The Next Defining Moment of the Iran War

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran that destroyed military infrastructure, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and spurred a wider regional war. US President Donald Trump has maintained throughout the conflict that the end is near. But as the Iran war encroaches on the six-month mark, skepticism surrounding a resolution has grown.

Americans have remained largely unsupportive of continued US military operations against Iran. Recent Council polling finds two in three Americans believe the war has not been worth fighting, which is consistent with Council polling conducted in May. Now, with the midterm elections just months away, Congress is growing increasingly restless over the costly, prolonged war.

Shortly after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shared details of the administration’s new economic campaign against Iran, Council Vice President of Research for Security and Defense Ariane Tabatabai spoke with the Council’s Christina Colón about what’s driving the shift in US strategy and whether an end to conflict is truly in sight.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Trump administration has, on numerous occasions, said an end to war was in sight. Do you see the Iran war ending soon?

I don’t see this war coming to an end soon. Both sides have now settled into a rhythm of pursuing a dual-track approach to negotiations and military operations. The war now follows a familiar pattern, with tit-for-tat operations prompting rapid rhetorical escalation from US President Donald Trump. President Trump’s threats to target Iran’s civilian infrastructure send diplomats from third-party states scrambling to mediate, which ends with the US president saying he will hold off on an attack at the request of his counterparts. A brief period of negotiations and a pause in military operations follow, and then the cycle begins again. This has been the case for a few months now, and I imagine we will see it continue.

US President Donald Trump recently announced a "crushing economic operation,” calling on allies to “stand with the United States of America” and threatening “economic consequences” against any country that engages in business with Iran. Why is Washington pursuing this tactic?

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clarified on Monday that the United States will be issuing new sanctions and broadening secondary sanctions as part of what the administration is calling “Operation Economic Outcast.” Substantively, the operation is not as significant as the administration is making it out to be, and the “D-Day” characterization is grossly overstating what it will actually accomplish.

The United States has been imposing additional sanctions on Iran for a host of issues since the first Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, so there is a comprehensive web of sanctions in place already. But the move does highlight that the administration knows it is not going to accomplish its objectives militarily.

Iran’s economy is deeply troubled, and it was the collapse of the Iranian currency that fueled the large-scale protests earlier this year and late last year. So, while the additional pressure is certainly going to hurt the country, I am skeptical that it will, in the short term, lead to regime collapse.

Looking back, what key moments would you say have defined this war?

The start of any war is a defining moment for it, and that was certainly the case here. In the two months leading up to the US-Israeli attack, Iranians were engaged in a series of large-scale, anti-government protests. Thousands were killed by regime security forces and even more rounded up. The country was completely in shock. So much of the commentary on these protests, including my own, shared the view that these protests were different. It seemed like the regime’s days were numbered. And then the missiles were launched.

The death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was the second moment. Khamenei was the second supreme leader to rule Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, succeeding the founder of the regime, Ruhollah Khomeini, in the late 1980s. While a number of senior officials were killed in the initial strikes, the death of the regime’s old, frail, but ruthless leader was the first sign of the strategic failure of the war as his even more hardline son, Mojtaba Khamenei, assumed power.

The third moment was the tragedy of Minab. On February 28, a Tomahawk missile struck an Iranian elementary school, killing around 150 people, mostly schoolgirls. The incident both highlighted the costs of the war and the changes to the US Department of Defense, which had already been receiving questions around its transparency and accountability, as well as cuts made to the workforce responsible for mitigating civilian harm in warfare.

The fourth event worth highlighting was the June signing of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran, which was significant for a few reasons. To set the 60-day clock to resolve major issues, the United States frontloaded a lot of concessions, chiefly Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz. Experts believed this MOU would be unlikely to lead to a final agreement, and that assessment was recently proven correct. The 60 days ended on August 17, and there still isn’t a deal.

We are now living through the next moment, defined by a tacit recognition by the administration that military operations have not yielded strategic results despite some operational successes. This is why Washington is now pursuing an economic policy that is designed to achieve what the war failed to accomplish: weakening the regime in Tehran and compelling it to accept US demands. It remains to be seen whether the economic measures will succeed where military operations failed, but I have my reservations.

Despite its name, the war has not been confined to Iran. What neighboring and regional countries have been pulled into the widening conflict? And how might their involvement—willing or unwilling—shape the future of the region and US relations?

A major reason why previous administrations had not engaged in a direct conflict with Iran was the likelihood that it would spill over into neighboring countries. Many countries with US military installations have been hit by Iran and its proxies, including all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Israel. In addition to hosting US installations and forces, some Gulf countries like the UAE and Qatar are a hub for regional commerce, tourism, energy, and other economic activity.

What the war will mean for US presence in and relations with Middle Eastern partners in the long term remains to be seen, though I suspect we will look back at the war as a decisive moment for America’s role in the region.

The war has remained deeply unpopular, with recent Council polling finding 68 percent of Americans believe the war has not been worth the costs. How are Democrats and Republicans approaching the war in the lead up to the midterm elections?

Congressional Republicans have been stuck between a rock and hard place. On the one hand, most still do not want to break from President Trump in a meaningful way as doing so could both impact their electoral fortunes and lead to personal pushback from him. On the other hand, many may have real problems with the way the war is going—albeit for different reasons.

For some long-time hawks, the Iran war is something they had wanted to see, and so they have been largely supportive of the war. They did, however, take issue with the MOU, which they (rightly) viewed as making too many concessions to the Iranian regime. Still, they have been reluctant to get into a public spat with the Trump administration over it. Then there are those within the party who joined the MAGA movement because of the failure of the post-9/11 wars and want to see a more isolationist foreign policy. They, too, have shied away from calling out the president.

On the Democratic side, there are two general threads united in the foundational view that the war with Iran has and continues to be a mistake. For moderate Democratics, the war was a mistake, and the MOU was a bad deal that just proved the administration has no strategy. Trump may have talked tough on Iran, but he made concessions that the Biden and Obama administrations would have refused to make. The progressives, meanwhile, see the war as the original sin and want Washington to take any offramp possible to end the devastation it has caused for the region, and for the US and global economies.

I think the role of public opinion in shaping the outcome of the war will remain limited. It will, however, impact the midterms. And it is clear Democrats view it as a winning issue.