Trump says the Iran war is over. So why won’t he end it?

One way or another, President Donald Trump would like you to believe the war in Iran is wrapping up soon.

Trump said this week that he is “very intent on making a deal” and that his team has had good talks with unnamed Iranian leaders, who also “want to make a deal badly.” He has insisted that the war has already been won and that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.” Wall Street, rattled by the war’s disruptions, seems to love the new happy talk about negotiations.

The White House has presented a proposal for a peace deal and is hopeful for talks via a new diplomatic track possibly led by Vice President JD Vance, with the government of Pakistan acting as intermediary. The 15-point plan to end the war that the US has presented to Iran, which includes Iran turning over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and accepting limits on its missile program, is probably a non-starter for the Iranian government. Iran has rejected the plan and presented a five-point proposal of its own, including the payment of war reparations. But warring parties tend to present maximalist demands at the beginning of ceasefire negotiations. It’s at least possible this is the beginning of a deal.

But a better question than whether the US and Iran can reach a deal may be why it’s even necessary. Why couldn’t Trump simply order a halt to airstrikes as he did at the conclusion of the “12-day war” last June? If he’s really done with the war, shouldn’t it be as simple as stopping the war?

The difference between this war and Trump’s previous military engagements with Iran as well as Venezuela and Syria, is that this time Iran has fought back to a much greater extent.

While this was widely anticipated by experts and commentators before the war started, Iran’s attacks on Gulf Arab countries and the disruptions to the global energy industry seem to have come as a genuine surprise to the president. Whether it was the killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020 or the bombing of the Houthis in 2024, Trump’s enemies have generally found it worth it to deescalate in hopes that he would simply go away. Even the recent raid on Venezuela that captured dictator Nicolas Maduro — which seems to have given Trump confidence that the Iran operation would go more smoothly than it has — appears to have been less an example of “regime change” in the President George W. Bush sense, and more a backroom deal cut with members of the regime who wanted to preserve their hold on power.

This time things are different: Iran’s leadership worries they will face an existential threat moving forward if they don’t prove Trump’s decision to strike was a disastrous mistake. And they may take Trump’s sudden skittishness about the war as a sign their counterattacks are working as intended.

“You don’t put your opponent in a corner where their only way out is through you. That’s what he’s finally done to the Iranians,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Pentagon Middle East adviser now with the advocacy group J Street. “He’s so boxed them in and so threatened their feeling of regime survival, that they’ve basically taken off the gloves and just gone nuts.”

One Iranian response in particular may account for much of why Trump can’t simply declare victory and move on this time: its disruption of global trade, especially oil, through the Strait of Hormuz.

“The simplest reason is Hormuz,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. Even with the damage the Iranian regime has sustained, it has demonstrated an ability to strike at the heart of the global economy and inflict just the sort of pain — in the form of high oil prices — to which a US president heading into a midterm election year is most susceptible. “I think the White House is sufficiently aware that if Trump does just deescalate now it will look very much like an Iranian victory, despite the costs that have been imposed on Iran,” Brew added.

In the short term, Iran’s leaders are also publicly skeptical of whether the US entreaties are genuine — and not just a feint while they move thousands of troops to the region, possibly ahead of a ground invasion to take over Kharg Island, Iran’s main offshore oil terminal, or to control the coast along the strait. It doesn’t help that Iran has been bombed by Israel and the United States twice in the past year while in the middle of nuclear negotiations.

A further question now is whether Iran would restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz even if the US and Israel were to deescalate. Some analysts suggest the Iranians might keep the strait partially closed in order to impose costs significant enough that the US and Israel won’t simply do this all again in six months. Iran is reportedly now developing a selective vetting system for which countries will be allowed to use the strait.

Given that the economic impact of rising energy and fertilizer costs are being felt globally — and far more severely in Africa and Asia than in the United States — Iran would likely come under enormous diplomatic pressure to restore normal traffic through the strait, including from its most important trading partner, China. But Iran has still demonstrated the ability to shut down more than 90 percent of trade through the strait and to do it with a relatively small number of tanker strikes rather than the extensive mining campaign that many expected. That raises the political stakes for both sides moving forward.

Trump, depending on the day, may hope to wind down the war soon, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely happy for it to continue.

From an Israeli perspective, every day that the US and Israel continue destroying Iranian missile launchers and killing senior officials is “pure profit” in the tactical sense. The strikes are making it harder for the regime to rebuild its military capabilities and they’re giving Israel more time to take on Iran’s allied “axis of resistance” groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Plus, there’s always the off chance that the leadership is weakened to the point that it becomes vulnerable to mass protests again.

Netanyahu is also probably not the only foreign leader with Trump’s ear right now. Despite Saudi Arabia’s public opposition to the strikes on Iran, de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has reportedly been privately urging Trump to continue the war, viewing it as a historic chance to reset the balance of power in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reports that the leaders of Arab Gulf states are “pressing Trump in regular phone conversations to finish the job and destroy Iran’s military capabilities before moving on.”

While the Gulf states may have been reluctant about getting involved in the war at the outset, for the now-apparent reason that it would expose their cities and oil infrastructure to Iranian reprisals, the ferocity of the Iranian response may have shifted their thinking. Just as Iran has proven it can make the world pay a heavy price by choking off oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, its regional rivals are hoping to prove to Iran that it can’t hold their economies hostage without paying an even bigger one in order to prevent this from becoming a regular occurrence.

The US is still the dominant player in this war and could resist demands from allies to escalate things further. As Trump demonstrated in June when he effectively called off the 12-day war on social media with Israeli jets still in the air, this is ultimately the president’s call to make. But having some of Trump’s closest friends in the region insisting the war isn’t done could give him pause.

It’s worth noting that we’re roughly three and a half weeks into what Trump had predicted would be a four- to five-week war or longer. Perhaps Trump simply doesn’t feel much sense of urgency about ending the war.

“What we’ve seen is he is very willing to just sort of pull the escape cord when he thinks he needs to,” said Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “So obviously he does not, or has not yet, felt that he needs to.”

Wars of attrition tend to continue as long as both sides think they are winning. Iran’s leaders’ calculation, from the beginning, has been that their tolerance for pain is higher than Trump’s and that with relatively little effort they can continue to impose intolerable costs on the United States.

But is Trump really feeling the pain? One would think the president would be alarmed by the spiking energy costs — and the way that diplomatic announcements appear to be timed to the opening and closing of the New York stock exchange suggests he at least has one eye on the markets, as well as his own poll numbers.

But the president is also reportedly consuming the war in the form of two-minute highlight reels of “stuff blowing up” compiled by military commanders. It’s far from clear that the strategic costs of this war, despite the operational successes, are getting through to the commander-in-chief. It’s possible he’s concluded he can juice the markets as needed with a phone call or press conference downplaying a long operation while still preparing for more extensive maneuvers behind the scenes.

Critics have coined the term “TACO” — Trump always chickens out — to describe Trump’s habit of backing off confrontations when he faces pushback. A more generous interpretation is that throughout his career, Trump has shown a remarkable ability to declare victory and move on rather than getting bogged down in crises. If that instinct isn’t kicking in this time, it may be because he doesn’t yet believe it’s a crisis.