President Donald Trump wanted a clear picture of victory: a quick agreement, an open strait, and a more pressureable Iran after months of bombing. However, what the American and British press is painting is closer to a scene of overlapping attrition.
Washington is looking for a political way out after it has used up part of its arsenal, and the Iranians are paying the price of a war that is said to be aimed at putting pressure on the authorities, and global markets are discovering that disruption of one corridor in the Gulf is enough to raise energy, food, and navigation bills.
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The illusion in the Iran war was not that the United States possessed overwhelming firepower, but rather in the belief that this power alone was sufficient to bring about a political end. Washington has struck, threatened, and escalated, but it has not yet extracted its major cards from Tehran, while the war and siege have deepened the Iranians’ daily crisis. Thus, “Victory” turns from a political declaration into a question about the bill: Who pays the price for a war that did not produce a solution, and did not leave an impact within its borders alone?
The dilemma of victory
The American magazine The Atlantic says that the agreement that Trump wants with Iran has continued to elude him, despite his repeated statements that reaching it is imminent. The president kept his team in Washington over the weekend, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, spoke of an announcement soon, and then the promises turned into a new wait. In a government meeting that was expected to bring big news, Trump was forced to admit that nothing had been completed yet.
The problem may not lie in the absence of an American desire for an agreement, but rather that the war has opened more files than a single deal can handle: the nuclear program, enriched uranium, the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions, frozen Iranian assets, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Gulf security.
According to Atlantic, Trump tried to extract Iranian concessions through escalating threats and deadlines, but Tehran tested the limits of these threats and pushed Washington to extend the ceasefire instead of returning to open war.
The Christian Science Monitor captured this dilemma when it saw that the “we won” rhetoric collided with a more complex reality: Iran is militarily weaker than Washington and Israel, but it is still capable of disrupting Hormuz, striking Gulf allies, and imposing a global cost for continuing the war.
Arsenal depletion
The price of war does not stop at the borders of politics. According to the American magazine Newsweek, Operation “Epic Fury” consumed important stocks of American munitions, including Tomahawk, Patriot, THAAD, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles, in addition to precision cruise missiles.
The magazine quotes an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the United States launched more than a thousand Tomahawk missiles at Iran, that is, about a third of the estimated stock before the war, in addition to large quantities of Patriot and THAAD missiles as well.
Newsweek indicates that rebuilding some of these stocks to pre-war levels may take at least 3 years, due to production and financing cycles and Washington’s commitments to its allies.
This attrition does not concern the Iranian field alone, but is included in broader strategic calculations: Ukraine still needs air defenses, China is monitoring Taiwan, and the American army finds itself facing a difficult question about the cost of a long regional war at a time when potential fronts are competing.
Therefore, when Trump hesitates to resume fighting, it is not just a matter of electoral calculations. The battle revealed that American power is not without a ceiling. Every missile launched in the Gulf requires time, money, and a production line to be compensated, and every decision to escalate carries a price in the stock of American deterrence in other arenas.
The Iranians are under pressure
On the other hand, the cost of the war inside Iran does not appear to be an abstract political matter, but rather a daily crisis that affects people’s lives. According to the American Wall Street Journal, the country entered a harsher economic phase after the war and the American naval blockade. Oil revenues have been choked, the risk of Iran being forced to shut down wells because it is unable to store crude has increased, basic industries have been damaged, more than a million Iranians have left the job market, and the currency has fallen to record levels.
The newspaper describes how pressure moved from ports and oil facilities to the details of daily life. The prices of basic commodities such as rice, meat, bread, and cheese rose, and officials began calling on citizens to rationalize the consumption of fuel, electricity, and water.
The newspaper quoted Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian as saying before the Tehran Chamber of Commerce that “the main war is in the economic field,” warning that “the failure of the economy means the failure of the country.”
The British newspaper The Guardian deepens this picture from inside Iran. With the partial lifting of Internet restrictions, widespread public anger over food price inflation emerged. The newspaper reported an annual increase of 308% in vegetable oil, 190% in chicken, and 170% in rice, while International Monetary Fund data showed that food inflation ranged between 140% and 200%.
These numbers do not only mean economic deterioration, but also reveal the gap between the rhetoric of war and the reality of civilians. The American president who addressed the Iranians before the war in the language of “support and rescue” ended in a war that increased their daily burdens, from food to work and contact with the world.
Hormuz hurts the world
However, the cost of the war did not remain within Iran alone, but rather was transformed through the Strait of Hormuz into global pressure. Disrupting the corridor through which a large percentage of the world’s oil and gas passes makes the blockade not only putting pressure on Tehran.
According to the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, Trump and his aides realize that any new escalation may push Iran to strike the energy infrastructure in the Gulf, or prolong the global fuel crisis, making a return to war an extremely costly option.
Here the nature of the unequal conflict appears. Iran cannot match American power on the traditional battlefield, but it can strike a sensitive spot in the global economy. The Christian Science Monitor saw that this is the essence of the impasse: American military superiority did not prevent Tehran from maintaining the ability to disrupt Hormuz and threaten Washington’s Gulf allies, as it put it.
Chaos extends beyond the Gulf
Even the seas far from Hormuz were not spared from the war. In an analysis published by the American magazine Time, experts say that the focus of the United States and its allies on the Gulf and Iran has drawn attention and resources from other regions, including the waters off Somalia, where pirate activity has begun to return to the forefront.
According to data from the International Chamber of Commerce for Criminal Commercial Services reported by TIME, since March, 4 confirmed kidnappings have been recorded in the vicinity of Somalia, 3 of which are still active, while maritime security companies say that the actual number of incidents may be higher.
Analysts believe that the Western military buildup around Iran and Hormuz has made monitoring the Horn of Africa and deterring pirates more difficult.
This is not a marginal detail. Piracy, as one maritime security expert tells Time magazine, is a “tax on globalization” that ends up in consumers’ shopping baskets. It raises the cost of insurance, guarding, alternative roads, and fuel, and adds a new layer of disruption to an already exhausting global trade in energy and wars.
This is the price of an imaginary victory: no one has a complete victory and everyone pays the bill.
