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President Trump is facing trouble on two fronts in the Middle East — and it’s not clear how he gets out of it.
Iran is pressing what it sees as its strategic advantage over control of the Strait of Hormuz, ratcheting up its rhetoric and its demands.
The Islamic Republic’s leadership is now insisting the U.S. must pay reparations, among other concessions, if the vital shipping channel is to return to seminormalcy.
At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday threw a wrench into Trump’s plans for stabilizing the situation in Gaza.
Netanyahu rejected a 15-point plan that could, perhaps, have advanced the arduous task of lowering hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians.
The deal, in simple terms, envisioned a phased process whereby Hamas would gradually disarm and, in return, Israel would withdraw from Gaza.
Hamas had signed up for the deal, but Netanyahu rejected it unequivocally in on-camera remarks at an Israeli Cabinet meeting.
“Israel does not accept the 15-point document,” he said, twice.
The Iran and Gaza developments, though separate, combine to create problems for Trump.
The Iran war has been unpopular since its inception, in part because it has directly impacted Americans with higher gas prices and broader inflationary pressure.
The seeming collapse of the Gaza disarmament deal has less direct effect on American domestic politics, but it still deprives Trump of a sliver of good news in the global arena.
On the Iran question, Trump blasted back Monday with a demand that reparations should flow from Tehran to Washington rather than the other way round.
In a social media post, the president contended that an Iranian demand for compensation “was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings!”
But he continued: “It is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts.”
A U.S. official told this column that ceding control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran was out of the question.
“Any temporary routes will be without any impediments — meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway and no party controls the lanes or the ability to transit through them,” the official said.
The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil rose above $80 again Monday, up about 5 percent for the day, amid the uncertainty over the strait. The national average for a gallon of gas was $4.01, according to AAA. The average was just under $3 before the war.
The rising prices are one of the factors behind Trump’s ebbing popularity.
Roughly 58 percent of Americans now disapprove of his performance in office while just 38.5 percent approve, according to the weighted average maintained by data and polling expert Nate Silver.
The situation with respect to Israel and the Palestinians has less of a direct bearing on Trump’s popularity because the political dynamics are more complicated.
The issue is more contentious in the Democratic Party, where many lawmakers are reflexively pro-Israel but a newly ascendant left has tapped into grassroots outrage over Netanyahu’s post-Oct. 7, 2023, campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians.
Aaron David Miller, who spent decades at the State Department with a speciality in the Middle East, said the disarmament deal was always unlikely to come to fruition. He suggested this may be one reason not to get too distressed about its apparent collapse.
“The whole project is tethered to a galaxy far, far away and is not worth fighting about — which is one of the reasons it has come and gone,” said Miller, who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Trump announced it because he needed a piece of good news.”
The U.S. official who commented about the Strait of Hormuz referred inquiries about Netanyahu’s dismissal of the disarmament deal to the Board of Peace.
At the least, the Israeli prime minister’s rejection of the deal is one more twist in his volatile relationship with Trump. The president has at times been publicly critical of the Israeli prime minister, over Lebanon as well as Gaza.
At a meeting of the Group of Seven in France in June, Trump took issue with the aggressiveness of Israel’s attacks in Lebanon, urging Netanyahu to “be more responsible.” More than 4,000 Lebanese have been killed by Israel since fighting resumed in March.
On Iran, Trump faces tough choices. He has often threatened major new attacks on Iran and then backed off. It’s possible he gets so infuriated by Iranian statements proclaiming victory that he does ramp up U.S. offensive actions again.
However, scrutiny is growing over the effect the war has had on U.S. munitions stockpiles. Although Trump and the Pentagon insist American forces have all the weapons they require, there has been reporting from multiple sources about the extent to which stocks have dwindled.
Miller argued the least-bad bet on Iran would be to neither cave nor escalate but to maintain economic pressure on Tehran for months and hope this would bring a change.
He acknowledged there was no guarantee that such a strategy would work. “But it certainly beats conceding to the Iranians control of the strait, or a massive escalation,” he said.
Trump’s defenders will say the midterms — and the president’s broader popularity — will be determined more by events on the home front than on the global stage.
But as the president is finding out, domestic politics and foreign policy can’t be so easily separated.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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