Starting the Iran War Was Easy. Stopping It Will Be Hard

As the second week of the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States draws to a close, one fact has become impossible to ignore: almost no one in Washington has any clear idea when or how the war will end. The opening blows landed faster and harder than nearly anyone predicted. The question of what comes next has no comparable answer.

Part of the confusion is self-inflicted. Since the fighting began, the White House has issued a stream of contradictory messaging about the rationale, the objectives, and the timeline. In one interview with CBS News, President Trump described the war as “pretty much complete” and “far ahead of schedule.” A few days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the same outlet that this was just the beginning.

Pressed by CBS on the contradiction, Trump insisted both statements could be true at once — a claim that, even read generously, strains belief.

The mixed signals may be deliberate, a way to keep Iran guessing about American military moves. But whatever the intent, the effect has been to make the war’s trajectory nearly impossible to forecast for analysts and allies alike. And the allies have noticed. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned reporters, “We are concerned that there is clearly no joint plan for bringing this war to an end.

We have no interest in an endless war.” French President Emmanuel Macron, after a video call with the heads of state of all G7 members, made a similar observation: no one can tell what Trump actually wants from this war.

The discontent reaches well beyond Europe. According to Bloomberg, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have been quietly lobbying allies to help them persuade Trump to find an off-ramp that would keep American military operations against Iran short. The central question of this war is no longer how it was won in its first week. It is whether an off-ramp exists at all.

An Off-Ramp

The desire to find a way out of this conflict is not new. After the very first strikes on February 28, Trump told Axios that he had several off-ramps available. He could do things the extended way and take over all of Iran, or he could end the conflict in two or three days, warning Tehran that America would return if it tried to rebuild its nuclear or missile programs. At the time, the president seemed genuinely open to a quick exit.

So what happened? In retrospect, the United States appears to have become a victim of its own early success. For roughly the first week of the conflict, everything went better than expected. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening hours.

The U.S. and Israel destroyed roughly 80 percent of Iran’s missile launchers, sank more than 40 Iranian naval vessels, and wiped out much of the country’s drone-manufacturing capacity. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a statement noting that Iran’s ballistic missile launches had dropped by 86 percent and that drone attacks were down 73 percent. For a brief moment, a U.S.–Israeli victory in Iran looked as if it might be almost as decisive as Venezuela.

Then the war dragged on. U.S. intelligence put out a report concluding that the Iranian leadership was still largely intact — not at risk of collapse anytime soon, despite relentless strikes. Around that same time, the White House appears to have begun thinking seriously about its path to a graceful exit.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the president’s advisers began encouraging Trump to articulate a plan to extract the United States from the war while arguing that the military had largely achieved its objectives. Their concern was primarily political. If the war continued too long, it risked losing support among Trump’s conservative base. Lose the base, and the upcoming midterm elections would become an even greater disaster for the Republican Party than previously predicted.

The presidency itself might be at stake in 2028.

The Bill Comes Due at Home

The political logic rests on a hard economic floor. When Republicans won power in 2024, their victory came on pledges to bring down the cost of living and keep the United States out of foreign wars. The intended message for 2026 was that Trump had delivered on those promises and, with a congressional mandate, would keep delivering. But since the Iran war started, the price of gas has gone wild — the product of yet another Middle East intervention that a majority of Americans do not appear to support.

Gas is not the only product Americans will soon pay more for. Fertilizer prices were already high before the war and have since surged. Urea prices are up 30 percent as commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a halt, putting the entire agricultural industry at risk. The strait handles roughly one-third of globally traded fertilizer, and farmers across North America are heading into spring planting season.

Veronica Nigh, chief economist at The Fertilizer Institute, told CNBC she expected more of these costs to be passed on to consumers.

The same pressures explain why Qatar and the UAE have been lobbying Trump to find an off-ramp. According to most analysts, prolonging the conflict would be a disaster for the region’s economies. Qatar has already shut down liquefied natural gas production at the world’s largest export facility after it was targeted in an Iranian drone attack. The Emirati oil giant ADNOC shut its refinery at Ruwais — the fourth-largest on Earth — after a drone strike caused a fire.

Skies Empty, Sea Lanes Collapse

Zoom out to the rest of the region and the disruption becomes stark. The aviation analytics firm Cirium estimated that there were about 37,000 cancelled flights between February 28 and March 8 — roughly 56 percent of all scheduled flights in the region during that nine-day period. The pattern is still visible on any flight tracker: enormous volumes of air traffic either squeezed into a northern route through Georgia and Azerbaijan, or flying a southern route to avoid the Persian Gulf entirely.

The situation is even more dire at sea. The independent outlet Argus Media reported that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had all but collapsed, with only two ships transiting the strait on March 11, compared to a historical average of 138 ships per day. Some flights to the Middle East have since resumed, but significant risks remain — vividly illustrated when four people were injured after two drones fell near Dubai International Airport. Regional governments are working round the clock to reopen their airports.

The Strait of Hormuz will be far harder to fix. According to Iran expert Danny Citrinowicz, all Tehran really needs is one successful drone strike to make passage untenable. Citrinowicz argues that a single strike could trigger a chain reaction: insurance companies would either dramatically raise premiums or refuse outright to insure ships transiting the strait. Without insurance, most tankers simply will not sail.

The economic chokepoint, in other words, does not require Iran to sink a fleet. It requires Iran to make the route uninsurable.

A Fraying Defensive Shield

The economics are only half the problem. There are also military concerns. Take the Emirates. Its interceptors performed well during the initial days of the war, but according to political scientist Christopher Clary, there has since been a significant spike in the percentage of Iranian drones that made it past the UAE’s defenses — an indication that its air defense network is already fraying.

And that is just one country. The situation has grown dire enough that the Pentagon is now redeploying THAAD missile defense assets from South Korea all the way to the Middle East. Stripping advanced air defenses from one theater to reinforce another is the signature of a force stretched thin. In short, the United States and its allies are overextended, both politically and militarily. It is not hard to see why both the Gulf states and Trump’s domestic allies are looking for the exits.

That raises an obvious question: would Trump even consider an off-ramp at this point in the war? The honest answer is that nobody knows. Dr. Andrew Gawthorpe, a U.S. foreign policy expert, believes Trump is talking himself out of an early exit.

He explains that whether a conflict is judged a success or a failure depends on the goals the combatants set for themselves. Trump has set out lofty goals — including Tehran’s unconditional surrender — so there is a real risk that taking an exit ramp, or pursuing goals that are easier to achieve, would look like a defeat. That is not something any president wants heading into a crucial midterm election. At the moment, an off-ramp does not seem likely.

And even if Trump were to accept one, there is no guarantee Iran would accept it too.

The Belligerent Republic

To understand whether Tehran would take an exit, start with its new leadership. In his first public address since becoming Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei struck a defiant tone. In a written statement read by a state television anchor, he vowed revenge for Iran’s martyrs, including his father and wife. He stressed that every member of the nation who had been killed was an independent subject for revenge.

He also laid out his strategy for the next phase of the war, saying Iran was studying the possibility of opening new fronts where its adversaries have little experience and are highly vulnerable.

Worse still, the new supreme leader doubled down on keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed to commercial traffic and demanded that Gulf states shut down U.S. military bases on their soil or face continued attacks. Khamenei’s threats could be read as an attempt to scare the United States and its allies into backing down. But the deeper message is clear: the United States would be wise to seek an off-ramp, because Iran will not.

Nate Swanson, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Security Initiative, agrees. He argues that the Iranian regime sees this as an existential conflict and does not appear interested in an immediate off-ramp. From Iran’s perspective, a ceasefire right now would only be a temporary respite before Washington or Jerusalem eventually restarted the conflict. In fairness, Iran has now been attacked twice while in the middle of negotiations — during the 12-day war and during this conflict.

That history makes it significantly harder for Tehran to believe that either the U.S. or Israel is negotiating in good faith. For Tehran, this war needs to end painfully enough that the United States and Israel lose interest in trying again.

The strategic implication is uncomfortable for Washington. If Iran retains its ability to inflict costs on the United States and the Gulf — including through energy prices — then in Swanson’s view, Tehran is more likely than Washington to determine the end of the conflict. That would contradict every public statement the White House has made: that Trump is the one who will decide when this war is over.

Two Tracks Out of Tehran

This does not mean Tehran would reject every offer of an off-ramp. At a minimum, it needs assurance that Iran will not be attacked in the near term. The outline of an acceptable deal looks something like the set of demands that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian shared on X after speaking to his Russian and Pakistani counterparts: “The only way to end this war — ignited by the Zionist regime & US — is recognizing Iran’s legitimate rights, payment of reparations, and firm [international] guarantees against future aggression.”

That was the first time a member of Iran’s leadership had outlined a path to end the conflict. It is possible Pezeshkian was going off-script, publicly contradicting Iran’s hardliners. But Iran may instead be working two angles at once. Pezeshkian, a career reformer, is the sort of figure who can credibly extend an olive branch even while Iran’s hardliners threaten continued violence.

This is an established pattern known as dual-track messaging, in which different factions of the Iranian government intentionally send different signals to different audiences.

If that is what is happening, the new supreme leader can play strongman — emphasizing revenge, resistance, and continued strikes to maintain support among the Revolutionary Guards and the conservative clerics who form the regime’s power base. Meanwhile, Pezeshkian can play to the international audience, floating the possibility of negotiations and off-ramps without directly contradicting the supreme leader. If Washington or regional mediators respond positively to Pezeshkian’s overtures, the regime can pursue that path.

If they do not — or if domestic hardliners decide it makes Iran look weak — the regime can dismiss his statements as unauthorized or insist he was misunderstood. The structure lets Tehran test for an exit while losing nothing if the test fails.

Divergence Between Washington and Jerusalem

Any potential off-ramp will require coordination between Washington and Jerusalem, and that is where the deepest fault line may run. For now, American and Israeli interests align on degrading Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missiles. Both countries want Tehran significantly weakened. But if those interests start to diverge, finding an off-ramp becomes far more difficult.

The most likely area of disagreement is the future of the Iranian regime itself. Analysts at the Atlantic Council believe Israel is determined to achieve regime change in Iran. The United States and its Arab partners are more cautious. If the regime collapses without a clear-cut successor able to unify the country, the result could be chaos, civil war, instability spilling into neighboring countries, and a major refugee crisis.

For America, the collapse of Iran would mean being bogged down in another Middle Eastern quagmire for decades — precisely what Trump has made explicitly clear he wants to avoid.

For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the collapse of Iran would threaten the trillion-dollar bets they are making on domestic transformation. Both countries have spent the past decade trying to diversify away from oil, building airports, hotels, financial centers, and tech hubs. But it is very difficult to draw tourists or data-center contracts to the middle of an active war zone, which means Saudi and Emirati economic projects depend on this war ending soon.

For Israel, these concerns matter less. Some analysts argue that Israeli leaders might actually prefer chaos in Iran over a managed transition. A weak, divided Iran would be unable to support Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza. It would be unable to project power across the Middle East. And that would leave Israel as the dominant military force in the region, without any serious competitor.

Whose Clock Decides the End

If the future of the regime becomes a point of contention between Washington and Jerusalem, the balance of leverage tilts toward the United States. According to Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump will most likely determine the war’s end and impose that endpoint on Netanyahu. But even if the two agree in principle on whether to end the war, that does not mean they will converge on the same timeline. According to Bloomberg, Netanyahu has made clear to the United States that Israel is not done yet, while Trump has indicated publicly, on multiple occasions, that he can have the war wrapped up quickly.

The timeline gap is rooted in electoral arithmetic on both sides. According to Professor Yossi Mekelberg, a geopolitical researcher and consultant, Netanyahu has bet that embarking on this war will boost his chances of political survival in the upcoming Israeli election — and that the longer the war goes on, the more likely he is to be reelected. Trump faces the reverse incentive. If the war lasts too long, it risks tanking the Republican Party in the upcoming midterms, and tanking the global oil markets even sooner.

That sets up a direct collision. If Trump decides he needs to end the war to salvage the markets or the midterms, but Netanyahu wants the fighting to continue through the Israeli elections this autumn, the two leaders are pulling in opposite directions. As Trump told the Times of Israel, the ending of the war with Iran will be a mutual decision for him and Netanyahu to take together — but only if they can reach an agreement.

Fail to do so, and Trump might not wait for Netanyahu’s approval before making a decision to boost his own political fortunes. The war was begun on the assumption that overwhelming force would dictate its end. Two weeks in, the harder truth is that ending it depends on aligning the clocks of three governments that no longer keep the same time.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did the opening phase of the Iran war go, and why did it stall?

For roughly the first week, the campaign went better than expected. Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening hours. The U.S. and Israel destroyed roughly 80 percent of Iran’s missile launchers, sank more than 40 Iranian naval vessels, and wiped out much of its drone-manufacturing capacity. Ballistic missile launches dropped 86 percent and drone attacks 73 percent.

But U.S. intelligence then concluded that Iran’s broader leadership remained largely intact and was not at risk of collapse, removing the prospect of a quick decisive victory and forcing Washington to reassess its path forward.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz so economically important, and what makes it so hard to reopen?

The strait handles roughly one-third of globally traded fertilizer and a large share of energy shipments. Argus Media reported that only two ships transited on March 11, against a historical average of 138 per day, contributing to a 30 percent surge in urea fertilizer prices. Iran expert Danny Citrinowicz argues that Tehran only needs a single successful drone strike to make passage untenable: one strike could trigger insurers to raise premiums dramatically or refuse coverage entirely, leaving most tankers unwilling to sail regardless of the military situation.

What is Iran’s dual-track messaging strategy, and who is sending each signal?

Iran appears to be deliberately sending contradictory signals. New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei has vowed revenge for Iran’s martyrs, kept the Strait of Hormuz closed, and demanded Gulf states expel U.S. bases. Meanwhile, President Masoud Pezeshkian — a career reformer — has publicly floated conditions for ending the war, including recognition of Iran’s rights, reparations, and international guarantees against future aggression. This arrangement lets Tehran test for an off-ramp while retaining the ability to disavow Pezeshkian’s statements if hardliners or the supreme leader decide they signal weakness.

Why might Iran, rather than the United States, end up determining when the war ends?

Nate Swanson of the Atlantic Council argues that because Iran retains the ability to inflict economic costs on the U.S. and the Gulf — particularly through energy prices and Strait of Hormuz disruption — it may hold more leverage over the conflict’s timeline than Washington’s public statements suggest. Iran also sees this as an existential conflict and has now been attacked twice while in negotiations, making it deeply skeptical that either the U.S. or Israel is negotiating in good faith. From Tehran’s perspective, the war needs to end painfully enough that Washington and Jerusalem lose interest in trying again.

Why are the United States and Israel operating on different timelines for ending the war?

The divergence is rooted in domestic electoral arithmetic. Netanyahu has bet that a longer war improves his political survival in Israel’s upcoming election, while Trump faces the opposite pressure: a prolonged conflict risks tanking the Republican Party in the midterms and destabilizing global oil markets even sooner. Former U.S. Ambassador Daniel Shapiro believes Trump will ultimately impose an endpoint on Netanyahu, but the two leaders are pulling in opposite directions — and they also diverge on the deeper question of regime change, with Atlantic Council analysts suggesting Israel actively seeks it while the U.S. and its Arab partners fear the chaos a collapsed Iranian state could produce.

Sources

• Atlantic Council: Twenty questions (and expert answers) about the Iran war
• Reuters: US intelligence says Iran government is not at risk of collapse
• The Conversation: Iran war — the search for an off-ramp
• Manara Magazine: Nuclear cons of Iran’s domestic politics
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Give negotiations a chance
• FDD: Reported U.S. demands on Iran fall short of eliminating Tehran’s threat
• Sentinel (sentdefender) on X
• CNN: Mojtaba Khamenei’s first speech as Iran’s supreme leader