What are President Donald Trump’s options on Iran after the midterm elections? By my count, he will have five, which is more than he has now, given the risk that a significant military escalation today would spook the financial markets and harm Republican candidates next Tuesday. Recent news reports suggest that the president is leaning in the direction of some form of renewed military action. Let’s review his choices, in order of the least escalatory to the most.
Make a deal. It’s still a possibility. The key issues are the status of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program, but the public positions of both sides seem irreconcilable at the moment. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War dryly refer to this as a “sequencing” problem, explaining that “Iran has repeatedly maintained that the United States must lift the naval blockade, provide sanctions relief, and recognize Iranian control over the strait before Iran makes any concessions.” (I, too, prefer my enemy’s surrender as a precondition for further discussion.)
Any diplomatic resolution in the short term looks as though it would require one side or the other to blink. Trump tested a conciliatory approach with the memorandum of understanding in June, recognizing Iranian sovereignty in the strait as a precondition for nuclear talks. Even so, some Iranian leaders considered their own concessions to have been too great, and the deal collapsed in less than two weeks. The formula by which both sides could plausibly claim victory in a new deal is not obvious. In other words, for Trump to close a deal quickly, he would effectively have to surrender the strait to Iran.
Stay the course on economic warfare. The blockade of Iranian ports is doing meaningful economic damage to the Islamic Republic, while escort operations in the Strait of Hormuz (essentially a counterblockade to Iran’s efforts to close those waters) appear to have restored oil transits to near pre-war levels. The fortunes of other commodities are less clear. Trump could preserve this status quo, and wait to see if economic pressure forces Iran’s regime to surrender or else risk collapse.
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