President Trump’s loss of the House and Senate intersects with one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: whether to resume intense combat operations against Iran, in a war that Mr. Trump’s vice president said Wednesday was the primary reason for the Republican Party’s crushing defeat.
The results across the country in Tuesday’s midterm elections drove home how deeply unpopular the war was among Americans — and how much backlash Mr. Trump could face if he renewed major strikes against the country, which the United States and Israel jointly attacked in February.
The political blow deepened the challenge Mr. Trump faces in ending a war of his choosing.
He has already hinted that he is in no rush to resume bombing, despite a major naval and air power buildup that has been underway for weeks as he has mulled whether to launch an intense, short attack on Iran’s surviving nuclear-related sites, along with energy and infrastructure targets.
It may yet happen: Past presidents, suddenly plunged into lame-duck status, have often reached for their military options, partly to demonstrate that their role as commander in chief is undiminished. George W. Bush accelerated in Iraq after his historic midterm defeat in 2006, though only after replacing his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and radically changing his strategy. Within limits, it worked.
But Mr. Trump’s choices in Iran are far more complex.
If the president has a new strategy for prosecuting the war, he and his aides have been silent about it. The rifts in his administration over his decision to go to war, barely hidden from the beginning, broke out into the open as soon as election results were in. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote in a social media post, claiming the president had made a similar assessment. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”
Mr. Trump immediately did so. “I can tell you as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different,” the president said a few hours later, as he gave reporters a tour of his under-construction White House ballroom.
If Mr. Vance’s logic wins the day, Mr. Trump will now resume negotiations, hoping to get some kind of agreement tougher than the cease-fire pact he signed in June, only to see it fall apart within weeks.
If Mr. Trump truly believes force will make a difference, he could order a resumption of bombing, though it is unclear why he might expect the outcome to be different than it was in the spring. Thirty-eight days of continuous attacks failed to collapse the regime, recover Iran’s vast stockpile of nuclear fuel, eliminate its missile stores or lead to what he once insisted would be “unconditional surrender.”
Now he is negotiating from a weaker hand, and the Iranians know it. “The elections decided the fate of the war,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who focused on Iran for two decades, said on Wednesday. “The only question is how it will end: with a bang, a peaceful, negotiated but likely unsatisfactory solution, or Trump saying, ‘JD Vance was right, and goodbye.’”
Time is not on Mr. Trump’s side. From the war’s start on Feb. 28, the Iranians have been betting that they can frustrate Mr. Trump’s efforts at regime change; protect the deeply buried nuclear stockpile or hold onto it until the end game of any negotiation; and ramp up the pain by restricting shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Along the way, they have so devastated several American bases in the region that, Pentagon officials concede, they will probably never be rebuilt.
The cost of the war so far has hit $47 billion, the Pentagon told Congress recently. That does not including damage to the bases — or the huge cost consumers have had to absorb in increased prices for gas, diesel and heating oil.
Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, could well run out of money before the conflict is resolved. Congress has never passed additional funding for the war in Iran, and the chances that the new, Democrat-controlled House and Senate would pay for it seem remote.
And Mr. Hegseth does not have much political currency in Congress: Democrats have indicated they plan to investigate and potentially impeach him.
All of that suggests that if Mr. Trump truly believes that an additional round of bombing will make Iran more likely to make concessions at the negotiating table, waiting will not help him. Moreover, he may be concerned that his powers appear undiminished to other world leaders, especially as he heads to the Philippines and China in less than two weeks for back-to-back summit meetings.
Former State Department diplomats, Pentagon officials and military commanders with long experience in the Middle East said that it was difficult to predict Mr. Trump’s decision, but that he may have boxed himself in.
“It makes little sense to resume attacks on Iran, since even the Republicans acknowledge that the war is why they lost,” Daniel Shapiro, the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official in the Biden administration, said on Wednesday, referring to Mr. Vance’s remarks. “But Trump is erratic, unstable and hates to be seen as a loser.”
Mr. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, added, “Iran has little incentive to give him a good deal that would allow him to claim victory, so his choices are to escalate and then claim victory — with the risk that he cannot control the escalation — or essentially walk away.”
The Pentagon has made no secret of its military buildup, perhaps hoping that the appearance of so much American firepower in the Gulf would push the Iranians to concessions.
Pentagon officials and military commanders said on Wednesday that thousands of American air and naval forces on more than a dozen ships and at bases around the Middle East and in the U.S. were poised to resume major combat operations against Iran on Mr. Trump’s orders.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for a short but intensive operation whose targets were likely to include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
Mr. Trump himself has frequently suggested as a possible target Pickaxe Mountain, the name the United States has given an underground facility that they believe holds advanced centrifuges to produce uranium — but, as far as anyone can tell, little or no nuclear fuel.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries have stepped up exercises, flying planes over Iraq to practice strike maneuvers. The Pentagon and State Department have withdrawn personnel from bases and facilities in the region as a precautionary measure. And remaining forces have rehearsed responding to mass-casualty incidents in case Iran retaliates against any American attack.
Ryan Crocker, a six-time U.S. ambassador in the Middle East and South Asia, said on Wednesday that the war’s role in the Republicans’ midterm losses should validate Mr. Trump’s long-stated reluctance to avoid forever wars.
“I would hope that this midterm result will reinforce the president’s gut instincts toward caution in military conflict,” Mr. Crocker said at a briefing held by the Middle East Institute.
Mr. Crocker said that Iran’s leadership has long shown a high tolerance for pain and suffering, and would not be fazed by several more days of heavy bombing. “We will be playing into their strong suit if we restart kinetic activity,” he said, referring to military operations.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
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