How the Trump administration miscalculated Iran’s ability to respond to US-Israeli attacks
On February 18th, as US president Donald Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.
Even during the Israeli and US strikes against Iran last June, Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that – the second time around – Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply.
The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.
The episode is emblematic of how much Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran, Iran’s capital, sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at US military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centres.
US officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices.
After Trump administration officials gave a closed-door briefing to lawmakers on Tuesday, Democratic senator Christopher Murphy said on social media that the administration had “NO PLAN” for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.”
Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.
Trump has laid out maximalist goals such as insisting that Iran name a leader who will submit to him, while secretary of state Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth have described narrower and more tactical objectives that could provide an exit in the near term.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration “had a strong game plan” before the war broke out, and said oil prices would drop after it ended.
“The purposeful disruption in the oil market by the Iranian regime is short term, and necessary for the long-term gain of wiping out these terrorists and the threat they pose to United States and the world,” she said in a statement.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen US officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.
‘Show Some Guts’
Hegseth acknowledged on Tuesday that Iran’s ferocious response against its neighbours caught the Pentagon somewhat off guard. But he insisted that Iran’s actions were backfiring.
“I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference. “I think it was a demonstration of the desperation of the regime.”
Trump has displayed growing frustration over how the war is disrupting the oil supply, telling Fox News that oil tanker crews should “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz.
Some military advisers did warn before the war that Iran could launch an aggressive campaign in response, and would view the US-Israeli attack as a threat to its existence. But other advisers remained confident that killing Iran’s senior leadership would lead to more pragmatic leaders taking over who might bring an end to the war.
When Trump was briefed about risks that oil prices could rise in the event of war, he acknowledged the possibility but downplayed it as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime. He directed Wright and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to work on developing options for a potential spike in prices.
But the president did not speak publicly about these options – including political risk insurance backed by the US government, and the potential of US Navy escorts – until more than 48 hours after the conflict started. The escorts have not yet taken place.
Wright, the energy secretary, caused a market commotion on Tuesday when he posted on social media that the Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. His post drove up stocks and reassured oil markets. Then, when he deleted the post after administration officials said no escorts had taken place, markets were once again thrust into turmoil.
Efforts to resume shipments have been complicated by intelligence that Iran was preparing to lay mines in the strait, one US official said. The Iranian operation was only in its earliest stages, but the preparatory efforts spooked the Trump administration. The US military said on Tuesday evening that its forces had attacked 16 Iranian minelaying vessels near the strait.
As the conflict has roiled global markets, Republicans in Washington have grown concerned about rising oil prices damaging their efforts to sell an economic agenda to voters ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war. The administration announced Tuesday a new refinery in Texas that officials said could help increase oil supply, ensuring that Iran does not cause any long-term damage to oil markets.
A potential way out of the war
The confidence that White House officials had that the shipping lanes could stay open is surprising given that Trump authorised a military campaign last year against the Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, that had used missile and drone attacks to bring maritime commerce in the Red Sea to a halt.
In a social media post last March announcing he had authorised military strikes against the Houthis, Trump said that the attacks had cost the global economy billions of dollars, and that “no terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”
But since the start of the war in Iran, Trump has not offered a consistent message. In private, his aides have said they feel frustration over his lack of discipline in communicating the objectives of the military campaign to the public.
Trump has said both that the war could go on for more than month and that it was “very complete, pretty much.” He also said the United States would “go forward more determined than ever.”
Rubio and Hegseth, however, appear to have co-ordinated their messaging for now on three discrete goals that they began laying out in public remarks Monday and Tuesday.
“The goals of this mission are clear,” Rubio said at a state department event on Monday before Trump held his own news conference. “It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”
The state department even laid out the three goals in bullet-point fashion, and highlighted a video clip of Rubio stating them on an official social media account.
The presentation by Rubio, who is also the White House national security adviser, appeared to be setting the stage for the president to bring an end to the war sooner rather than later. In his news conference, Trump boasted of how the US military had already destroyed Iran’s ballistic missile capability and its navy. But he also warned of even more aggressive action if Iranian leaders tried to cut off the world’s energy supply.
Matthew Pottinger, who was a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said in an interview that Trump had indicated he could decide to pursue ambitious war goals that would take weeks at least.
“In his press conference, I could hear him circling back to a rationale for fighting a bit longer given that the regime is still signalling it won’t be deterred and is still trying to control the Strait of Hormuz,” said Pottinger, now chair of the China programme at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that advocates a close US partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran.
“He doesn’t want to have to fight a ‘sequel’ war,” Pottinger added.
The search for ways out of the war has gained urgency since the weekend, as global oil prices surge and as the United States burns through costly munitions. Pentagon officials said in recent closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill that the military used up $5.6 billion of munitions in the first two days of the war alone, according to three congressional officials. That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed. The Washington Post reported on the figure Monday.
Iranian officials have remained defiant, saying they will use their leverage over the world’s oil supply to force the United States and Israel to blink.
“Strait of Hormuz will either be a Strait of peace and prosperity for all,” Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, said in a social media post Tuesday. “Or it will be a Strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.” -This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
