The first American bombs fell on Iran six months ago. Half a year is plenty of time to judge how a war is going, and the results of this one can now be fairly assessed. The only reasonable conclusion is that it is an abject failure, which might be the most charitable description I can come up with.
On Monday I wrote about the numbness across the political media world over this diplomatic and economic disaster of a foray. The strange refusal of elected officials and the pundit class to treat what appears to be an obvious emergency like an obvious emergency. It got me thinking that I needed a more dispassionate argument to make the case. Forget the rhetoric, forget whether you supported the initial strikes, and forget what anyone predicted. Let’s just look at the ledgers of what has and has not transpired.
It’s not that difficult to do because the Trump administration set its own benchmarks at the outset: a capitulating regime, a reopened Strait of Hormuz, a nuclear agreement, cheap energy, an isolated Iran. Six months is long enough to assess and audit each and every one on fact-based merits. It doesn’t look good.
First, the good news? The military part went exactly as advertised, at least at the very outset. American forces killed an entire upper tier of the regime’s leadership and shredded Iran’s conventional military in a matter of days. At the time, I compared it to the ‘96 Bulls playing basketball against a private school JV team, and that comparison holds. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the rest of the administration were so cocksure about the domination, and on that narrow definition they earned the bravado.
But nobody in the administration has been able to simply explain what all that military firepower and dominance was meant to achieve, apart from leaving Iran without nuclear capabilities to threaten their neighbors, namely Israel.
Six months after the first bombs were fired to compel Iran’s surrender, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the “toughest sanctions in history,” which were clearly designed to compel Iran’s surrender. Victorious wars don’t typically come with the Treasury Department trying to finish what the Department of War started. It’s usually the reverse of that, but here we are.
Bessent finally did what almost no one in the administration would do when he explained the intended endgame in public statements Thursday. “This is going to be the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world,” he said. “It worked in Venezuela once we put up the blockade. It is working in Cuba right now. And it is going to work in Iran, and we are going to collapse this regime.”
So the objective has returned to regime change, six months after the war started, and the goal of changing the regime has been an on-again, off-again, and now on-again goal. It's also worth noting that neither sanctions on Venezuela nor Cuba led to a regime collapse, unless you include the surgical military extraction of Nicolas Maduro. Those two nations were made materially weaker, but the regimes stayed in place.
Vice President JD Vance also conceded this new approach in public statements he made Thursday. “We destroyed their conventional military,” he said. “We’re kind of now in a new phase where the most effective tool that we have is the economic pressure.” That’s how the administration is officially characterizing the war with Iran in terms of sanctions over a military approach. The good news is that this will save the U.S. money. The not-so-good news is the tacit admission that the military approach did not achieve the previously stated regime-change objective.
President Donald Trump told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst earlier this week that Iran should “put up the white flag of surrender.” He also said he has “no time schedule,” and that he’s “not in a hurry,” before revealing backchannel negotiations with the Revolutionary Guard (just a day before he admitted there were no such discussions). This feels as close to an open admission that he’s run out of options as you will ever find. And it’s certainly not the way to make Iran wave a white flag.
Lest we forget that this was always a war of choice, after all, launched by an administration apparently drunk on its own military competence in Venezuela and sold by a president who campaigned on no more forever wars. So there is literally no one else to blame for how poorly this has developed. So let’s grade this Iran War “project” the same way you’d grade any other that has costly overruns and is close to six months past its own deadlines.
THE DIPLOMATIC LEDGER: The war began without any of the allies Trump expected. Britain, France, and Germany all refused to join the campaign and complained they were never consulted. Perhaps a year of tariff actions and Trump insults came with a cost? Six months later, Iran is reportedly nine to twelve months from having a nuclear bomb, which is basically where it was before any of the bombing started last summer. Inspectors still cannot verify what happened to its prewar stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium.
But wait, there’s more. 60-day peace deal expired Monday with no settlement, and both sides further apart than when they signed. Nuclear talks at the center of the whole agreement never even began. Oman, one of the few countries with real channels into Tehran, got threatened by Trump with American bombs all for having the temerity to try to negotiate an end to the blockade. With Oman, Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar all getting nowhere, U.S. outreach has since expanded to Austria and Greece. As for isolating Iran? China still buys more than 80% of the oil Iran ships, and Turkey still does billions in annual trade with Tehran. Russia is also reportedly shipping munitions to Iran as well.
THE MILITARY LEDGER: There are some clear military wins from the outset, but after over six months of on-again, off-again armed conflict, the military losses are piling up as well. Dozens of aircraft have been lost or damaged. The long-range munitions arsenal has been left virtually empty, and the plan to replace them is being measured in three to five years. And the Pacific theater is now without a US aircraft carrier, as the USS Washington has been sent to the Middle East to replace the USS Lincoln, which spent 250 straight days at sea. And 18 Americans are dead with more than 750 wounded.
THE ECONOMIC LEDGER: Secretary Hegseth told Senators that the war had cost $37.5 billion so far, as of late July. The White House has asked Congress for another $87.6 billion in emergency spending, $67 billion of which is simply to restock the Pentagon’s depleted munitions supply. Ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz have dropped from more than 130 ships a day before the war started, to only nine this week. A fifth of the world’s oil and gas moves through a waterway that Trump consistently insists is open, despite a raft of evidence, including spiked oil prices, that suggests otherwise.
It gets worse. Gas has gone from under $3 a gallon before the war to $4.10 today, a record for this date, even after the administration let stations switch to cheaper winter-blend fuel a month early. And the economic damage goes well past the gas station, with oil peaking at $126 a barrel, roughly 75% above prewar levels. More than a fifth of Middle Eastern refining capacity is now offline as U.S. inflation hit 3.4% in July. The IMF is cutting its global growth forecast, citing energy prices still running about 25% above pre-war levels.
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The Strait of Hormuz is clearly the biggest worry of all of the above, because the war’s net effect was to give Iran effective control over a waterway the global economy simply cannot function without. Two months of so-called ceasefire negotiations accomplished nothing to reopen it. Its closure isn’t just the reason why energy prices are hurting American households right now, but also why Trump’s approval rating is in a death spiral just months before the midterms.
Iran sees this situation as clearly as I do. On Thursday’s Fox & Friends, Charlie Hurt asked Yingst how mind-boggling it is that Tehran still hasn’t capitulated. Yingst answered by candidly reporting that Iran feels very confident right now, citing the Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the regime spent the ceasefire not looking for peace, but preparing for an escalation of combat.. He then said on Fox News words that don’t often get said about the Iran war: that there is “no end in sight.”
So yes, I am calling this an abject failure, which I still think is the charitable version, because failures at least end. As Yingst said, this one has no end in sight.