Why Iran is becoming Trump’s ‘forever war’

More than a month into the war with Iran, Washington is confronting the strategic nightmare it tried to avoid. What began as a campaign that many in the US and Israel appear to have imagined as short, punishing, and politically manageable has instead become prolonged, expensive, globally destabilizing, and increasingly difficult to define as success.

The battlefield logic is now inseparable from the political logic, and on both fronts the pressure is mounting on Donald Trump’s administration. Reuters reports that the conflict, launched on February 28, has disrupted global energy flows, driven oil sharply higher, pushed US gasoline prices above four dollars a gallon, and dragged US President Donald Trump’s approval rating down to 36%, the lowest level since his return to office.

How to sell a war

A domestic audience can be persuaded to see a short war as an act of decisive leadership, but a long war becomes a test of competence, a source of inflation, a burden on allied relations, and eventually a question about whether the White House ever had a serious political endgame. Trump, who built much of his political appeal on the promise that he would be stronger than his predecessors and yet less trapped by endless wars, now faces the opposite image. The longer this campaign drags on, the more it looks like a war of choice with no clean exit, one that hurts households at the gas pump, deepens strategic uncertainty, and gives Tehran new ways to impose costs without needing conventional military parity.

That is the crucial point often missed in triumphalist rhetoric coming out of Washington. Iran does not need to dominate the skies or defeat the US in a contest of arms to claim strategic success. It needs only to survive, to keep retaliating, to deny the Americans and Israelis a clean political settlement, and to convert geography into leverage. Reuters described this with unusual clarity when it noted that Tehran has effectively put its hand on a pressure point of the global economy through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on energy infrastructure. In other words, Iran’s war aim is economic coercion by endurance, not a classic military victory.

That reality explains why repeated mediation efforts have failed to produce a breakthrough. Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, and Oman have all been involved in one form or another, while regional diplomacy has become increasingly crowded with ad hoc initiatives and competing back channels. Yet none of these efforts has yielded a stable formula because the central political problem remains unresolved. Tehran does not believe Washington is negotiating in good faith. From the Iranian perspective, the precedent of the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal destroyed confidence in American commitments. In the middle of an active war, that distrust becomes even more intense. Iran continues to insist on its own terms for ending what it calls an unlawful war, while rejecting temporary arrangements that look like tactical pauses rather than real de-escalation.