it, and that will surely save a few bucks somewhere down the road.

When the senators asked him why the Pentagon needed all this extra money, Hegseth fell back on the Trump administration’s catch-all explanation: “Joe Biden did it.” In this the secretary was correct. Biden requested military funding for Ukraine through emergency supplemental requests. But the Trump administration has created an unprecedented innovation. In partnership with MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, they are trying to get it passed through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered but is subject to ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who can strip the provision if it is determined to be non-budgetary.

The U.S. is running through its supplies of expensive precision-guided munitions and air-defense interceptors at record pace in the Iran war, and there are concerns that reduced inventories are going to affect readiness in case the country is drawn into a war it didn’t choose. Hegseth, though, would not cop to that, insisting instead that all was well — and that the Pentagon just needed more cash to fix up the depleted military Biden left them.

House Republicans have proven more pliant. On Wednesday, by a margin of 216 to 212, they passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill to cover some of what the White House is requesting, adding some juicy extras for artificial intelligence and other tech-bro projects led by the private-equity types who are running much of the Pentagon these days. According to Guardian, one of them, former Uber executive Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering who is an aggressive promoter of AI, made a profit of up to $24 million by selling a private investment he held in xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, earlier this year. (In March 2025, Michael declared the value of his stake at between $500,000 and $1 million.) Since the company isn’t public, no one is quite sure how he came to own the shares or who he sold them to, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the defense department entered into two separate contracts with xAI before Michael sold his shares. 

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He’s not the only one who appears to be milking the military-industrial complex. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s eldest sons, have a portfolio of tech companies that are raking in billions from the Pentagon. These are not businesses with which the Trumps have any experience, and the partnerships and investments have all been initiated since their father became president the second time. Don Jr. has said publicly that he works with Hegseth to steer more contracts to drone manufacturers, of which he is a beneficiary. Both brothers are heavily involved with firms that have contracts all over the Pentagon. They insist, though, there’s no conflict of interest and no one in the department has even considered favoritism.

As usual, Hegseth behaved like a teenage bully during the Senate hearing. He argued with senators, blamed Biden and insisted that America has won the war in Iran while simultaneously requesting many more billions to win it. Since the GOP is attempting to push this supplemental package through using reconciliation, they won’t need Democrats to pass it, so one can probably expect that he’ll get what he wants. The firehose of money flowing to the Pentagon and all the insiders who are making massive bank from it isn’t going to dry up any time soon. 

 

Hegseth ended the week with a gratuitous gesture to his commander in chief, who spent a good part of his time explaining that the 18 deaths in the Iran war are nothing compared to all the deaths in previous wars. To make Trump feel better, Hegseth removed from the tally four troops who were killed in renewed fighting, bringing the official death toll back down to 14. Military officials told the New York Times that “one reason behind the change was . . . because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Nonetheless, Trump attended the dignified transfer of the four fallen soldiers’ remains and concocted a story to burnish his war lust. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

Sure they did.

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President Donald Trump is ramping up the war in Iran once again, but this escalation comes while the United States has comparatively fewer tools in its military arsenal — and to soften the war’s economic effects.

Since the total breakdown of the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in early July, the conflict has intensified, with the countries exchanging fire for 11 days straight, resulting in four American deaths. The total number of U.S. deaths since the war began in February now stands at 18, alongside nearly a hundred casualties, per reporting from the New York Times.

The escalation comes as the U.S. is in a weaker position than when it started, with historically low levels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and with comparatively diminished military and diplomatic resources.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that the reserve fell to about 311 million barrels of oil over the previous week, the lowest level since March 1983. This happened as part of an ongoing tapping of the reserve that’s expected to conclude in mid-to-late August or early September. Pending a change in regulation, this will be the end of the line for releases from the reserve, which is required by statute to maintain a minimum inventory of about 250 million barrels of oil.

According to Max Pyziur, a director for transportation fuel and natural gas project at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, this drawdown is one of the major factors that has helped suppress the price of oil and gasoline in the United States since the start of the war.

Without the ability to rely on the reserve, Pyziur said he expects the government and oil companies to explore more alternatives to Middle Eastern oil, such as sources in Venezuela and Argentina, along with additional transportation options to get oil out of the region. While these alternatives are already being explored, new infrastructure will likely take years to come online, Pyziur said, which means Americans will have to deal with elevated prices.

“The tools are running out,” he said. “We only have so much time as far as strategic reserves. We could be in an extended period of time with a four-dollar handle on gasoline prices, five bucks for diesel. And if that continues, well, then that affects the economy, that affects expectations, and it might affect political outcomes if the Democrats are smart.”

Pyziur also noted that oil prices have been suppressed in part because China slashed its own imports of oil. A resumption to pre-war levels of imports could cause global oil prices to increase significantly, but there’s no guarantee that China would ramp up imports, he said. The country’s previous import levels were part of an effort to fill its own oil reserves, and even if it decides to resume them, there would be a limit to how much oil they could store.

But it’s not just American oil reserves that have diminished since the beginning of the war in February. The U.S. military’s own weapons stockpiles, including crucial drone and missile interceptors, were expended in the first period of the war. Remaining stockpiles of other munitions vary.

Anelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Middle East Program, highlighted that there are some questions as to whether Trump is even fully aware of current levels of munitions stockpiles, due to a reluctance among Pentagon leaders to deliver bad news to the president.

“The situation is significantly worse this time. But I don’t know that we’re sort of grappling with that. The average American again may think, ‘Oh, just another round of this stupid war, here we go again,’ it could really be much worse this time,” Sheline said. 

One potentially significant difference is the entry of the Houthis into the war, with the Iran-aligned group announcing a blockade of Saudi Arabia. While it remains to be seen how exactly the promised blockade could play out, the Houthis’ engagement represents a significant expansion of the war. 

The most consequential difference between now and when the war began, however, may be the degradation of trust in diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and Iran. This makes escalation more likely, Sheline said, which could result in attacks on infrastructure like desalination plants, which serve as a necessary water supply for parts of Iran, as well as the Gulf countries. 

“The Iranians may be less willing to engage diplomatically because they’ve been burned several times in the past,” she said. “The possibility of escalation, therefore, seems much more likely, the result then potentially being a truly devastating humanitarian impact, both for the Iranian population and for the Gulf population.” 

The post As Iran war escalates, U.S. is fighting from a weakened position appeared first on Salon.com.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump seemed visibly irked when asked about his plans for Iran on Tuesday. “You don’t know anything,” he snapped at a reporter who said Iran showed no signs of deescalating. 

You have to forgive the man his vexation — he is in something of a bind. The war in Iran, never popular to begin with, has only become more of a lemon since a tenuous ceasefire collapsed earlier this month. In the two weeks since, Iran has bombarded targets across the Middle East with missiles and drone strikes. The onslaught badly damaged US bases and, just last week, killed three American soldiers’ lives.

Now Iran and its allies, metaphorically drunk on their recent successes (…alcohol is technically illegal in Iran!), appear to be revving for a new round of attacks. Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain this week, reportedly targeting both US bases and civilian infrastructure. And on Monday, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia also threatened to shut down a second key waterway that could further strain global oil markets. 

The world is running out of soldiers

The latest US casualties are a grim reminder that — for all the talk of drones and precision missiles — wars are still fought by actual, human people. 

But major military powers are running short on soldiers: The US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have all recently struggled to recruit troops. And the forces driving that shortage aren’t easily reversed. 

For starters, falling birth rates and aging populations have left many countries with fewer military-age adults. Being the right age is also only half of the equation. In the US, factors including weight, drug use and physical or mental health conditions would disqualify an estimated three-quarters of young Americans from military service.

Then there’s the military’s image problem: Polls show that young people around the world are becoming less willing to fight for their respective countries. And young Americans, in particular, have more negative views of both the military and the war in Iran than do their parents or grandparents.

There is another way to fill the ranks, of course…but it isn’t popular. The US ended its draft in 1973, and most Western militaries have similarly transitioned to all-volunteer forces. If the US did ever need to restart its draft, both the politics and the logistics could prove formidable. 

One link for later

➨ Treat yourself to a froyo. The go-to dessert of my misspent 20s is apparently very much back in vogue. But this time, it’s less about the zany flavors and maximalist toppings and more about wellness buzzwords like…protein and probiotics. Hmmmm. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that carrots don’t actually improve your vision? The myth originated as part of a World War II propaganda campaign to conceal Britain’s development of radar technology.
• Today’s trivia: How many countries are in North America? Don’t look it up — just guess! (Our daily trivia generally comes from Vox’s daily crossword, but today’s tidbit comes from my colleague Sean Rameswaram.) 
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday I asked you to name the Mesoamerican civilization that spoke Nahuatl. That would be the Aztecs — though 1.5 million people in central Mexico still speak the language now.

Even as the US conflict with Iran threatens to escalate once again, diplomatic talks break down, and US and Israel officials again flirt with the idea of pushing for regime change, President Donald Trump remains reportedly very reluctant to send US ground forces into Iran. That would risk causing large numbers of American casualties and pushing a war that many Americans have largely tuned out, even if they oppose it, back to the center of public debate. 

But that, tragically, does not mean that American troops involved in the conflict are necessarily safe. The past few days have been the deadliest for US forces since an initial ceasefire went into effect in April. On Friday, two US servicemembers were killed in a missile strike on a base in Jordan, marking the second time in two days that Iranian missiles had managed a direct hit on the base. On Saturday, a third US servicemember was killed in Iraq during the attempted controlled detonation of a downed Iranian attack drone. Altogether at least 17 US servicemembers have now been killed since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in February. 

The US escalated its own attacks on Iran in retaliation, including a strike against the missile base in Tabriz, Iran where the attack on Jordan is thought to have originated. Iran has also fired missiles and drones at targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar in recent days, most of them intercepted, as well as at several commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has again ground to a near halt.

If Iran’s ability to shut down the strait has been the biggest surprise of this war, it’s ability to hold targets on land throughout the region at risk, including energy infrastructure and US military bases, with missiles and drones, may be the second. 

This suggests the risks to the US military as well as US allies from Iranian retaliation may only grow, the longer this conflict drags on, even if Trump never commits to “boots on the ground.” The president has sought to portray this as a war where the risk of death and destruction is borne only by one side, and certainly Iran has sustained far more damage. But there have already been a number of surprises in this war and the risks to the American military may be higher than most anticipated a few months ago.

The growing risk to US troops in the Middle East 

In the early days of the war, the military began shifting troops and equipment from bases in Persian Gulf countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar farther west to Jordan and Israel, where they are subject to fewer local restrictions and where they sit farther from Iranian missile launchers. Satellite imagery and subsequent reporting has revealed that Iranian strikes did far more damage to these bases during the first phase of this war than was revealed at the time. 

More distant US bases may be harder to hit, but they are clearly still within the range of Iran’s missiles and Shahed drones. Some analysts also say the shift may have created new vulnerabilities by concentrating US personnel and equipment in fewer locations. 

The missile strike that killed Lt. Tyler James Feehan and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales on Friday was one of four Iranian attacks against bases in Jordan in just five days. The Iranians in fact appear to be striking Jordan more than Israel in recent days, which could be because these targets are less well-defended than Israeli bases or because they carry less escalation risk: Israeli leaders, unlike Trump, are eager to rejoin the war. 

 US officials suggested to the Wall Street Journal that Iran is adapting to US air defenses by “firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” making them harder to intercept. The officials also suggested the Iranians may be receiving targeting assistance from China or Russia. 

Or it may simply be that if Iranians can keep firing missiles and drones, no system will be able to provide perfect protection. 

“What it actually shows is that Iran is in a lot better shape than was assumed,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missile program and professor at Sciences Po in Paris. “Contrary to a lot of the US statements from early parts of the war, Iran still retains quite a significant amount of missile and drone capabilities, and because they’re not operating now under constant aerial bombardment, they may have been able to reconstruct part of it.” 

According to assessments reported in June, Iran still has access to most of its missile sites and around 70 percent of its prewar stockpile. 

And while Iran still possesses the ability to punch, there are growing questions about whether the US air defense capabilities are depleting. At the time of the April ceasefire, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated, the US had likely burned through more than 1,000 of its roughly 2,300 stockpile of Patriot interceptors, and between 50-80 percent of the highly advanced THAAD interceptors, designed for use against high-altitude, long-range ballistic missiles. 

The Pentagon has been pushing defense manufacturers to accelerate the production and bring down the costs of advanced interceptors, but that will take months if not longer, depending on the system. In the short term, missile defense scarcity is going to continue to be a source of stress if this conflict escalates. 

“We do not have enough [munitions] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” one US official told the Washington Post this week. 

The US no longer dominates the skies the way it once did

US troops in the Middle East have long been vulnerable to missile attacks. One particularly infamous Iraqi Scud missile strike killed 27 American soldiers during the first Gulf War in 1991. 

But the proliferation of one-way attack drones like Iran’s Shaheds have shifted the balance, giving weaker adversaries the ability to target US bases at low cost. The attack that killed the two servicemembers on Friday was, like many of Iran’s attacks in this war, a combined missile and drone barrage intended to overwhelm the facility’s defenses. The best-case scenario from these strikes, from a US perspective, is that they are intercepted, albeit at the cost of draining valuable air defense resources. In the worst case, US soldiers are killed. 

A strike on another base in Jordan in early 2024 by the Iran-backed militia group the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, during the war in Gaza, that killed three US servicemembers was in some ways a warning of the risks US troops would face in a scenario where Iran itself targeted them with its full capabilities. Since at least the Korean War, the US military has gotten used to fighting with more or less full control of the skies. As far back as 2022, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of US forces in the Middle East, warned that “air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time” due to the proliferation of low-cost drones, which he compared to the improvised explosive devices, many planted by Iranian proxies, that killed hundreds of US troops during the war in Iraq. 

Thankfully, US casualties in this war are still nowhere close to those of either Iraq war. Trump told reporters on Sunday that “We feel very badly” about the deaths but that “those great patriots were out there fighting so that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.” In recent weeks, the main focus of the war has been control of the Strait of Hormuz, rather than Iran’s nuclear program. 

The hard logic is that just as high fuel prices and declining poll numbers have not yet been enough to deter Trump from continuing to fight Iran, a few American casualties are not enough to be a deterrent to military action. In fact, as this weekend’s retaliatory strikes against Tabriz showed, they may only pull the US deeper into the war. 

As long as Trump avoids a ground invasion, Iran’s ability to target and kill US troops will remain limited. But as this past weekend’s events showed, that ability exists, and there is only so much the US can do to prevent it. The risk of an even larger catastrophe for American troops in the Middle East will only grow the longer this war goes on.  

Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”

On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.” 

The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight. 

Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other. 

Exporting the Venezuela model

In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state. 

The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action. 

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike. 

 “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump said, when Iran’s regime was considering Khamenei’s successor. 

Trump was not involved. Iran’s Assembly of experts chose the former supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom Trump dismissed as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight”.

Despite this, Trump continued to insist that regime change had effectively happened in Iran and that its new leaders were “much more reasonable.” While Iran’s new political system is still very much a work in progress, its insistence on maintaining control of the state and ongoing attacks against shipping and US allies in the region have made it fairly clear that it will not be taking orders from Marco Rubio or anyone else in DC. 

Why Iran is not Venezuela

On the surface, there are some striking similarities between Iran and Venezuela: They were once close allies of each other, as well as of Russia and China. Both are oil dependent authoritarian states espousing a revolutionary ideology defined in large part by opposition to the United States. Both are known for sponsoring foreign militant groups. Both have a history of disputed elections and crushing opposition protests. Both have large and vocal exile communities in the US. Both have struggling economies and have spent years under US sanctions. 

That’s where the similarities end, however. Start with the military: Iran’s combined forces are roughly three times the size of Venezuela’s and far better equipped, possessing missile and drone capabilities that have spread chaos across the region for months. Iran’s senior leaders came of age during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and have spent decades engaged in proxy battles with the US and Israel, whereas Venezuela has not fought an interstate war in modern times. It’s telling that Maduro was relying on Cuban personnel for his own security. 

Then, there’s geography. Thanks to its fortuitous location on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has means to retaliate against the US by blocking shipping through the world’s most important energy chokepoint, driving up oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to disrupt global energy flows. 

Iran was able to attack US allies throughout the Gulf with both its own missiles and via the military groups it supports throughout the region. Despite Trump’s misleading claims that Maduro’s government was in direct control of gangs in the US or weaponizing migration, Venezuela simply didn’t have the same kind of leverage with which to fight back. 

There’s history, too. Even at the nadir of relations with the US, when Venezuela was under heavy American sanctions and formal diplomatic contacts were cut off, there were still periodic talks over energy issues and prisoner releases. The US oil company Chevron continued to operate inside the country. Rodriguez herself was a familiar figure to US officials, having participated in talks with both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

And finally, there’s ideology. Venezuela’s rulers may still be publicly committed to the “Bolivarian” socialist vision of former leader Hugo Chávez, but, in reality, the regime operates as “an extreme form of crony capitalism with some pretenses of redistribution of oil windfalls to the poor,” said Chris Sabatini, director of the Latin America program at the think tank Chatham House. Senior civilian and military officials were heavily involved in a range of enterprises of varying degrees of legality from the oil industry, from gold mining to drug trafficking. When push came to shove, they were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than standing up for a long-dead revolution. 

According to some reporting, denied by the Venezuelan government, Rodríguez had been in direct contact with US officials prior to Maduro’s capture, assuring them of her cooperation, which would make this less a regime change invasion than a US-enabled coup. Even Interior Minister Diasdello Cabello, considered the hardest of the hardline Chavistas with a US price on his head, has been more than happy to play ball with the country’s new American overlords. 

Iran has widespread corruption, as well, but the regime is far more organized, disciplined, and committed to the radical Islamist ideology of the 1979 revolution. Iran’s leaders had long been planning for invasion and had detailed succession plans in place for when top leaders were eliminated.  The fact that the US’s Israeli partners were reportedly cultivating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president best remembered for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and promoting a long-shot plan to arm Kurdish rebels to mount a ground invasion, is an indication that there were simply no plausible candidates for an “Iranian Delcy.” 

It should have been obvious from the start that a quick and easy operation that would replace Iran’s top leaders with more cooperative ones without requiring a dangerous and costly ground invasion by US troops was never a realistic prospect. It’s notable that the administration sidelined many of its own Iran experts ahead of the war, but, in fairness, Trump’s own CIA director dismissed Israel’s optimistic regime change scenarios as “farcical.” 

“President Trump has not really taken the time to study the history of Iran-US relations going back to 1979, or even earlier,” said the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka. “If he had studied that relationship, I think he would have taken a different approach.” But Trump may have been thinking less about what happened in Tehran in 1979 than what had happened in Caracas just a few weeks earlier. 

The end of hubris?

Many scoffed in January when Trump suggested that the US would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, but that appears to be more or less what’s happening now. It’s not clear how long this arrangement can last. Discontent with both Rodríguez and Trump is growing in Venezuela, and many in the opposition accuse the government of using the recent devastating earthquake as a pretext to delay called-for democratic reforms. Venezuelans may come to hold the United States responsible for the failures of the government it is remotely controlling. 

But the initial success of the Venezuela operation was a vindication for a president who often sees himself as running the world in addition to the United States.

Has Trump faith in his ability to bend other countries to his will been shaken at all by the Iran experience? He has frequently described Cuba as “next” on the list of countries he’d like to “take” after Venezuela and Cuba.

In terms of culture and geography, Cuba may look more like Venezuela. But in terms of its political system, it’s “more like Iran,” said Sabatini. “It’s completely state-centric, vertical, disciplined.” Dealing with a system still fiercely devoted to its founding revolutionary ideology that has been largely isolated from the US for decades, the administration may have no better luck finding a “Cuban Delcy” than it did finding an Iranian one. 

Trump still hasn’t ruled out taking over Cuba in some fashion, and Pentagon planners are reportedly examining a range of options for action against the island, though he claimed Rubio wants to “get [Iran] finished first.” If that’s true, it may be a long wait until Iran is “finished.” 

On the other hand, Trump is once again talking about taking over Greenland and posting memes referencing his desire to annex Canada. Iran may have proven that Venezuela was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to regime change, but Trump’s ambitions for world domination do not seem to have disappeared. 

If you can think back to the distant days of March 2026, you’ll remember that the US-Iran war was, at one point, primarily a conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, though at times it was also about Iran’s treatment of protesters, threat to Israel, missile program, and support for regional proxies. 

At this point, however, it’s now clear that it’s about something entirely different, and something that wasn’t even an issue until this conflict began more than four months ago: Iran’s ability to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Iran’s ability to use cheap drones and missiles to throttle ship traffic through the crucial waterway, through which around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally transits, became, during the war, its primary source of leverage against the US. Iran’s new leaders now view de facto control of the Strait as their primary deterrent against future attacks by their enemies — an arguably more effective and flexible deterrent than their nuclear program ever was — as well as a potential source of revenue via tolls and fees. Iranian officials have in recent days variously described the Strait as a “golden weapon” and a “divine blessing.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called it Iran’s “economic nuclear weapon.”

This week, however, as violence flared again in the region, there were some indications that Iran might be overestimating the power of that weapon and its ability to coerce and deter its enemies. 

A return to war in the Gulf

This week, Iranian leaders showed how far they’re willing to go to protect their “divine blessing,” attacking three ships transiting the Strait with missiles. The ships were traveling through a corridor close to the coast of Oman, under recommendation from the UN’s International Maritime Organization, and had not coordinated with Iranian authorities. This led to the biggest exchange of fire between the two countries since an interim ceasefire agreement in June, with the US bombing more than 80 targets in Iran and the Iranians launching missiles at US targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. The US also reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales, while President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the two countries to be over. 

The letter of the dispute comes down to a vaguely worded clause in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two countries on June 17. The MOU commits Iran to take steps to restore shipping through the Strait and work with Oman, with which it shares the Strait, to determine future arrangements for administering it. US officials interpreted this as restoring the free navigation through the strait that existed before the war. The Iranians, however, interpret it as giving them control over which ships can cross. This rather wide ambiguity over the control of a very narrow body of water made it easier for both sides to sign the deal, but it’s now led to a new phase of the conflict. 

After the deal was completed, oil shipments through the Strait returned to around half of their prewar levels, but much of it was on ships traveling at night with their identification systems turned off, escorted by the US Navy.

That was an unacceptable situation for Iran, whose leaders have signaled they believe they have created a new status quo that gives them a say over who comes and goes in the Strait. The increasing number of ships traveling the Oman route under US protection was a threat to that status quo. Add in the fact that Tehran appears to believe that Trump is reluctant to return to full-scale war, and they calculated that this week’s attacks were a risk worth taking. 

“Because they believe that the US is deterred from resuming full-scale hostilities, there is scope for pushing the envelope, for pushing their luck and seeing how much they can extract in the Strait,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. 

This may be a miscalculation. 

A weapon, but not an all-powerful one

Iran’s Hormuz deterrent might be more effective against a more normal politician than Donald Trump. The Iran war is deeply unpopular, and Trump’s Republicans can ill afford high gas prices heading into this year’s midterm elections. But Trump, generally speaking, appears to value his own idiosyncratic political projects — including the conflict with Iran — more than his party’s political prospects. 

But Trump aside, the ability to close Hormuz may also simply not be as powerful a weapon of mass disruption as many thought it would be. Crude oil prices went as high as $126 per barrel during the war, but usually hovered closer to $100 — well short of the $200 many experts were predicting at the outset of the war. 

That’s due to a number of factors, including non-Mideast producers like the US increasing production and the fact that the world’s largest importer, China, proved able to suddenly slash those imports far more than anyone realized was possible, leaving more oil for everyone else. And thanks to the wider adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy sources, oil is simply not as central to the global economy as it once was. 

This isn’t to say that the crisis isn’t having an economic impact — it’s driving a slow-moving food crisis throughout much of the developing world — but it’s not creating 1970s-type gas lines or even COVID-type supply chain disruptions. 

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz was always understood to be this massively destabilizing black swan event,” Brew said. “And it turns out to have been more manageable.”

While continued flare-ups in the fighting have driven spikes in oil prices throughout the crisis — including this week — markets have also been quick to settle in the periods of calm that followed. One week after the signing of the MOU, prices were back at pre-war levels. Even during this week’s fighting, oil jumped to only around $80 before receding as the fighting died down. Energy markets appear to be pricing in the expectation that any return to war won’t last long.  

Iran’s leaders can probably be confident that Trump isn’t inclined to risk large numbers of US casualties by committing ground troops, embarking on a costly regime-change operation, or even returning to the level of airstrikes that we saw at the height of Operation Epic Fury. But they may on the other hand,  the cost to the United States of periodic “mowing the grass” strikes is relatively low. The US has also been striking Iranian bridges for the first time since April. This attack on civilian infrastructure rather than military targets suggests Trump’s tolerance for escalation may be higher than the Iranians anticipated.  

Has Iran bought a diminishing asset? 

Iran’s moment of maximum leverage may be right now. Oil producers in the region are heavily investing in new pipelines and alternative routes to allow them to eventually bypass the Strait. The more Iran attacks the ships used by its Gulf neighbors, the more it will encourage those investments. The crisis is also driving a surge in demand for electric vehicles in many countries. The more dangerous it stays in the Strait, the more consumers and producers will be incentivized to lessen their dependence on it. 

In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Council analyst Nate Swanson argued that there may also be a contradiction between Iran’s twin goals with the Strait: creating a deterrent to future attacks while also extracting maximum economic value from its control of the waterway. Iran has already shown it can shut down shipping at will, as well as attack the energy infrastructure of its neighbors. (It’s worth remembering that any new bypass pipelines built by Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates will still be within range of Iranian missiles and drones.) 

But the more Tehran tries to squeeze the region economically through tolls, and the more chaos it creates by actually launching attacks on both shipping through the strait and Gulf countries, the more it will seem worth the cost to both the US and countries in the region to go back to war. 

Some in Tehran may consider this a price worth paying. The recent mass funeral for the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei doubled as a rally and coming-out party for what Iranian leaders hope will be a new regional order that they will help to shape, and control of Hormuz is part of that. But drawing a hard line on this issue will also push back any return to normalcy for a population exhausted by war and economic crisis. Iran has also not yet received the frozen assets held in banks in the Middle East as promised in the deal, and that seems unlikely as long as tankers in the Strait are taking incoming fire. 

The US and Israel launched this war with what proved to be massive overconfidence in their ability to force a weaker country to bend to their will through sheer dominance in firepower. In this new lower-intensity phase of the conflict, Iran may have similar overconfidence in its ability to coerce its rivals through an advantage in geography. 

Iranians leaders once believed that their missile forces and regional proxies like Hezbollah could deter foreign attacks and that their nascent nuclear program gave them bargaining leverage with their rivals. Ultimately, that deterrent failed, and Khamenei and many other top Iranian leaders paid with their lives. Their successors believe they’ve now found a more effective deterrent and bargaining chip. If it fails, they can’t say they weren’t warned. 

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Is the US-Iran deal “over”?  

What’s happening? The US launched a second consecutive day of strikes against Iran on Wednesday, deepening a breach in the three-week-old “memorandum of understanding” between the two countries. 

The immediate incident began on Monday after Iran attacked multiple ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The US struck Iran on Tuesday, and Iran responded with strikes of its own in neighboring Kuwait and Bahrain, which are both home to US military installations.

The US also reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil on Tuesday, restricting what had been a new income stream for the regime.

When asked about the ceasefire on Wednesday, President Donald Trump, who is currently at a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, said, “I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum.”

What’s the context? As my colleague Josh Keating wrote last month, the end of the Iran war has been greatly exaggerated from the jump. This isn’t even the first time the US has attacked Iranian targets since the two sides reached a “memorandum of understanding” in mid-June, which laid out a 60-day pathway toward a more permanent deal (at least in theory).

Other problems also abound, including the status of the Strait, the outstanding question of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

So what now? It’s hard to say. Violence has broken out and receded at other points during the ceasefire, and Trump’s comments can be an unreliable indicator of where things are headed. But the strikes are once again grinding traffic through the Strait to a halt, according to CNN, and oil prices are rising. 

If that continues, Trump could also begin to lose ground on gas prices, which had been falling following the ceasefire agreement — and with the midterms quickly approaching and voters broadly unhappy about the state of the economy, he doesn’t have much time left.

Speaking of the midterms: The road to control of the US Senate may well run through Maine, where Democratic nominee Graham Platner is facing serious new allegations that are likely to end his campaign. On a special episode of his podcast America, Actually, my colleague Astead Herndon explains why the left ignored Platner’s red flags in the first place.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a Logoff piece if I’ve ever seen one: The moral case for being less online, featuring some fun history about Luddism (as always, it’s a gift link).

Plus, from the World Cup: No games today. But don’t miss the Vox video team on how soccer players train for chaos.  

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!