When the ceasefire in the war with Iran went into effect a month ago, US president Donald Trump was pretty direct that if the Iranians failed to end their nuclear programme, or to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the bombers would be back in the air. “If there’s no deal, fighting resumes,” he said, making it very clear this was just a pause.
But it turns out, according to US secretary of state Marco Rubio, the war actually ended at some point after the ceasefire took hold, or so he told reporters at a news conference at the White House on Tuesday. “The Operation Epic Fury is concluded,” he said. “We achieved the objective of that operation.”
The effort to reopen the strait, Rubio said, is entirely a defensive and humanitarian operation that would result in direct military exchanges with the Iranians only if US ships came under fire.
Later on Tuesday, Trump announced he was pausing even that effort – which was only one day old, and had succeeded in getting just a few ships freed – “for a short period of time”, citing what he said was “great progress” toward an agreement with Iran. But he kept the US blockade in place, part of a strategy of maximum economic pressure.
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Still, Trump’s suspension of the effort to guide ships out of the strait seemed to contradict the administration’s stated position that it was intolerable for Iran to block an international waterway, and that only the United States had the ability to force it open again.
For the White House, the insistence the war was over was the latest rhetorical leap in an effort to put a war that has created the greatest political crisis of Trump’s presidency in the rear-view mirror. But the mere proclamation does not make it true. Missiles were still flying. Both sides insist they control traffic in the waterway.
And despite Rubio’s declaration that the objectives of the war have been accomplished, they clearly have not. In the 38 days of intensive combat operations, the United States hit, by the Pentagon’s count, about 13,000 targets. But destroying targets was not the only point. Trump himself described his objectives in the early hours of February 28th, when he told the country, in a video he had recorded earlier, that he had five major goals.
The first, of course, was to ensure that Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon”. But he went on to add that the United States had to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and their launchers, sink its navy, end its support of terrorist groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas and, finally, create the conditions for the Iranian people to topple their government.
“Your hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said at the time.
The Iranian navy is clearly gone, as Trump often notes. But that is the only one checked off the list. So far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched and there is no agreement, at least yet, to ship it out of the country or to dilute it so it cannot easily be used to manufacture weapons. While intelligence estimates differ, the US assessments suggest more than half of Iran’s missiles and launchers survived. It is too early to tell about support of the proxy groups, which were shredded by Israeli attacks.
And Trump has abandoned talk of changing the country’s leadership, suggesting at one point he never called for it. At other moments he has maintained that regime change already happened, citing the emergence of a new supreme leader and other officials, replacing those who were killed. To most Iran experts – and many in the US intelligence agencies – that is a change of personnel.
Nonetheless, both Trump and Rubio have many reasons to declare that Epic Fury ended at some undefined date in the recent past. US Congress was getting increasingly restive about the War Powers Act, which demands a vote of approval by Congress after US troops are involved in combat for more than 60 days. His political base has fractured on the question of whether Trump has dispensed with his own promise to get the United States out of lengthy wars. And Trump delayed his trip to China once to make sure the war was over, the United States was victorious and the strait was open before he touched down in Beijing. That trip is now scheduled for next Wednesday.
Trump’s language has changed, too, though even he has not gone so far as to declare that the operation is ended. He cannot quite seem to keep himself from describing the current situation as a war, even if he has begun to back away. “Our country is booming now, despite the fact that we’re in a – I call it a mini-war,” he said at a White House event for small businesses Monday.
While it all sounds like politically convenient wordplay, any real declaration that the battle is over represents a fundamental change in strategy, even for a war in which the White House seemed to be making up its next move day by day. For the past nine weeks, US military power, and the prospect it could resume, was the leverage Trump celebrated as the steel behind negotiations. Nothing would focus Iranian minds, he suggested, like the prospect of further destruction.
Indeed, when negotiations over the future of the nuclear programme broke down in late February, the US bombing was designed to force Iran to make concessions.
But the bombing campaign, while deadly and destructive, did not alter Iran’s fundamental positions, at least yet. And the Revolutionary Guard’s success at sealing off the strait – bottling up tankers and cargo ships and sending oil and fertiliser markets into a frenzy – changed the dynamic. Trump’s frustration was clear: he threatened even heavier strikes – and attacks on power plants – if Iran refused to relent, lashing out with expletives on social media.
The Iranians ignored it, then a few days later Trump warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Then came the ceasefire.
But Iran’s restraint fell apart after Trump on Sunday announced a new operation to guide ships through the narrow strait, on a pathway that had been declared free of mines. Iranian forces shot at two ships the following day, but the missiles were intercepted by US forces. Gen Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, said on Tuesday that since the ceasefire took effect, Iran had attacked US forces more than 10 times, but the attacks were “all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point”.
Caine added that defining that threshold was “a political decision”, meaning it was Trump’s decision. And Trump, pressed a few hours later to explain where he put that threshold, told reporters, “You’ll find out, because I’ll let you know.”
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday morning the new military effort to guide merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be understood as a completely separate enterprise, and a temporary defensive effort.
“We’re not looking for a fight,” said Hegseth, who only a few weeks ago was celebrating American firepower against Iran and urging “maximum lethality”. But he noted that US warships shot down cruise missiles and drones that Iran fired at the ships and commercial vessels, and that US Apache helicopter gunships also sank six Iranian military speedboats that threatened the vessels.
Now the US administration has moved from declaring that military strikes would change Iran’s leaders to insisting it is really economic cutoffs that will do the trick. Rubio said the United States was now cutting off revenue that keeps together “whatever remains of their frail economy”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
