In just the past five days, the United States and Iran traded missile strikes after the downing of an American helicopter; Israel bombarded Lebanon, drawing retaliation from Iran; and the Iran-backed Houthis joined the reprisal from Yemen.
Then in a matter of hours on Thursday, President Trump called off another major attack on Iran and again held out the prospect of a peace accord, which Iran downplayed. In the two months since the U.S. and Iran nominally declared a cease-fire, the line between peace and war has been all but erased across the Middle East, with attacks and counterattacks alongside promises to end the hostilities that never quite materialize. It is less a cease-fire than a “lesser fire,” in the words of the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres.
Even if the combatants manage to get a framework for a deal this time, this gray zone of “neither war nor peace” may persist for weeks or months, analysts and diplomats say. Neither Mr. Trump nor Iran appears ready to make significant concessions in negotiations for a long-term truce, with many devilish details to be worked out — not least over the future of Iran’s nuclear program.
Such a stalemate would consign the Middle East to a purgatory of sporadic violence and constant anxiety. And it would force the rest of the world to confront a stark new economic reality. Long-term disruption of oil and gas shipments would ripple into global supply chains, causing food shortages and driving up prices at the fuel pump and in grocery stores.
“There’s a good chance that the current equilibrium or something like it persists,” said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in Persian Gulf security issues. “Not every war has a clean ending.”
What makes this war particularly messy are its multiple combatants, all with their own, often conflicting, agendas. Mr. Trump, facing midterm elections and political headwinds at home, has signaled he is eager to turn the page. Iran, having suffered fearful casualties, including the death of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, views this as a war of survival and is unlikely to limit its nuclear program in exchange for short-term respite. And Israel regards Iran as an existential threat — its nuclear facilities buried under rubble but not wiped out, its proxies regrouping in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen.
As Mr. Trump faces off with Iran, he is conducting a parallel negotiation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, alternately imploring him to hold off on strikes in Lebanon or defending Israel’s right to retaliate. Mr. Netanyahu faces his own election, with Iran looming as a major piece of unfinished business.
“If you get a cease-fire but not a durable peace, you would have to keep a close eye on Iran,” said Charles A. Kupchan, who worked on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “You could also see continued proxy wars related to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis,” he said, referring to Iran’s allies across the Middle East.
Mr. Kupchan, now a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, likened the challenge for the United States and Israel to “mowing the lawn,” a phrase that refers to the military offensives Israel periodically carried out in Gaza to degrade Hamas before the group carried out its attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
Such a situation is not without precedent in the Middle East. For several years before the American-led war in Iraq, the United States imposed sanctions and enforced no-fly zones on Iraq. Proxy wars flared, and American military installations came under attack, most dramatically in 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was blown up in a suicide bombing by Al Qaeda terrorists in Aden, Yemen.
What sets this conflict apart from previous ones is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, in shutting it down, has wielded a devastating new form of leverage, even if it has yet to force Mr. Trump into a peace settlement.
Commercial shipping remains largely suspended. The shooting down of the Apache helicopter, for which the United States blamed Iran, is a reminder of the risks of a plan by the U.S. Navy to help secure the passage of ships through the strait. “This is more a temporary measure than an enduring situation,” said Martin Kelly, the head of advisory at EOS Risk Group, a Britain-based consulting firm.
Oil prices spiked on Thursday amid fears of a return to all-out war, while in the United States, the inflation rate surged past 4 percent.
Worries about the war’s economic fallout are likely to dominate a meeting of the Group of 7 leaders next week in France. European leaders have proposed a mission to secure commercial shipping, but it hinges on Mr. Trump and Iran agreeing on a more durable peace settlement. Iran is under its own pressures, with its oil exports largely halted by the U.S. Navy’s retaliatory blockade of the strait.
“This ‘no war, no peace’ situation is not sustainable,” said Vali R. Nasr, an expert on Iran at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The Iranian economy cannot sustain this maximally for more than four or five months. The global economy cannot sustain this for four or five more months.”
For those reasons, Mr. Nasr said he expected that each side would try to force the other to recalculate. “That’s what we’re actually witnessing,” he said, pointing to U.S. strikes on Iranian drone bases near the strait, which he said were calculated to break its chokehold over the waterway.
The stalemate is creating its own facts on the ground, many of which are parlous for United States, according to analysts. Large numbers of American troops are tied up in the region, cutting into its ability to wield influence elsewhere, notably against China. A major escalation would further deplete stocks of air defenses and other weapons, which are already running low.
“You’re drawing down stockpiles and you’re deploying assets, which means that you’re impacting readiness of the force,” said Seth G. Jones, the defense and security department president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It creates tremendous risk in the Pacific.”
The war is also sapping the capacity of the White House to deal with other crises. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who is fighting a war with Russia that Mr. Trump had pledged to stop within 24 hours, recently said, “We see that the United States is fully focused on the issue of Iran.” He urged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in a taunting open letter, to negotiate with him directly. (Mr. Putin declined.)
Even in the Middle East, U.S. influence has been shown to have limits. Iran’s missile and drone strikes have made it more dangerous for American service members to operate from their bases, while the Navy has largely avoided sending large ships into the Persian Gulf, apparently for fear of their being targeted.
“There are new military realities,” said Ms. Talmadge, the M.I.T. professor. “We’ve had the assumption for a really long time that our surface forces and our bases would have sanctuary — and they don’t.”
A more optimistic situation than the current limbo, analysts said, would be a durable cease-fire agreement, in which the United States and Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while deferring the thorny issue of Iran’s nuclear program for a subsequent negotiation. That could quiet Iran’s missile strikes on gulf countries. But it’s unclear if it would deter Israel from attacking Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon, since Hezbollah has rejected a cease-fire and Israel contends that it needs to defend itself.
“The longer this war persists, the more cracks are likely to develop between Israel and the United States,” Mr. Jones said.
To some extent, Mr. Trump is in a box of his own making. He appears loath to agree to a settlement with Iran that hawkish critics in the Republican Party could brand as a retread of President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. (“No deal is better than a bad one,” is the refrain in that camp.)
Yet a resumption of high-intensity warfare would deepen the economic chaos, as well as put American troops at risk, five months before a midterm election in which the Republicans already face an uphill struggle.
“Having this war escalate into a bigger conflagration right before the election is not going to be politically helpful for Republicans,” Ms. Talmadge said. “But the status quo is also bad.”
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