A War With No Exit Strategy, No Victory To Declare

Both sides have now revealed a preference for escalation over strategic defeat, and each new provocation narrows the space for the next pause.
The Touska seizure, Iran's refusal to negotiate under blockade, Israel's strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure -- all of these add up to an increasingly untenable situation.
This makes the wild card -- Trump and his motormouth -- more consequential than ever, notes Prem Panicker in his must read blog on the Iran War.

Fragile Iran Ceasefire Collapse

Friday morning US time began on a note of Trumpian triumphalism.

Scenting a deal in the air, the American president unleashed a flurry of social media posts congratulating himself.

He called the Iranians 'the nice guys', felicitated the world on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and sternly warned Israel that if it did not honour the ceasefire and continued its attacks in Lebanon, it would not be tolerated. 'Enough is enough,' he declared.

For a brief moment the world breathed easier. The markets danced. And then it all went downhill, fast.

Strait of Hormuz Tensions Rise

The ceasefire barely lasted an hour before Israel resumed bombing operations in Lebanon.

The Strait of Hormuz stayed open for roughly a couple of hours before Iran shut it again, pointing out that the US blockade remained in place and hence there was little point in Tehran complying unilaterally while Washington did not.

Two Indian ships attempted to run the Hormuz blockade. Iran fired on at least one of them.

Trump U-Turns and Diplomacy Chaos

Trump's frustration boiled over, producing the kind of sudden U-turns that have become his trademark.

Earlier in the week he had spoken of likely travelling to Pakistan himself to sign the deal.

Over the weekend he announced that Vice President J D Vance would not go due to security concerns, and that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff -- arguably the two negotiators Iran trusts the least -- would lead the talks instead.

Bizarrely, a separate White House statement said Vance would go after all.

When asked about the contradiction, officials said: 'Things changed.'

• WAR IN THE GULF

The weekend ended with this post (external link) that harked back to an earlier Trump threat to destroy an entire civilization.

Threatening Iran with dire consequences if it did not accept the deal, he said in all caps that he would be 'No more Mr Nice Guy'.

European nations, watching this spectacle from the sidelines, are far from convinced (external link).

They believe a deal patched together in a hurry, primarily to give the United States a face-saving exit, will only store up serious downstream problems for the region, and beyond.

The weekend ended with the news that a US team would go to Islamabad on Monday to negotiate. Iran is yet to confirm whether it will attend.

READING LIST

The ceasefire that wasn't

The weekend's fragile truce collapsed in stages, each stage more damaging than the last.

The USS Spruance intercepted the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska in the Gulf of Oman after it attempted to breach the US naval blockade, firing on its engine room and boarding it with marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. Iran's military called it 'armed maritime piracy' and vowed retaliation.

Tehran also announced it would not send negotiators to the Islamabad talks -- as long as the blockade remains in place, there is nothing to negotiate, Iranian officials said.

Oil jumped nearly eight percent on the news.

The talks that Islamabad is preparing for -- barbed wire around the Serena Hotel, C-17s landed with security equipment, public transport halted -- may have no Iranian delegation to receive. [James Politi, Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Michael Acton, Financial Times (external link); Daphne Psaledakis and Hatem Maher, Reuters (external link)]

Why the ceasefire couldn't hold

The events of the weekend, summarised above, are so dizzying that any observer would ask the logical question: But why?

For answers, turn to Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. His expertise is grounded in decades of direct access to senior decision-makers in the US, Iran, and Israel, as well as his role as a key architect of diplomatic efforts including the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).

His reconstruction of the weekend's sequence is the essential corrective to the chaos-as-default reading.

Regional diplomacy had quietly produced a framework: Iran, through President Pezeshkian, signalled that attacks on neighboring States would cease as long as their territory wasn't used to strike Iran.

Gulf States were monitoring to see if the commitment held before reciprocating -- a process that takes hours, not minutes.

But before they could respond, Trump posted his Truth Social declaration of victory: Congratulatory, humiliating to Tehran, and threatening 'complete destruction and certain death' in the same breath.

The desalination plant at Qeshm Island was struck shortly after -- a likely war crime under Article 54 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions.

The de-escalation architecture, assembled carefully over days, collapsed in under an hour.

Whether Trump's intervention was deliberate or impulsive, the Gulf States' verdict -- prominent accounts across the Gulf are now blaming Washington for the war's continuation -- is notable. [Trita Parsi, Quincy Institute (external link)]

Why the ceasefires keep failing

Robert Pape's analysis is the structural complement to Parsi's operational account.

Where Parsi explains how this particular ceasefire was sabotaged, Pape explains why all ceasefires in this conflict are inherently unstable -- and will remain so.

The core argument is simple and unsparing: both the nuclear question and control of the Strait of Hormuz are zero-sum problems.

Iran either retains a threshold nuclear capability or it does not; the Strait either operates as an open international passage or it is governed by Iran.

Neither condition admits of a middle position that satisfies both sides simultaneously.

Ceasefires in this environment are not pathways to resolution -- they are temporary interruptions of an underlying trajectory, useful only until one side calculates that delay strengthens the other.

The pattern of the past seven weeks -- incremental escalation, brief pauses, renewed escalation -- is not accidental or the product of poor diplomacy.

It is, Pape argues, the natural rhythm of a conflict in which both sides have revealed a preference for escalation over strategic defeat.

The final line is worth sitting with: 'This war is not stabilising. It is tightening.' [Robert Pape, Substack (external link)]

The man outside the room

The Wall Street Journal's reconstruction of Donald Trump's conduct during the Iran war is the most consequential piece of reporting to emerge from this conflict.

The operational detail that anchors it -- that Trump was kept out of the Situation Room during mission to rescue downed US pilots on the Easter weekend because his aides believed his impatience would be counterproductive -- is remarkable enough in and of itself.

But the piece is larger than that moment. It is a portrait of a president oscillating between belligerence and fear, haunted by the Jimmy Carter hostage crisis, asking advisers 'How's it playing?' minutes after posting an Islamic prayer and an obscenity on Easter morning, and -- one night after threatening to destroy an entire civilisation -- musing to donors at a White House reception that he deserved the Medal of Honor for a scary landing on an unlit runway in Iraq.

Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, a Bush-era US National Security Council official, provides the sharpest external verdict: 'Astonishing military successes that do not add up to victory, and that is squarely on the president.'

Read between the lines, though, and there is more to this story than the admittedly astonishing detail of a president -- the supreme commander of the armed forces -- being kept out of the Situation Room.

Firstly, the The Wall Street Journal is not a left-leaning publication; in fact, it has leaned towards the administration's side throughout this war.

And more importantly, this level of sourcing -- senior administration officials, people in the room, people who spoke to him directly, over weeks -- does not happen by accident.

When an administration leaks this comprehensively and this precisely, it is signaling something.

The civil-military relationship at the apex of American war-making is broken, and no one trusts the President. [Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey,The Wall Street Journal (external link)]

Who broke the law in the Strait:

For weeks, the international community has treated Iran's regulation of the Strait of Hormuz as the central legal violation of this conflict.

Multiple UN Security Council resolutions have been introduced condemning Tehran; one passed with support from nearly 140 member states. Not a single resolution has been brought condemning the US-Israeli war that started it.

Maryam Jamshidi's legal analysis in The Nation is the most rigorous available account of why this inversion is not just politically convenient but legally indefensible.

The US-Israeli war, she argues, constitutes the crime of aggression under international law -- a conclusion that even Washington's Western allies have quietly accepted while declining to say so publicly.

Iran's regulation of the Strait is legally contestable precisely because Iran never ratified UNCLOS and has been a persistent objector to its transit passage provisions for over forty years -- meaning it cannot be bound by them even under customary international law.

The piece situates this double standard within a longer history of international law being weaponised to legitimise imperial action while delegitimising resistance from the Global South. The pattern is not new; what is new is its visibility. [Maryam Jamshidi, The Nation (external link)]

The inflation that won't leave when the war does

The economic damage from the Iran war will outlast the conflict itself.

That is the IMF's assessment, delivered by Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, and it is the thread running through the Financial Times' careful survey of the inflationary shock now working its way through the US economy.

Petrol has risen from under three dollars a gallon when the war began to over four dollars now.

Diesel, the input that moves food, goods and agricultural supplies, is approaching its 2022 record.

Nitrogen fertiliser costs are up more than thirty percent, with grocery price increases to follow later in the year.

The IMF has revised its US inflation forecast for 2026 from 2.5 percent to 3.2 percent; the OECD's revision is more alarming, from 2.8 to 4.2 percent.

The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index hit a record low in April.

What the piece captures, beyond the numbers, is the second-order effect: Businesses are beginning to incorporate elevated energy costs into their pricing, producing the kind of embedded inflation that is slower to arrive and far harder to dislodge.

For Trump, who ran on bringing prices down, the political arithmetic is unforgiving, and the war's inflationary legacy will still be visible on election day in November. [Myles McCormick, Stephanie Findlay, Gregory Meyer and Oliver Roeder, Financial Times (external link)]

The Gulf's financial distress call

The UAE's approach to Washington for a currency swap line, raised quietly by its central bank governor with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the sidelines of last week's IMF meetings, is the clearest signal yet of how deeply the war has shaken the Gulf's financial architecture.

The Emirati dirham is pegged to the dollar, backed by $270 billion in foreign reserves, and the UAE has so far avoided the worst of the physical damage.

But the war has shut off its ability to sell oil through Hormuz, damaged energy infrastructure, triggered capital flight, and rattled its reputation as the region's premier financial hub.

What makes the approach significant is the argument Emirati officials deployed: It was Trump's decision to attack Iran that entangled their country in this conflict, and if the UAE runs short of dollars it may be forced to conduct oil transactions in Chinese yuan.

That sentence contains an implicit threat to dollar primacy that Washington will have heard clearly.

Saudi Arabia's finance minister, speaking at the same IMF meetings, offered the clearest timeline on recovery: Even after a complete end to hostilities, the logistics of returning tanker traffic to normal will take until the end of June at the earliest. [David Cloud, Alexander Saeedy and Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal (external link)]

The base that's cracking

Trump has survived everything -- Access Hollywood, January 6, two impeachments, a criminal conviction, an assassination attempt.

What he may not survive is a war he started that he cannot end, fuel prices that keep rising, and a series of own goals that have simultaneously offended Catholics, evangelicals, anti-interventionists and anyone who voted for him expecting prices to come down.

The Guardian's David Smith maps the fractures with care.

A Quinnipiac poll this week put his approval at 38 percent; 58 percent disapprove of his handling of Iran; two in three voters blame him for rising gas prices.

Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens -- not exactly the anti-war left -- have broken with him over the civilisation-destruction threat and the Jesus memes.

Kori Schake's verdict from the WSJ piece resonates here too: Military successes that don't add up to victory, and the deficit is the president's.

The piece's sharpest observation is structural rather than political: xonstitutionally barred from running again, Trump may have entered what Anthony Scaramucci calls 'the nihilistic stage' -- polls don't matter, consequences don't matter, and a wounded political animal with nothing to lose is the most dangerous version of this man. [David Smith, The Guardian (external link)]

The inside job

Rebecca Solnit's essay, published last week but more relevant today than when it appeared, is not about the Iran war specifically. It is about what the war is a symptom of.

Her argument: The United States is being systematically dismantled from within -- its regulatory apparatus, its scientific institutions, its alliances, its environmental protections are all being shredded while the war burns through billions daily and the administration simultaneously pleads that there is no money for daycare or Medicaid.

The Iran war is, in this framing, not a foreign policy crisis that arrived from outside but one more expression of a presidency whose purpose, judged by its actions rather than its stated intentions, is to weaken, corrupt and harm.

Solnit ends not with despair but with a demand: To begin thinking seriously about reconstruction: not a return to the pre-Trump status quo, but a reckoning with the structural vulnerabilities that made this possible in the first place.

The electoral college, gerrymandering, a corrupted supreme court, the corrosive weight of oligarchic money in democratic politics.

The war will end. What it has revealed about American governance will not simply heal when it does. [Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian (external link)]

In passing...

The talks in Islamabad, if they happen, are the last off-ramp before this conflict enters a phase where off-ramps no longer exist.

Robert Pape's framework tells us why: Both sides have now revealed a preference for escalation over strategic defeat, and each new provocation narrows the space for the next pause.

The Touska seizure, Iran's refusal to negotiate under blockade, Israel's strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure -- all of these add up to an increasingly untenable situation.

This makes the wild card -- Trump and his motormouth -- more consequential than ever.

The man who will determine whether these talks happen, what is on offer, and whether any agreement holds long enough to matter is also the man who torpedoed the last de-escalation framework with a Truth Social post, mused about awarding himself the Medal of Honor the night after threatening to destroy a civilisation, and asked his aides 'How's it playing?' when he probably should have been asking 'What have I done?' It is impossible to overstate just how wild this wild card is.

An Iranian official tells DropSite (external link) that the window for any agreement is rapidly closing because of the unreasonable US demands and Trump's erratic behaviour.

'Our assessment is that Trump effectively lacks both a coherent plan and the capacity to secure even a temporary agreement,' the official said.

'His decision-making appears to be grounded in Israeli political and security assessments, conveyed to him on a daily basis.'

The ceasefire expires mid-week. The inflation Georgieva warned about will be more deeply embedded.

The Gulf's financial architecture will be under greater strain. And the political clock -- midterms, a base that is visibly cracking, a war with no exit strategy and no victory to declare -- will have moved another seven days in the wrong direction.

The last chance for order is in the hands of the most disorderly presidency in American history.

• Must Read! Prem Panicker's Earlier Blogs On The Iran War

Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff