Trump's Iran gambit exposes limits of American power

Donald Trump came to office determined to remake the map. Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Venezuela—each represented a piece of the expansionist vision he meant to impose on a world he believed had grown too comfortable with American decline. Iran was supposed to be the capstone: a regime change operation that would demonstrate overwhelming American firepower and resolve. Instead, it has become the moment when that power revealed its actual limits.

The operation began with confidence. Israeli planners believed Iran's leadership could be toppled. American military planners believed shock and awe would work. What they misread was the resilience of a 47-year-old state, the strategic calculations of an ally that had its own survival to consider, and the physical reality of the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow waterway through which 20 percent of the world's oil and liquified natural gas flows. Iran had studied the tanker wars of the 1980s. It had decades to think about how to turn an international passage into a chokepoint.

Some in the Oval Office may have believed the pain would fall elsewhere. China imports half its oil and 30 percent of its LNG from Middle Eastern suppliers. Iran's heavily discounted crude moves through third parties in Southeast Asia. The calculus, in this view, was that America as an energy superpower could absorb the cost while rivals bore the weight. That theory did not survive contact with reality. The geography of the Gulf created an amphitheatre for drone and missile attacks. Israel and British military bases in Cyprus became implicated in kinetic operations. Ukraine, hardened by years of air defense, found itself selling expertise to Gulf states desperate for protection. Saudi Arabia signed the first deal with Kyiv in late March. Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan followed.

What emerged from the wreckage was a settlement that reads as a capitulation dressed in diplomatic language. The United States lifted its blockade of Iranian ports. In return, Iran agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons—a commitment that carries no enforcement mechanism and leaves untouched Tehran's funding for Hezbollah and Hamas. The centerpiece is a new arrangement: Iran will charge users to transit the Strait of Hormuz through a body called the Persian Gulf Transit Authority, after an interim grace period. The United States must withdraw its forces from the immediate area, though the boundaries of that area remain undefined. To sweeten the deal, Washington agreed to lift sanctions, unfreeze Iranian financial assets, and provide a $300 billion compensation package for reconstruction. It is unclear who will fund that commitment, though Trump may expect Gulf states to supply the answer.

For Israel, this is a security catastrophe. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces an election this year and is likely to lose. Any deal that leaves Iran's nuclear ambitions unresolved and its proxy networks intact will finish his political career. He and Trump are now engaged in a war of words. Israel has begun new operations in Lebanon, a signal that Netanyahu has concluded the United States is an unreliable security partner. He is not alone in that assessment. Ukraine has reached the same conclusion. So have Denmark and other NATO states. So have the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which bore the brunt of American recklessness and discovered that Trump would not commit ground forces to Iranian coastal operations.

The next six months will be volatile. If the deal holds, Iran will impose transit fees that could push Gulf suppliers toward overland export routes. Asian customers may seek oil and gas from suppliers outside the Persian Gulf, forcing an urgent recalibration of energy security planning across the continent. Demining the Strait compounds the risk—Iran has only a patchy understanding of where mines are located and how many exist. The waterway will remain a high-risk, high-cost environment, but one that consolidates Iranian regional power. Thirteen thousand American strikes on Iranian military targets failed to shift the fundamental equation. At the G7 summit in Evian, President Macron started the meeting on time rather than wait for Trump, who insisted he remained in charge. The wider world watched an American president reveal, with unusual clarity, the actual boundaries of American power. It is difficult to characterize this as anything other than a strategic defeat—one that overshadows even the hostage crisis of the late 1970s.