U.S. and Israel Launch War on Iran, Killing Supreme Leader and Triggering Strait of Hormuz Closure

Details

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military assault on Iran with surprise airstrikes targeting sites and cities across the country. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several senior military and political officials, struck nuclear facilities, missile launchers, and military bases. President Trump stated the operation aimed to eliminate Iran's nuclear and missile programs, destroy its navy, and change its leadership. The attack came less than 48 hours after a third round of Omani-mediated nuclear negotiations in Geneva—talks that the Omani foreign minister described as having achieved a major diplomatic breakthrough.

Background

The Nuclear Negotiations

The attack followed months of escalating U.S. military buildup in the region and three rounds of indirect nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, mediated by Oman. On February 26, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi announced that Iran had agreed never to stockpile enriched uranium and to submit to full IAEA verification—concessions he described as a "breakthrough" that had "never been achieved before." He said a peace deal was "within our reach" and that technical talks were scheduled for March 2 in Vienna.

Trump said he was "not happy" with the negotiations and that Iran "should make a deal." The following day, the U.S. and Israel attacked.

The Arms Control Association reported that Iran had been willing to put concessions on the table that were previously unimaginable—including suspending uranium enrichment for a long period and accepting long-term restrictions. Ali Vaez, Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group, who was involved in the 2015 JCPOA negotiations, said the administration was "seeking a surrender agreement" rather than genuine negotiations, and that "diplomacy was used as a cover for military preparation."

After the strikes, Oman's foreign minister said he was "dismayed" and that "active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined," adding: "This is not your war."

A March 2026 report in The Guardian revealed that UK National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell had secretly attended the Geneva talks and assessed that a diplomatic breakthrough was possible. The report also cited a Gulf diplomat alleging that U.S. intermediaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were acting in Israeli interests to pressure the U.S. into military confrontation.

Prior Military Actions

The attack was the third major U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran in less than a year. In the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, Israel bombed military and nuclear facilities across Iran while the U.S. struck three nuclear sites. That conflict was followed by a ceasefire. The February 2026 attack was far more expansive, targeting political leadership and explicitly pursuing regime change.

The January Uprising and Crackdown

The war was preceded by the largest wave of unrest in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Beginning on December 28, 2025, protests erupted across more than 200 cities, triggered by a collapse of the Iranian rial, soaring inflation, and shortages, and broadening into demands for an end to the Islamic Republic. The government responded with a crackdown that Amnesty International called the deadliest period of repression in decades of its research, with security forces firing on demonstrators and the authorities cutting internet access from January 8 to conceal the scale of the killing.

Death-toll estimates varied enormously and could not be independently verified amid the blackout. The Iranian government put the figure at 3,117; the U.S.-based monitor HRANA later confirmed roughly 7,000 deaths with thousands more under review; an Iranian official told Reuters the government's own internal estimate exceeded 5,000; and the UN Special Rapporteur said the toll could surpass 20,000, while Time, The Guardian, and Iran International cited hospital-based estimates of 30,000 or more for January 8–9 alone. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian publicly apologized to the nation on February 11.

The Trump administration responded with threats and shows of force. Trump encouraged the protesters, told Iranians "help is on the way," cancelled contacts with Iranian officials, and imposed a 25% tariff on countries doing business with Iran, while the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group deployed to the region and U.S. and British personnel temporarily withdrew from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi said he was in direct contact with the administration. By the time the U.S. and Israel attacked on February 28—roughly seven weeks after the worst of the killing—the uprising had been largely crushed. Although Trump's stated war aims included changing Iran's leadership, the administration pursued a deal with the existing government during the conflict, and the war's casualties were counted separately from those of the crackdown. Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum argued that Trump "made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising," having begun military operations only after the rebellion was already defeated.

The Decision to Strike

The most detailed account of how the war was decided came from a New York Times investigation by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. According to the report, the turning point was a February 11 presentation Netanyahu delivered in the White House Situation Room to Trump and a small group of senior officials—among them chief of staff Susan Wiles, Rubio, Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, with Mossad chief David Barnea and Israeli commanders joining by screen. Netanyahu argued Iran was "ripe for regime change" and that a joint campaign could topple the government within weeks, promising that Iran's missile program would be destroyed quickly, the Strait of Hormuz kept open, and Iranian retaliation kept minimal, with Mossad instigating an internal uprising to "finish the job." Trump's response, according to the report, was "Sounds good to me."

The following day, U.S. officials met without the Israeli team to assess the plan, breaking it into four goals: killing Khamenei, degrading Iran's ability to threaten its neighbors, a popular uprising, and regime change. Intelligence officials judged the first two achievable but dismissed the latter two as detached from reality—Ratcliffe called the regime-change scenarios "farcical," and Rubio said, "In other words, it's bullshit." Trump was most interested in the first two objectives; regime change, he said, would be Iran's "problem." The administration proceeded on that narrower basis. Gen. Caine laid out the risks—strain on U.S. munitions stockpiles and the difficulty of sustaining a long campaign—without offering a recommendation. Late in February, intelligence that Khamenei would gather with senior officials at a targetable location accelerated the timeline, and Trump gave the final order aboard Air Force One: "Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck."

Swan and Haberman's full account arrived in late June 2026 with the publication of their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster), based on roughly 1,000 interviews conducted over two years. Reviewing it in The New Yorker, David Remnick called the Situation Room episode "an astonishing account": Netanyahu assured Trump they would topple the Iranian regime and end its nuclear ambitions "before it ever had a chance to close the Strait of Hormuz"; the secretary of state called the plan "bullshit," the CIA director declared it "farcical"—and Trump told the prime minister, "Sounds good to me." According to accounts of the book, Ratcliffe also warned that Netanyahu's justification for the strikes "did not pass the smell test," and Caine raised concerns about depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles. The authors' verdict on the war was that the United States won militarily but "lost the peace"—the resulting memorandum of understanding lifted sanctions, promised billions, and released frozen assets while Iran gained leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump dismissed the book as "Fake News."

The Assault

Opening Strikes and Khamenei's Death

The joint operation began early Saturday morning with strikes on military, nuclear, and leadership targets across Iran. Trump confirmed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed after his secure compound was bombed. Several other senior leaders were also reported dead, including Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and IRGC head Mohammad Pakpour. Israeli sources indicated the date of the attack had been agreed upon two weeks earlier, during Netanyahu's visit to Washington.

Iran's Response

Iran responded rapidly with missile and drone strikes against Israel, U.S. bases across the Middle East, and energy infrastructure in Gulf states. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian declared that avenging Khamenei's death was Iran's "legitimate right and duty."

Iran's retaliatory strikes hit targets across the region: a missile strike on the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh killed nine civilians in a synagogue shelter; U.S. military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq were attacked; and energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman sustained damage. Gulf energy infrastructure would sustain its most serious blow weeks later, during a March escalation described below.

Casualties

As of late March 2026, preliminary casualty figures include approximately 1,937 dead in Iran, at least 19 in Israel, 13 U.S. service members killed, more than 300 American soldiers wounded, at least 96 killed in Iraq, 25 killed in Gulf states, and 7 killed in Oman. The actual toll is difficult to verify due to restricted internet and media access within Iran.

The Minab School Attack

On the morning of February 28, during the opening wave of strikes, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. At least 175 people were killed, most of them schoolgirls between the ages of 2 and 12.

Evidence of U.S. Responsibility

Multiple independent investigations by NPR, CNN, The New York Times, BBC Verify, Bellingcat, and Amnesty International concluded that the school was likely struck by a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile. A preliminary Pentagon investigation corroborated that the U.S. was likely responsible, finding that Central Command created target coordinates using outdated intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The school building had once been part of an adjacent IRGC naval base but was walled off between 2013 and 2016 with separate entrances, a soccer pitch, and clear markings identifying it as a school.

Tomahawk missiles are manufactured by Raytheon and are held by only a small group of U.S. allies—not including Israel or Iran. Multiple munitions experts confirmed to CBS News and NPR that the missile debris at the site was consistent with a Tomahawk and that no Iranian weapon matches the footage. According to witness testimony reported by Middle East Eye, the school was struck multiple times in a "double tap" or "triple tap" pattern.

Trump's Response

President Trump initially blamed Iran for the strike, claiming Iran had "no accuracy whatsoever" with its munitions and suggesting it had Tomahawk missiles. When pressed by reporters about the New York Times findings that preliminary evidence pointed to the U.S., Trump said: "I don't know about it." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to endorse Trump's claim and said the Pentagon was investigating. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated the U.S. would not "deliberately target a school."

Connection to Civilian Harm Office Cuts

The school strike occurred less than a year after Defense Secretary Hegseth dismantled the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) offices, which had been created in 2022 after a series of investigations uncovered systemic failures to protect civilians. ProPublica reported that staffing was cut from roughly 200 personnel to fewer than 40, and Central Command's civilian harm team was reduced from 10 people to one. The cuts were made over the objections of CENTCOM commander Gen. Erik Kurilla and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, both of whom argued the offices played a critical role in pre-strike risk assessment.

Former Pentagon civilian harm analyst Wes Bryant told NPR that one of the CHMR offices' core functions was maintaining "no-strike lists"—databases of protected sites like schools, hospitals, and cultural sites—that were "historically actually out of date for many areas we operate." The Minab school attack appears to exemplify exactly the kind of intelligence failure those offices were designed to prevent.

Congressional scrutiny of the cuts intensified through mid-2026. A May 2026 Defense Department Inspector General report examined the dismantling of the CHMR program—begun in spring 2025 under Hegseth's "lethality" doctrine, with civilian-protection staffing cut roughly 90% and the congressionally mandated Civilian Protection Center of Excellence defunded—and ProPublica reported that the Pentagon withheld access to its civilian-harm tracking tools from the inspector general. On July 5, ten Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—including veterans Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Mark Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow and Adam Smith—sent Hegseth a letter charging that the administration, "potentially in violation of federal law," had "defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts," and posing 20 questions with a July 9 deadline. Hegseth has been unapologetic about the cuts—"We became 'the woke department'… We're done with that shit," he said—while Smith told him at a hearing, "You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm." Separately, Rep. Crow and 120 House members demanded answers on the Minab school strike—which Hegseth had promised in March would be investigated "as long as necessary"—Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Warren opened an investigation into Hegseth's role in dismantling the military's civilian-harm "guard rails," and The Intercept reported on an internal Pentagon report it characterized as showing Hegseth willfully endangering civilians.

The Strait of Hormuz

Closure and Economic Fallout

On March 4, Iranian forces declared the Strait of Hormuz "closed" and began threatening and attacking ships attempting to transit. The strait normally carries roughly 20% of the world's oil and significant LNG volumes. At least 20 vessels were attacked in the area, killing several crew members. Insurance premiums surged to six-year highs, effectively halting most commercial shipping.

The International Energy Agency described the situation as the "greatest global energy security challenge in history". Oil prices spiked above $120 a barrel within the first week before easing to around $100—still more than 40% above pre-war levels. Gasoline prices rose to nearly $4 per gallon, up approximately 80 cents from a month earlier. The IEA coordinated the largest strategic petroleum reserve release in history—400 million barrels. Bloomberg Economics estimated U.S. CPI for March at 3.4% year-on-year, up from 2.4% in February.

The Dallas Federal Reserve estimated that a one-quarter closure of the strait could raise WTI oil prices to $98 per barrel and lower global real GDP growth by an annualized 2.9 percentage points.

Iran's Oil Paradox

In a striking irony, Iran itself continued exporting oil through the strait. Bloomberg calculated that Iran was earning approximately $139 million per day from oil sales in March—nearly $25 million more per day than in February—as the only major Gulf exporter able to use the waterway. Iranian crude was sold almost exclusively to China, with the pre-war discount to Brent narrowing from over $10 per barrel to just $2.10. As The Economist reported, Iran was earning nearly twice as much from oil sales each day as before the bombing began—"pummelled on the battlefield, but winning the energy war."

Iran also began charging transit fees of up to $2 million for ships to pass through the strait, with some payments settled in Chinese yuan—a significant development for China's long-standing effort to denominate oil trade in its currency.

The Energy-Infrastructure War

The war's most serious blow to Gulf energy infrastructure came in mid-March. On March 18, Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field—the world's largest, shared with Qatar, and the source of roughly 70% of Iran's domestic gas supply—along with related facilities at the Asaluyeh hub. Iran retaliated within hours, striking Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world's largest liquefied-natural-gas export complex, on March 18 and 19. QatarEnergy said the strikes cut the country's LNG export capacity by 17%, would cost roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, and would take three to five years to repair, hitting supply to Europe and Asia. Human Rights Watch concluded that both the South Pars and Ras Laffan strikes were unlawfully indiscriminate and could amount to war crimes.

The exchange marked a turning point. Trump—who initially said Israel had acted alone, though Axios and the Associated Press reported the U.S. had coordinated on the strike—announced there would be "no more attacks" on South Pars unless Iran struck Qatar again, in which case the U.S. would "massively blow up the entirety" of the field. He declared a de facto moratorium on strikes against Iranian energy sites, a posture several analysts later identified as the point at which U.S. military escalation stalled.

Congressional Response

War Powers Debate

The strikes were launched without congressional authorization. The White House notified the Gang of Eight shortly before the attack, and Armed Services Committees were notified after strikes began. Trump filed a 48-hour report with the Senate as required under the War Powers Resolution.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans demanded war powers votes. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) called it "an illegal war," noting that "the Constitution says no declaration of war without Congress." Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) called the attack "illegal and unconstitutional." Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said "everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame."

The House rejected a war powers resolution 219–212 on March 5, largely along party lines. The Senate defeated a similar measure the day before. Congress also passed a separate nonbinding resolution stating that Iran is the most significant backer of state-sponsored terrorism, which passed 372–53.

The War Powers Resolution also set a statutory clock. Because Trump notified Congress on March 2, the law's 60-day window for conducting hostilities without authorization expired on May 1, after which the statute directs the president to terminate the use of force absent congressional approval—with only a one-time 30-day extension available, and only to cover a safe withdrawal. As the date approached, several Republicans signaled it could be an inflection point. Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) wrote that he would not support military action beyond 60 days without congressional approval and later said he would oppose further war funding until Congress voted; Sens. Josh Hawley and Susan Collins said the statute had to be followed; and Sen. Lisa Murkowski began drafting an authorization for the use of military force to reassert congressional oversight. Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Brian Mast warned there could be "a different vote count after 60 days."

When the deadline arrived, little changed. Rather than seek authorization or begin winding down, Trump sent letters to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley declaring that "the hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated"—pointing to the April 7 ceasefire—while adding that the threat from Iran "remains significant." Hegseth told senators the ceasefire meant "the 60-day clock pauses or stops," and Johnson said Congress need not act because the U.S. was "not at war." The White House noted it had given more than 30 bipartisan briefings and argued, as the Obama administration had during the 2011 Libya campaign, that the operations no longer amounted to "hostilities" under the law. Critics rejected the reasoning: the U.S. naval blockade remained in force and Iran still controlled the strait, and legal scholars noted the resolution contains no provision for a ceasefire to pause the clock. "There's no pause button in the Constitution, or the War Powers Act," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on House Armed Services, said he did not expect the administration to follow the law. Senate Majority Leader Thune signaled no authorization vote would come—and none did. The deadline passed without congressional action or any change in U.S. operations.

The clearest congressional rebuke came only as the war was already winding down. On June 3, the Republican-led House passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities, 215–208, with four Republicans—Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, and Thomas Massie—joining Democrats. GOP leaders had sent the House into an early recess two weeks earlier when it appeared the measure had the votes, but the break failed to peel off the defectors. "We're past the 60 days... You either follow the law or you change the law. You can't violate the law," Fitzpatrick said. Still subject to the Senate and a likely veto, the measure was overtaken within days by the June 17 memorandum that formally ended the war.

The Senate finally acted after the war had formally ended. On June 23, it passed the same resolution, sponsored by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), by a vote of 50 to 48, with four Republicans—Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—joining nearly all Democrats. It was the first time both chambers had approved a war powers resolution since the conflict began. Because the resolution is not legally binding and is not sent to the president for signature, it carried no operational effect, but it delivered a rare bipartisan rebuke. The measure passed in part because two Republicans who would have voted no were absent, including Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, who was traveling with Trump.

The rebuke provoked an extraordinary response. Hours after the vote, Trump denounced the four Republicans on social media as "losers" and accused them of giving "aid and comfort" to Iran. The next day, June 24—after abruptly canceling the ceremonial signing of a bipartisan housing bill his party had championed as a midterm achievement, dismissing it as "of minor importance"—Trump traveled to the Capitol for a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans and angrily confronted the members who had crossed him. "He was mad as a murder hornet," said Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA). "Why would anybody vote for the War Powers Act?" Trump demanded, according to attendees' accounts; Cassidy stood and answered—"You have not told the American people what's going on. It was supposed to last four weeks; it's lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved"—and the exchange devolved into a shouting match, with Trump yelling "You lost the election" and calling Cassidy a "loser" and, according to several senators, a "lunatic." ("If someone tries to bully me," Cassidy said afterward, "I ain't gonna put up with that.") Trump also called Murkowski a "horrible person" and berated Sen. Dave McCormick for missing the vote, according to senators in attendance. That evening, in a move to mollify the president, Republican leaders brought a nearly identical Kaine resolution back to the floor and voted 50 to 47 to block it, with Paul voting "present." Cassidy and Paul both shifted their votes; Cassidy said he did so after an evening White House briefing from Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff that left him "reassured," while Paul said Trump "feels like it reduces his leverage to find a deal." The late-night vote—the Senate's last before a recess lasting until July 13—defeated a motion to proceed and did nothing to rescind or supersede the resolution adopted a day earlier—"That train has left the station," Kaine said—but Trump celebrated it on social media, falsely claiming the Senate had "changed its vote on Iran" and asserting that the new vote "puts Iran on notice." The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman described the day as emblematic of a president who "has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country's standing in the world," with poll numbers plummeting and Republicans fearing "a November wipeout."

Republican Support and Dissent

Most Republicans rallied behind the president. Senate Majority Leader John Thune argued the action was "consistent with what previous administrations have done." Sen. Lindsey Graham called it a moment where Trump was "evil's worst nightmare." Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) broke with his party to support the strikes.

However, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) opposed the operation on constitutional grounds. Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) voted against the war powers resolution but had previously supported one on Venezuela. Several Republican senators, including Roger Wicker (Armed Services chair), indicated their support could waver if ground troops were deployed.

Constitutional Questions

Legal scholars broadly agreed the operation was constitutionally dubious. Ilya Somin of George Mason University told CNN: "This is very obviously a war. You don't have to take my word for that—Trump himself says it's a war." The White House cited Article II commander-in-chief authority but did not present a detailed legal justification publicly.

Trump told reporters he wouldn't call the conflict a "war" because "you are supposed to get approval," while press secretary Karoline Leavitt said congressional authorization was unnecessary because the operation was on a "four- to six-week timeline." Trump and Vice President Vance have both called the War Powers Act "unconstitutional."

State Department Legal Justification

On April 21, the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser, led by Reed D. Rubinstein, released a formal legal justification for Operation Epic Fury — the most detailed defense the administration has offered nearly two months into the war. The memo makes two core arguments. First, that the U.S. is fighting "at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States' own inherent right of self-defense." Second, that the war is not a new conflict requiring fresh legal authorization, but rather "the latest round of an ongoing international armed conflict with Iran" that began with the June 2025 Twelve-Day War — meaning, under the administration's theory, that it need not "continually reassess the jus ad bellum principles of necessity and proportionality." The memo explicitly states that the U.S. "does not rely on a theory of imminence to justify its actions."

The "Israel asked us" framing drew immediate attention. Matthew Yglesias posted on X: "Kind of remarkable that 'because Israel asked us to' is the official explanation for the war." Jewish Insider noted the memo represented Washington's first formal acknowledgment that participation came "at least in part — at Israel's request." This represented a notable shift from earlier administration framings that emphasized an "imminent threat" from Iran (Rubio, March 2) and Iran's nuclear program (Trump, throughout).

Legal scholars largely rejected the memo's reasoning. Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group, a former State Department war crimes lawyer, wrote in Just Security that the justification was "defective and overly permissive" and "risks further eroding legal constraints on the use of force." He argued the memo fails to establish necessity — a core requirement of self-defense — because the U.S. had not exhausted peaceful alternatives, noting that "the United States had successfully employed diplomacy to tightly constrain Iran's nuclear program, subject to international verification—until President Trump withdrew from" the JCPOA. Finucane characterized the document's lengthy recitation of Iranian misconduct as "an airing of grievances rather than substantiation for rigorous legal arguments." A Carnegie Endowment analysis concluded that "there is no other reasonable conclusion to be drawn at this stage other than its initiation of hostilities against Iran with Operation Epic Fury was unlawful under international law," noting that under the jus ad bellum, "you cannot double-preempt against an action to which you are yourself a party."

The memo's "ongoing conflict" theory — which holds that the brief ceasefire after the Twelve-Day War did not actually end hostilities — was central to its argument that no new authorization was needed. Critics argued this theory would, if accepted, render the War Powers Resolution and Article 51 of the U.N. Charter effectively meaningless by allowing any limited prior conflict to justify unlimited future force. National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan group of former senior officials, had earlier called on Congress to demand a clear legal rationale and assert its authorization role; the April 21 memo did not satisfy those demands, as it sidesteps the question of domestic congressional authorization entirely by framing the conflict as already-authorized.

Hegseth's "No Quarter" Declaration

On March 13, during a Pentagon press briefing, Defense Secretary Hegseth declared: "We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies." In the same briefing, he also attacked CNN's reporting that the administration had underestimated the war's impact on the Strait of Hormuz, calling it "fake news."

The statement drew immediate alarm from legal experts across the political spectrum. "No quarter" is a specific term in the law of armed conflict meaning that surrendering combatants will be killed rather than taken prisoner. Declaring "no quarter" is explicitly prohibited under the 1907 Hague Convention (Article 23), the Geneva Convention's Additional Protocol I (Article 40), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Under U.S. domestic law, it is criminalized by the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441). The Pentagon's own Law of War Manual states: "It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given." The prohibition has been recognized since the Civil War–era Lieber Code of 1863, and the U.S. prosecuted German military officials for the offense after World War II.

Critically, the prohibition applies to the speech act itself—not just to carrying it out. As retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate Dan Maurer wrote in a hypothetical legal memorandum published by Just Security, even if Hegseth intended the phrase colloquially, the statement "may expose you to criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. 2441(c)(2)" and could expose subordinate service members to prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Maurer recommended Hegseth publicly retract the statement immediately.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department war crimes lawyer now with the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera: "These comments are very striking. It raises questions about whether this belligerent, lawless rhetoric is being translated into how the war is being conducted on the battlefield." Ryan Goodman, founding editor of Just Security and former Pentagon general counsel official, told Axios that Hegseth was "putting the American military on a track to lawlessness in which we will lose more and more allies."

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired Navy officer, responded: "'No quarter' isn't some wannabe tough guy line—it means something. An order to give no quarter would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead. That would violate the law of armed conflict. It would be an illegal order. It would also put American service members at greater risk." Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) connected the rhetoric to the broader pattern of Hegseth's earlier statement that the military would operate with "no stupid rules of engagement."

Some legal scholars offered a more charitable interpretation. Marko Milanovic, an international law professor at the University of Reading, told HuffPost the remark could be "the type of Trumpian hyperbole that one can expect from Hegseth et al." But Laurie Blank, an international law expert at Emory University, said that even spoken colloquially, "it is not a good message for someone in his position to communicate." Neither the Defense Department nor the White House responded to multiple outlets' requests for comment. Hegseth did not retract the statement.

Administration Messaging

The administration's public statements on the war have been notably contradictory—to a degree that commentators across the political spectrum have described as unprecedented. On the Strait of Hormuz alone, Trump has cycled through mutually exclusive positions in rapid succession: threatening to destroy Iran's civilization if the strait is not opened; claiming the U.S. doesn't need the strait and it's "Europe's problem"; suggesting the U.S. and Iran might "run it together"; celebrating the closure because it lets America sell more oil; and insisting the strait is already open and the media is lying. Political analyst Richard Hanania wrote on X: "I think Hormuz has broken Trump... When he's been inconsistent before, usually he cycles through different positions, at least showing some consistency for a short period of time. Here he's constantly saying contradictory things in the same breath, over and over again."

More broadly, Trump has simultaneously claimed to have "already won" the war while deploying thousands of additional troops; said Iran is "begging" for a deal while Iran has publicly denied talks are taking place; threatened to destroy Iran's energy infrastructure while issuing pauses on strikes; asked NATO allies for naval help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz one week after telling Britain not to bother sending ships because the war was won; and claimed Iran has "no anti-aircraft equipment" and that "their radar is 100% annihilated" two days before Iran shot down a U.S. F-15E. NBC News reported that the administration's talking points have been "a moving target, with officials giving sometimes conflicting takes of the operation's goals in language that evolves in real-time."

The pattern extended to the president disputing his own recorded statements. On May 1, in a speech to the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in Florida—delivered as Iran sent a new proposal to Pakistani mediators—Trump said: "Frankly, maybe we're better off not making a deal at all, do you want to know the truth. Because we can't let this thing go on." The next day, after a reporter reminded him of the comment, Trump denied making it: "Well, I wouldn't have to. I didn't say that." CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale documented that Trump had said exactly that on camera, and placed the denial within a broader pattern of the president disclaiming public remarks the record showed he had made. In the same May 1 speech, Trump described the U.S. Navy's seizure of an Iranian-flagged tanker enforcing the blockade, saying American forces "took over the cargo, took over the oil" and likening the operation to acting "like pirates."

The president's account of the war's central military achievement also reversed. In an April 11 Truth Social post, Trump wrote that "the United States has completely destroyed Iran's Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else," adding that "their Leadership is DEAD." In a May 30 Fox News interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, he described the military differently: while again calling Iran's navy and air force "100%" gone, he said "their military, we've sort of left it alone—because we think that their military is somewhat moderate," and "we've actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that," reasoning that wiping out "everybody" leaves a country that "for 40 years can never rebuild." The reframing came weeks after U.S. intelligence assessments found Iran had retained roughly 70% of its missile stockpile and most of its launchers. In the same interview, Trump said the United States "should not have been in Iran"—likening it to the Iraq War—while defending the strikes as having stopped Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The gap between the president's claims and the intelligence carried a personnel cost as well. The Atlantic reported that the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, was dismissed following a preliminary assessment that U.S. air strikes had set back Iran's nuclear capabilities by only a few months—an evaluation at odds with Trump's insistence that the program had been "obliterated." The magazine cited the firing as an example of the price intelligence officers could pay for departing from the administration's political line, part of a broader pattern of pressure on the analytic workforce that also drew objection in the CIA's internal survey of analytic integrity.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that Israel's plans to attack Iran played a role in the U.S. decision to strike first. A Wall Street Journal report detailed how Sen. Lindsey Graham traveled to Israel multiple times in the weeks before the strikes, meeting with Israeli intelligence officials who "tell me things our own government won't tell me," and that Netanyahu "showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead." Reuters reported that Netanyahu spoke with Trump by phone less than 48 hours before the strikes began. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested the White House believed Israel was determined to strike on its own, leaving Trump with a "very difficult decision."

The "No New Wars" Pledge

Trump had campaigned in both 2016 and 2024 as an opponent of the kind of open-ended Middle East conflict he ultimately launched. His "America First" coalition was built partly on rejecting the interventionism associated with the Iraq War—"Great nations do not fight endless wars," he said in his 2019 State of the Union—and in 2018 he ordered a drawdown from Syria, asking whether the United States wanted to be "the Policeman of the Middle East… spending precious lives and trillions of dollars." His first term included military strikes, among them the 2020 killing of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, but no new large-scale war, a distinction he and his supporters stressed often. The 2024 campaign leaned on the theme heavily: JD Vance framed his candidacy on the promise that Trump would not "recklessly" send Americans to fight abroad, and advisers including Stephen Miller warned in the final days that a Democratic win would drag young men into a "3rd World War."

The February 2026 war—waged without congressional authorization and, as NBC News noted, with no announced end date—sat uneasily with that record, a tension felt sharply within the anti-interventionist wing of Trump's own base. Pressed on NBC's Meet the Press in June on whether the war betrayed his "no new wars" refrain, Trump said he had made no such promise: "First of all, I didn't guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?" The administration argued the operation—cast as a limited campaign to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran rather than an occupation or nation-building effort—was consistent with its "America First" posture. Critics, including some who had backed Trump on his antiwar messaging, argued the conflict had become the kind of costly, open-ended entanglement he had once run against.

Conservative Dissent

While rank-and-file Republicans have largely supported the war in polling, the conflict has produced a visible fracture among prominent conservative voices and Trump-aligned officials—a development that distinguishes it from earlier Republican-led military actions.

Joe Kent's Resignation

On March 17, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center—a retired Green Beret with 11 combat deployments and a Gold Star spouse whose wife was killed in Syria—resigned publicly, posting his resignation letter on X. Kent wrote: "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." He accused "high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media" of deploying "a misinformation campaign" to move Trump's stated red line from "no nuclear weapons" to "no enrichment"—a position Iran could not accept—thereby sabotaging ongoing negotiations. Kent called it "the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war."

Kent's resignation was the highest-profile rebuke of the war from within the administration. In subsequent media appearances, including on Tucker Carlson's podcast and the Shawn Ryan Show, Kent elaborated that the administration's decision-making circle was "very, very tight" and dominated by "pro-Israel hawks," that Israeli officials had bypassed normal intelligence vetting channels to deliver information directly to senior decision-makers, and that the war had no clear strategic objective beyond a "punch list of things we want to bomb." He argued the only path to ending the war was to "restrain the Israelis" by conditioning U.S. defensive support on Israeli compliance with American diplomatic objectives.

Trump dismissed Kent, calling him "very weak on security," despite having previously praised him as someone who had "hunted down terrorists and criminals his entire adult life." Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the claim that Israel goaded Trump into war "insulting and laughable." But Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that while he disagreed with many of Kent's past positions, "on this point, he is right: there was no credible evidence of an imminent threat from Iran that would justify rushing the United States into another war of choice in the Middle East." Pentagon briefings to Capitol Hill contradicted the administration's "imminent threat" justification, with defense officials telling lawmakers that Iran was not planning to attack unless struck first.

On May 8, Kent expanded the argument in a post on X, asserting that before the war the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, had agreed that Iran "wasn't developing a nuclear weapon," and had correctly predicted that Iran would strike U.S. bases and close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. He further claimed the community had assessed that targeting Iranian leadership "would strengthen the regime and embolden the hardliners," and argued the assessments were overridden because "the narrative & agenda spun by a foreign government—Israel, won the argument & forced us into this war." The White House rejected the account: spokesman Davis Ingle called Kent's claims "riddled with lies," maintaining that Trump "took decisive action based on strong evidence which showed that the terrorist Iranian regime posed an imminent threat and was preparing to strike Americans first." In an April Truth Social post, Trump had denied that Israel drove the decision—"Israel never talked me into the war with Iran," he wrote, attributing it instead to his "lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON"—and he called Kent's departure "a good thing." Kent's characterization of a unanimous prewar intelligence consensus could not be independently verified, and the Associated Press reported he was under investigation following his resignation. Iran maintained throughout that its nuclear program was for civilian purposes, though it had enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels before the war.

Broader Right-Wing Split

Kent's resignation catalyzed a wider public split among prominent conservatives. Tucker Carlson, who remains highly influential among the Republican base, said Israeli "lobbying in the United States pressured the president." Megyn Kelly said the war was sold to Americans by "Israel firsters, like Mark Levin." Levin, a prominent radio host and Fox personality who has been among the war's most vocal supporters, called Kelly "an emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck." The Associated Press described the episode as reflecting "two schisms within the Republican Party": one over the war's wisdom, and another over talk about Israel "that critics call antisemitic."

The Republican Jewish Coalition opposed Kent's claims, and critics accused Kent and Carlson of trafficking in antisemitic tropes. But the debate also extended to substantive policy disagreements: Kent argued in his Shawn Ryan Show interview that Israel and the U.S. have "drastically different strategic goals"—Israel seeking full regime change while the U.S. has only articulated a list of military targets—and that the U.S. is "footing the bill, doing the majority of the combat, doing the dying" while Israel drives escalation. He cited the U.S. spending $18–25 billion on the war compared to Israel's $6.4 billion, with the administration requesting an additional $200 billion from Congress.

Public Opinion

Polling consistently shows majority opposition to the war:

• A Pew Research survey (March 16–22) found 61% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the conflict and 60% say striking Iran was the wrong decision
• A Quinnipiac poll (March 6–8) found 53% oppose U.S. military action and 55% do not believe Iran posed an imminent military threat before the strikes; 74% oppose sending ground troops
• Silver Bulletin's polling average shows support for the war steady at about 40%, with opposition rising from 48% to 54%
• A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted the day of the attack found 43% disapproved and 27% approved, with 30% unsure
• A Washington Post poll found more than 60% consider the number of U.S. military casualties unacceptable given the war's goals

Notably, opposition crosses party lines to a degree. A Fox News poll found that by a 51%–29% margin, voters said Trump's handling of Iran has made the U.S. less safe—even though 50% broadly supported the military action. Pew found that only 52% of Republican-leaning independents approve of Trump's handling of the conflict, and younger Republicans are significantly more skeptical than older ones.

Global Response

The United Nations condemned the strikes. Secretary-General António Guterres described the events as a grave threat to international peace and security and urged the international community to pull the region "back from the brink." The UK condemned Iran's counter-strikes but did not participate in offensive operations, deploying aircraft only in a defensive role. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he did "not believe in regime change from the skies."

Satellite companies Planet Labs and Vantor restricted access to satellite imagery of the Middle East, saying they made the decisions independently to ensure imagery was "not tactically leveraged by adversarial actors." Both companies stated they were not directed by any government to restrict access.

Threats to Civilian Infrastructure

Beginning in mid-March, Trump began explicitly threatening to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure — particularly power plants, bridges, and desalination plants — if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Escalating Ultimatums

On March 21, Trump issued his first 48-hour ultimatum, threatening to "obliterate" Iranian power plants "starting with the biggest one first." He extended that deadline on March 23, pausing strikes for five days. On March 26, he extended it again by 10 days, to April 6, saying it was at Iran's request and that "talks are going very well."

In a prime-time address to the nation on April 1, Trump declared the war was "nearing completion" and promised to hit Iran "extremely hard" over the next two to three weeks. He said, "If there is no deal, we will hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously." He also claimed: "They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force."

Two days later, on April 3, Iran shot down a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle — the first American fighter jet downed in combat since the 2003 Iraq War. An A-10 Thunderbolt II was also struck and crashed the same day. Both crew members from the F-15E were ultimately rescued in a dramatic joint military-CIA operation involving Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and hundreds of special operations personnel. The weapons systems officer, a colonel, evaded capture in Iran's mountains for more than 24 hours while Iranian forces and civilians offered a $60,000 bounty for his capture. Two U.S. rescue helicopters were hit during the operation. Iran claimed to have destroyed additional U.S. aircraft during the rescue; the Pentagon said some aircraft were destroyed by U.S. forces after malfunctions.

The shootdowns undercut Hegseth's and Trump's repeated claims of unchallenged air dominance over Iran.

The April 5 Ultimatum

On April 4, Trump posted on Truth Social: "Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!"

On April 5, in a phone interview with ABC News, Trump said: "If it happens, it happens. And if it doesn't, we're blowing up the whole country. We're blowing up, as I said, it's going to be bridge day and it's going to be power plant day in the country of Iran." He told Fox News that if Iran didn't make a deal, he was "considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil." He said "very little" would be off limits. He told Axios: "If they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there." When asked whether he worried about harming civilians, Trump said he believed Iranian civilians who oppose their government would support such strikes.

On April 7, hours before his deadline, Trump posted on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." He added: "But I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." The post triggered calls from members of Congress for Trump's removal under the 25th Amendment, including from former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally turned critic, who wrote: "25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness." Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump's "instability is more clear and dangerous than ever." Pope Leo XIV urged people of good will to "reject war, especially a war which many people have said is an unjust war." The UK refused to authorize U.S. use of British bases for any operations targeting civilian infrastructure. Approximately 90 minutes before his deadline, Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire at the request of Pakistani PM Sharif. Trump later defended the post, saying: "I'm fine with it" and arguing it brought Iran to the table.

Legal Analysis of Infrastructure Threats

Legal experts and human rights organizations have warned that targeting civilian infrastructure would likely violate international humanitarian law. Amnesty International stated that "intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally prohibited" and that striking them "would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law, and could amount to a war crime." PolitiFact reported that experts confirmed Rep. Seth Moulton's (D-MA) claim that "bombing civilian power infrastructure is a war crime" was well-supported, though some gray area exists for dual-use targets that serve both military and civilian purposes.

Over 100 international law experts signed a letter published by Just Security warning that the U.S. strikes violate the U.N. Charter and may constitute war crimes, citing threats to energy infrastructure and reported strikes on schools, health facilities, and homes. The Iranian Red Crescent reported that 67,414 civilian sites had been struck, including 498 schools and 236 health facilities. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) estimated that 3,531 people had been killed in the war as of early April, including 1,607 civilians and at least 244 children.

Gabor Rona, director of the Law and Armed Conflict Project at Cardozo Law School and former ICRC legal adviser, told NPR that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure would violate both international law and the U.S. War Crimes Act, which has no statute of limitations for crimes resulting in death. "Obviously, there's not going to be any accountability during this administration," Rona said, "but there could very well be accountability, even under U.S. law, in the next administration or sometime in the future."

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf responded on X: "Your reckless moves are dragging the United States into a living HELL for every single family, and our whole region is going to burn because you insist on following Netanyahu's commands. Make no mistake: You won't gain anything through war crimes." Foreign Minister Araghchi responded to Trump's "stone ages" threat by noting: "There's one striking difference between the present and the Stone Age: there was no oil or gas being pumped in the Middle East back then."

Undisclosed Damage to U.S. Bases

On April 25, NBC News reported that Iranian strikes caused far more extensive damage to U.S. military bases across the Middle East than the administration has publicly acknowledged. Citing three U.S. officials, two congressional aides, and an American Enterprise Institute assessment, NBC reported that Iran hit more than 100 targets across 11 U.S. bases in seven countries—Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—with infrastructure repair costs estimated well over $5 billion, a figure that does not include the replacement cost of destroyed aircraft, radars, and weapons systems. Damage included the U.S. Navy 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, a destroyed runway at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, multiple hangars at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, fuel storage and barracks at Al Dhafra in the UAE, and at least two air-defense systems.

Most strikingly, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet—a Cold War-era aircraft first introduced in the 1960s—penetrated U.S. air defenses including Patriot batteries to bomb Camp Buehring in Kuwait during the opening days of the war. Two officials told NBC it was "the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years." The strike directly contradicts Defense Secretary Hegseth's March 4 claim that Iran's air force had been "wiped out" and that the U.S. had "complete control of Iranian skies," as well as Trump's repeated assertion that Iran has "no anti-aircraft equipment" and "no air force." A Pentagon official told NBC: "We do not discuss battle damage assessments for operation security reasons."

NBC also reported that the White House asked private satellite companies not to publish images of U.S. bases in the region after they were struck. The request was revealed in an April 4 Planet Labs email to customers extending a 14-day blackout of the affected areas—context that gives new weight to Planet Labs' and Vantor's earlier statements that they were not "directed by any government" to restrict imagery.

A more comprehensive accounting came on May 6, when The Washington Post published a satellite-imagery investigation finding that Iranian strikes had damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment—217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment—across 15 U.S. military sites since the war began, far more than the government had acknowledged or earlier reporting had captured. Days earlier, a CNN investigation had reached a similar conclusion, finding at least 16 U.S. military sites damaged—a majority of the American positions in the region—including high-value targets. With Planet and Vantor withholding regional imagery at the U.S. government's request from early in the war, the Post relied largely on more than 100 high-resolution satellite images released by Iranian state-affiliated media, verifying 109 of them against the EU's Copernicus system and Planet imagery, excluding 19 as inconclusive, and finding no evidence any had been manipulated; a separate search of Planet imagery turned up 10 additional damaged structures. More than half the documented damage was concentrated at the 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and three Kuwaiti bases—Ali al-Salem, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring—which a U.S. official said may have been hit hardest because they permitted offensive operations, including HIMARS launches, from their territory.

The verified imagery documented hits on Patriot equipment at three bases, THAAD radars in Jordan and the UAE, satellite-communications sites at Al Udeid in Qatar, a power plant at Camp Buehring, fuel-storage bladders across three bases, and an E-3 Sentry command-and-control aircraft and a refueling tanker at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. official described the damage at the 5th Fleet headquarters as "extensive" and said the command had relocated to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, with troops unlikely to return "anytime soon"; two other officials said U.S. forces might never return to the regional bases in large numbers. Seven of the war's U.S. military deaths came in strikes on these facilities—six in Kuwait, one in Saudi Arabia—and more than 400 troops were wounded, at least 12 seriously.

Analysts who reviewed the imagery said its precision was notable. "The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses," said CSIS's Mark Cancian, while Contested Ground's William Goodhind said Iran had "deliberately targeted accommodation buildings" with the intent to inflict mass casualties. Experts attributed the vulnerability to an underestimation of Iran's pre-positioned targeting intelligence, the depletion of U.S. air defenses during the June 2025 conflict, a shortfall of fortified shelters, and a failure to adapt to cheap one-way attack drones—lessons, several noted, that should have been drawn from Ukraine. CSIS estimated the U.S. had fired at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors between February 28 and April 8, roughly 53% and 43% of prewar inventories. Cancian and others cautioned, however, that the attacks did not appear to have significantly limited the U.S. bombing campaign in Iran, and that some damage could reflect deliberate U.S. choices—allowing missiles to strike low-value targets to conserve interceptors, or making emptied bases appear occupied to deceive Iranian forces. U.S. Central Command declined to address the findings in detail; a military spokesperson disputed characterizing the damage as extensive or as evidence of failure, called damage assessments complex and sometimes misleading, and said fuller context would come after the war.

The Ceasefire Whiplash

The Strait of Hormuz and ceasefire negotiations have followed a pattern of breakdowns, partial deals, reversals, and re-imposed restrictions — sometimes oscillating multiple times in a single week. The result is what Goldman Sachs analyst Jared Cohen described as a "sloppy ceasefire" — neither side firing ballistic missiles, but both maintaining maritime pressure: Iran's IRGC small boats firing on commercial ships, the U.S. Navy boarding Iran-linked vessels.

April 7–8: After the "civilization will die" threat, the U.S., Israel, and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan. Iran agreed to safely reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the U.S. agreed to suspend bombing.

April 8–9: Within hours of the ceasefire announcement, Israel launched "Operation Eternal Darkness" — its largest wave of strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon since the war began, killing at least 357 people. Iran cited the Lebanon attacks as grounds to pause Hormuz traffic, arguing the U.S. and Israel had violated the ceasefire. By April 9, ships were again being prevented from passing through the strait. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan Al Jaber confirmed 230 loaded oil tankers were waiting inside the Gulf.

April 11–12: Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner traveled to Islamabad for the first face-to-face U.S.–Iran negotiations since 2015, with Pakistani mediation. Talks collapsed after 21 hours. Vance called the ceasefire a "fragile truce" and said Iran's team "was not in a position to cut a deal."

April 13: Trump declared a U.S. naval blockade of all Iranian ports, deploying over 10,000 personnel and a dozen warships. The arrangement became a "dual blockade" — the U.S. blockading Iran, Iran blockading the strait. Iran called it an act of war.

April 16–17: A Lebanon ceasefire took effect April 16. The next day, Iran briefly reopened the strait to commercial traffic, sending oil prices down 11%. France and the UK announced plans for an international defensive maritime mission once a sustainable ceasefire is in place.

April 18: After Trump insisted the U.S. blockade would continue regardless of the strait reopening, Iran closed the strait again and reportedly fired on a tanker, citing "repeated breaches of trust."

April 19: Mohammad Rezaei-Kouchi, head of Iran's parliamentary construction committee, announced legislation banning ships from "hostile" countries from transiting the strait and requiring tolls from all others. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf told state television the two sides remained "far from a final agreement."

April 21: Trump extended the ceasefire at Pakistan's request to allow Iran to submit a new proposal. He kept the naval blockade in place and instructed the military to remain prepared to resume fighting. Axios reported he did not intend to extend it for more than a few days.

April 23: Trump claimed the U.S. "fully controlled" the strait and that he himself was keeping it closed, because reopening it would let Iran "make $500 million a day." The Guardian observed that the U.S. had not actually been able to open the strait to allies, only to blockade Iranian ports. Trump also extended the Israel–Lebanon ceasefire by three weeks. The U.S. military announced three U.S. aircraft carriers were now stationed in the Middle East — the first such deployment since 2003.

April 24: Trump ordered the U.S. military to "shoot and kill" Iranian small boats attempting to lay mines in the strait. Crude oil rose to over $105 a barrel.

April 25: Trump canceled Witkoff and Kushner's planned trip to Pakistan for the next round of negotiations, complaining of "too much time wasted on traveling." Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi met instead with Pakistani PM Sharif and Army Chief Munir, then traveled to Moscow. NBC reported a U.S.-sanctioned supertanker had passed through the strait despite the blockade.

April 26: Iran's forensics chief reported nearly 3,400 people killed inside Iran since strikes began. Iran's ambassador to Russia said: "If other side is willing to negotiate, we will negotiate. If they want war, we will fight." Trump said there was "no time pressure" in talks and "no time frame" on ending the war. The "sloppy ceasefire" continues.

Vance and the Pentagon's Account of the War

Behind the administration's united public messaging, reporting surfaced signs of internal friction over whether the Pentagon was giving an accurate account of the war. On April 27, The Atlantic reported, citing two senior administration officials, that Vice President JD Vance had repeatedly questioned the Defense Department's depiction of the conflict in closed-door meetings and whether it had understated the depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles, raising the issue directly with Trump. Vance's advisers said he had framed the concerns as his own rather than accusing Hegseth or Caine of misleading the president, and was trying to avoid divisions in the war cabinet—though some of his confidants believed Hegseth's portrayal had been "so positive as to be misleading." Several advisers suggested the Pentagon's upbeat framing was tailored to the president, noting that its 8 a.m. briefings coincided with Trump's Fox News viewing; one former official said Hegseth "strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear." Trump had echoed the optimistic line, declaring victory weeks earlier and calling U.S. weapons stockpiles "virtually unlimited."

The munitions question had independent support. In an April 21 analysis, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the United States had expended more than half of its prewar supply of several key munitions—including roughly half its Patriot interceptors and large shares of its THAAD and Precision Strike inventories—reserves already strained before the war by slow manufacturing and donations to Ukraine and Israel. CSIS analyst Mark Cancian warned the spending had opened "a window of increased vulnerability in the western Pacific," with one to four years needed to replenish. Notably, the same CSIS analysis concluded the U.S. had enough missiles "to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario"—locating the risk in future contingencies such as Taiwan, Korea, or Europe rather than the Iran campaign itself. Internal estimates cited by The Atlantic held that Iran retained about two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of its small, fast boats capable of mining or harassing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

The administration rejected the suggestion that it was withholding anything. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Hegseth and other leaders "consistently provide the president with the complete, unvarnished picture," and a senior official called Caine "precise, exact, and comprehensive." Vance issued a statement praising Hegseth as "doing a great job," and a White House official cast the differing views within the national-security team as "healthy tension." Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the military had "decimated the Iranian regime's capabilities in just 38 days." Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Hegseth said the Pentagon gave the committee weekly munitions briefings and that there were no shortfalls "in our ability to execute the missions around the world," while arguing specific stockpile levels should not be discussed publicly. Some conservatives went further, with National Review suggesting that if the Pentagon was in fact informing the president accurately, the anonymous leaks aimed at casting doubt on it looked like an attempt to undermine the war effort.

The episode also exposed the gap between rhetoric and events: in March, Hegseth had touted "complete control" of Iranian skies, only for Iran to down a U.S. fighter jet in April, prompting a rescue operation Hegseth likened to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The friction carried a political subtext as well. Vance, who had been skeptical of attacking Iran and once said of foreign wars "we were lied to," and Hegseth, who has courted the religious right and the NRA, are both seen as eyeing the 2028 Republican nomination with their fortunes tied to the war's outcome. The tension extended to personnel: Hegseth's ouster of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George—who had overseen munitions replenishment and was an ally of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a close friend of Vance—drew an outcry on Capitol Hill.

By the war's end, Vance had become its most consequential administration figure after the president—the deal's lead negotiator in Switzerland and Doha, the briefer who flipped Sen. Cassidy's war-powers vote, and the public face of the memorandum's defense. His trajectory drew extended scrutiny. A New Yorker essay by Paul Elie, occasioned by the publication of Vance's faith memoir Communion, noted that the vice president—who had built his political brand on restraint and privately been reluctant to support the war—invoked Augustinian just-war theory to defend the strikes, then found himself "the public face of a war that he had once privately been reluctant to support, trying to negotiate a truce on behalf of his profane and immoral boss." The war also produced an open breach with the Vatican: on April 10, Pope Leo XIV wrote on X that "a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs"; Trump responded by calling the pope "WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy," and Vance, at a Turning Point USA event, suggested the pope's insight was not "anchored in the truth," adding that "it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology." Julia Ioffe reported in Puck that as Republican voters soured on the Iran conflict and on Netanyahu, Vance shifted his public rhetoric on Israel, positioning himself as the voice of a new MAGA foreign policy ahead of a likely 2028 run. "He sees the writing on the wall that an increasing fraction of America hates Israel," one Trump administration official told her. "He's trying to save his political future."

Iran's Retained Military Capacity

In mid-May, the administration's portrayal of a shattered Iranian military came into sharp conflict with classified U.S. intelligence. On May 12, The New York Times reported that assessments compiled earlier that month found Iran had regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities during the ceasefire. According to people with knowledge of the assessments, Iran had restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz—leaving only three fully inaccessible—and could use mobile launchers within the sites to relocate missiles or, in some cases, fire directly from surviving launchpads. The assessments concluded that Iran still fielded roughly 70% of its mobile launchers and retained about 70% of its prewar missile stockpile, and had regained access to roughly 90% of its underground missile storage and launch facilities, now judged "partially or fully operational." The findings were corroborated by Washington Post reporting that put Iran's retained mobile launchers at about 75% and its stockpile at roughly 70%.

The intelligence cut against months of public statements. On March 9, ten days into the war, Trump told CBS News that Iran's "missiles are down to a scatter" and that the country had "nothing left in a military sense." On April 8, Hegseth declared that Operation Epic Fury had "decimated Iran's military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come." The assessments were dated less than a month after that statement.

The administration rejected the reporting. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales repeated that Iran's military had been "crushed" and said anyone who "thinks Iran has reconstituted its military is either delusional or a mouthpiece" for the IRGC; she pointed to a Trump post calling it "virtual treason" to suggest Iran's military was doing well. Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez accused the Times and other outlets of "acting as public relations agents for the Iranian regime." Asked about munitions levels, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told a House subcommittee, "We have sufficient munitions for what we're tasked to do right now," and chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the military had "everything it needs."

The reporting also detailed the strain the war placed on U.S. arsenals. According to the Times, the United States expended roughly 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles—close to its total remaining supply—fired more than 1,000 Tomahawks (about ten times the number procured in a year), and used more than 1,300 Patriot interceptors, more than two years of production at 2025 rates. Replenishment would take years: Lockheed Martin produces about 650 Patriot interceptors annually and has announced plans to reach 2,000. Officials also described a tactical trade-off behind Iran's resilience—with limited bunker-busting munitions, planners often chose to seal the entrances of hardened underground facilities rather than destroy entire complexes, partly to preserve stocks for potential conflicts involving North Korea or China, with what officials called mixed results. The combination of a depleted U.S. arsenal and a substantially intact Iranian one framed the dilemma facing Washington as the ceasefire held.

By late June the administration was pressing on two fronts to close the gap—leaning on manufacturers to speed up output while asking Congress for money to pay for it. In a June 24 White House meeting, Trump and senior Pentagon officials urged defense companies to accelerate production of depleted systems; the companies, in turn, said they wanted more funding to expand capacity, and Trump—more conciliatory than in past sessions—told them the administration was working to secure it. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg pressed the firms to move faster. But officials cautioned there had been many announcements and little actual expansion: Raytheon in February pledged to raise Tomahawk output to 1,000 per year from about 90, but first had to certify new airframe suppliers such as the 3-D-printing start-up Divergent, a process that can take years. The Senate Armed Services Committee, for its part, approved a bill that could bar some defense contractors from stock buybacks or dividend payments without Pentagon approval, extending a January executive order. Analysts warned the shortfall was less about the Iran war—which the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the U.S. had enough munitions to sustain—than about a "window of vulnerability" for a future great-power conflict with China.

The same gap between intelligence and rhetoric extended to the blockade's economic effects. On May 7, The Washington Post reported that a confidential CIA analysis delivered to the White House concluded Iran could withstand the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months—roughly 90 to 120 days, and possibly longer—before facing more severe economic hardship, a finding corroborated by Reuters. A central administration hope had been that the blockade would fill Iran's storage and force it to stop pumping, damaging its wells; the assessment found Tehran was forestalling that by storing unsold crude aboard otherwise-idle tankers and slowing output to keep its wells viable, with one official calling the situation "nowhere near as dire as some have claimed." Iran was also developing overland routes—Pakistan opened six transit corridors in late April—though the Soufan Center cautioned that rail and road could not replace the tanker volumes Iran's main customer, China, required. The administration disputed the framing: White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the blockade was costing Iran $500 million a day and that Trump "holds all the cards," and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, touting a sanctions push branded "Economic Fury," said Iran's main oil terminal would soon reach capacity, "causing permanent damage." Trump called the blockade "a wall of steel" and Iran's economy "crashing." Days earlier he had launched, then paused, a Navy-escort operation he called "Project Freedom" to move commercial ships through the strait, citing "Great Progress" in talks.

The May Negotiations and Republican Backlash

By mid-May, the war had settled into a fragile, repeatedly violated ceasefire that had broadly held since April 8, with Pakistan and Qatar mediating indirect talks while the U.S. and Iran rejected one another's proposals. Negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz had largely stalled, with each side blaming the other and Gulf states warning that a resumption of fighting could deepen what they called the worst global energy crisis in decades.

On May 23, after a flurry of phone calls with Gulf and Muslim leaders and with Netanyahu, Trump posted on Truth Social that a peace agreement had been "largely negotiated, subject to finalization" between the United States, Iran, and "various other Countries," and would be announced shortly. He said it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz but did not mention Iran's nuclear program or its roughly 440-kilogram stockpile of highly enriched uranium—issues his administration had repeatedly called central to ending the war. Iran's foreign ministry described the arrangement as a memorandum of understanding constituting a first phase, with broader talks to follow within 30 to 60 days. Iran's Fars news agency said the strait would remain under Iranian management and dismissed Trump's reopening announcement as "incomplete and inconsistent with reality."

Earlier the same day, Trump had struck a less confident tone, telling Axios the odds of a deal were a "solid 50/50" and that he would either accept a "good" deal or "blow them to kingdom come." By May 24 he was qualifying the claim, writing that any agreement would be "a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama," and complaining that critics were attacking something that "isn't even fully negotiated yet." He told supporters not to "listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about."

Republican Hawks Revolt

The sharpest criticism came not from the war's opponents but from Republicans who had been among its strongest backers, several of whom feared Trump was preparing to "cut and run" under economic and political pressure ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), normally a close Trump ally, warned that allowing Iran to retain leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the ability to threaten Gulf oil infrastructure would be "a nightmare for Israel" and shift the regional balance of power; he also said a deal that caved to Iran "makes one wonder why the war started to begin with." Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), chair of the Armed Services Committee, called a rumored 60-day ceasefire a "disaster" and said "everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught," accusing Trump's advisers of pushing a deal "that would not be worth the paper it is written on" while also warning that not resuming military action "risks a perception of weakness." Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) named Trump but framed the deal as "being pushed by some voices in the administration," warning that an Iran left with enrichment capacity, recovered assets, and effective control of the strait would be "a disastrous mistake."

Former officials joined in. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who ran the first-term "maximum pressure" campaign, said the reported terms were "not remotely America First" and likened them to the 2015 Obama-era agreement, saying they amounted to "pay the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world." Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote that if the reports were accurate, "the ayatollahs will have won a significant victory." Former national security adviser Michael Flynn publicly urged Trump not to sign, writing that he understood the president wanted to "get out of this mess" but should "give it some thought."

The White House pushed back unusually hard against members of its own coalition. Communications director Steven Cheung told Pompeo on X that he had "no idea what the f--- he's talking about" and should "shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals." Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz told Cruz, "No one asked you, bro"; Cruz shot back that "young political grifters pushing Iran appeasement are not remotely helping the President." Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling in India, offered a calmer version of the same message: no president had been stronger on Iran than Trump, and his commitment to preventing a nuclear Iran "shouldn't be questioned by anybody." Sen. Rand Paul defended giving Trump room to negotiate.

Not every Republican shared the hawks' alarm. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), an antiwar Trump critic who had lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger the previous week, told NBC's Meet the Press: "If Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz are crashing out last night, I'd say it's probably a pretty good deal." The split left the administration caught between the anti-interventionist wing of its base, which had opposed the war from the start, and national-security hardliners who feared Trump was about to surrender a decisive advantage.

Analyst Assessments

Commentators divided over what the emerging terms meant. Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols argued the war was "staggering to an incoherent defeat," contending that Trump "didn't know what he was doing when he began it" and now risked accepting terms worse than the JCPOA he had abandoned in 2018. His colleague David Frum characterized the conflict as having already ended in "America's strategic defeat by the Islamic Republic of Iran." Nichols also reported that Netanyahu had told Trump the Iranian regime would fall, while CIA Director John Ratcliffe had called that prediction "farcical." The administration rejected the framing; Trump insisted any deal would be "THE EXACT OPPOSITE" of the Obama agreement, and in a separate CBS interview said he would only sign a deal where "we get everything we want," including a satisfactory disposition of Iran's enriched uranium.

The War Ends

The talks then nearly collapsed before they concluded. After a late-May White House meeting ended without a decision, the U.S. and Iran exchanged fresh strikes, and on June 1 Iran's state-affiliated Tasnim outlet announced Tehran would stop exchanging messages through intermediaries and move to "completely" block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for ceasefire violations; oil prices jumped more than 7%. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi argued that a violation "on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts."

Mediation by Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir, with Qatari, Saudi, Egyptian, and Turkish support, ultimately produced a breakthrough. On June 11, Trump announced agreement on a 60-day ceasefire framework, and on June 14 the U.S. and Iran finalized a memorandum of understanding extending the truce while detailed nuclear talks proceeded. The framework called for an immediate halt to hostilities, the de-mining and gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade, and a 60-day window to negotiate how Iran's highly enriched uranium would be down-blended, frozen, and monitored. Sanctions relief and access to frozen Iranian funds were made conditional on progress on the nuclear file.

Trump announced the agreement on Truth Social on the evening of June 14—his birthday—writing "Congratulations to all!" before presiding over a birthday celebration and UFC event on the White House South Lawn; the Atlantic's Tom Nichols noted that the Iranians declined to sign on Trump's preferred schedule, saying instead they would send a delegation to a meeting in Switzerland later that week. On June 17, Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the memorandum ending the active phase of the war, which had run for 110 days. Trump declared the deal "complete," authorized the "toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz," ordered the simultaneous removal of the U.S. naval blockade, and posted, "Ships of the World, start your engines." Iran characterized the outcome as a victory, asserting it had forced Washington to accept its terms; U.S. officials countered that Tehran was incentivized to reach a final agreement because sanctions relief depended on nuclear concessions.

The Text of the Islamabad Memorandum

The administration initially declined to publish the agreement—dubbed the "Islamabad Memorandum" after the Pakistani mediation—prompting demands for its release from figures normally allied with the president. Fox News host Mark Levin asked, "Why can't we, the people, see the damn MOU?"; Sen. Lindsey Graham demanded a congressional vote; and National Review's editors called the secrecy discouraging. Andrew McCarthy noted that the administration refused even to brief the Gang of Eight on the terms "though the Qataris apparently know its details." On June 17, a senior U.S. official read what he described as the full text to reporters on a White House conference call, and The New York Times published an annotated version.

The 14-point text confirmed the outlines critics had feared and added specifics. It declares the "immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon"—language the Times' Anton Troianovski noted amounted to a remarkable rejection of Israel's concerns about Hezbollah—commits both sides to non-interference in each other's internal affairs, and sets a 60-day window, extendable by mutual consent, to negotiate a final deal. The United States undertakes to fully remove its naval blockade within 30 days and to withdraw its forces "from the proximity of Iran" within 30 days after a final deal; Iran arranges safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz "with no charge for 60 days only"—phrasing the Times' David Sanger flagged as leaving Iran free to impose transit fees afterward, an authority it never had before the war—while conducting a dialogue with Oman on the strait's "future administration." The U.S. commits, "with regional partners," to develop a plan of at least $300 billion for Iran's reconstruction and economic development; to terminate "all types of sanctions"—UN Security Council, IAEA-related, and unilateral U.S. primary and secondary sanctions—on an agreed schedule; to issue immediate Treasury waivers for Iranian crude-oil and petroleum exports and all associated banking, insurance, and shipping services; and to make Iran's frozen assets—roughly $24 billion or more—"fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of Iran," a proviso Sanger noted could be read to include military and intelligence entities on terrorist lists.

On the nuclear file—the war's stated cause—the memorandum contains a single paragraph: Iran "reaffirms" it will not procure or develop nuclear weapons (a commitment Sanger observed Iran had already made under the NPT in 1970 and again in 2015), and the parties agree to resolve the disposition of the enriched-uranium stockpile through a mechanism whose minimum methodology is "down-blending on site under IAEA supervision"—unlike the 2015 accord, which shipped 97% of Iran's stockpile out of the country. Pending a final deal, both sides maintain the "status quo": Iran keeps its nuclear program as-is, the U.S. imposes no new sanctions. Miad Maleki of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote that the immediate oil waivers meant the U.S. was "trading away its most durable economic lever before the hard part of the negotiation has even started." The final deal is to be endorsed by a binding UN Security Council resolution; the text makes no reference to congressional review, and analysts debated whether the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act obliged the administration to submit it to Congress. Times reporters also noted that the ambitious 60-day timeline would place a potential final deal ahead of the midterm elections.

Israel, which was not a party to the negotiations, reacted angrily. Julia Ioffe reported in Puck that Israelis were irate on two fronts: the deal offered nothing on reining in Iran's proxies—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis—and by accepting the Iranian framework that a ceasefire must cover Israel and Hezbollah, the memorandum "essentially relegated Israel to the status of a proxy itself." Israel signaled it did not consider itself bound by the Lebanon-related provisions, and Nichols reported Trump was angry at Netanyahu as the deal came together—a striking coda to a war the Israeli prime minister had persuaded Trump to join.

The Switzerland Talks and Early Implementation

Follow-on negotiations began almost immediately, with Vice President Vance dispatched as the administration's lead negotiator to Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, where talks on June 21 produced a 60-day roadmap toward a comprehensive agreement. Trump made the stakes for his deputy explicit before he left: "If it works out, I'm going to take the credit. If it doesn't, I'm blaming J.D." On June 22, the United States partially lifted sanctions on Iranian oil and petrochemicals and began the partial release of frozen assets—an embrace of sanctions relief that CNN noted Trump and his team had long denounced—while a Lebanon de-confliction cell and a Hormuz maritime-safety hotline were established. Iran moved some 5 million barrels of oil on three ships within days, and Brent crude eased to about $78 a barrel from $81, though strait traffic remained well below prewar levels.

Implementation disputes surfaced quickly. Vance claimed the talks had secured IAEA inspections—and asserted that "the Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed," a claim that sat awkwardly with the memorandum's deferral of all enrichment questions—but Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said "no visits have been scheduled" for the agency to the bombed nuclear sites, though inspectors were permitted to re-enter the country. Technical talks continued in Switzerland and Doha through early July, led by Vance and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf; on July 1, Vance said the Doha talks were "going well."

"Surrender": The Backlash Over the Deal

The reaction to the deal's terms was ferocious, and much of it came from the political right. CNN's Aaron Blake catalogued prominent GOP hawks concluding Trump had caved: conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote flatly that "Trump has surrendered to Iran" and that "those who kill Americans love this deal"; Marc Thiessen likened the $300 billion reconstruction fund to "a Marshall Plan for Nazi Germany"; and Sen. Ted Cruz attacked giving "billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics." Sen. Bill Cassidy called it "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades", with Iran's nuclear ambitions "unchecked." National Review's Andrew McCarthy—a former federal prosecutor and prominent conservative legal commentator—published a pair of scathing analyses dubbing the president "Neville Trump": the memorandum, he argued, "is not an agreement" but "an agreement to talk about an eventual agreement," under which "the world's leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism is going to get lots of money"—"$24 billion up front—that's before we get to astronomical sums down the line"—in exchange for "nothing more than opening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had not closed until Trump decided to launch a war he had no intention of fighting to victory." He dismissed the administration's insistence that Iran was merely getting "its own money back" rather than taxpayer funds, noting the funds were frozen precisely because of terrorism, missile, and human-rights sanctions, and that the administration had conceded in principle Iran's right to enrich uranium. The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last called it "a memo of understanding in advance of a surrender of the American-led world order".

The criticism extended well beyond the right. David French, the conservative New York Times columnist, former JAG officer, and Iraq veteran, called the released text "an astonishing document," writing that "not a single war aim has been achieved, but Iran receives enormous financial" benefits. USA Today's Rex Huppke wrote that a war launched with the promise "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" and predictions it would last four to five weeks had instead run more than fourteen weeks, killed 13 U.S. service members, and ended with nuclear negotiations deferred—"we're back to square one." A Sky News analysis called the war "one of the greatest strategic blunders in US history" and the deal a tacit admission of strategic defeat. The Center for Strategic and International Studies titled its assessment "Iran Won the Negotiation, Even Though It Lost the War." House Armed Services Committee Democrats sent a June 17 letter to Secretary Rubio demanding answers, and lawmakers of both parties described the terms as "full capitulation."

The administration defended the agreement—the White House released a statement titled "President Trump's Iran Agreement Is America First in Action," and Trump and Vance insisted Iran would not receive "a dime of U.S. taxpayer money"—while Vance argued the unfrozen assets would be spent partly on American agricultural goods. McCarthy called the taxpayer-money defense a straw man, since sanctions termination and asset release were themselves the concessions. Brookings' Robert Einhorn captured the structural critique: Iran's benefits under the memorandum are explicit and front-loaded, while U.S. benefits are "amorphous, put off until future negotiations."

Stated Objectives and Outcomes

The administration declared the war's offensive phase concluded weeks before the fighting fully stopped. On May 5, with the bombing campaign wound down and the conflict centered on the naval standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: "The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we're done with that stage of it." He said the United States had "achieved the objectives of that operation" and was shifting to a "defensive" posture—"there's no shooting unless we're shot at first"—focused on reopening the strait through the effort dubbed Project Freedom.

Measured against the goals stated at the outset, the results were uneven. On February 28, Trump said the operation aimed to eliminate Iran's nuclear and missile programs, destroy its navy, and change Iran's leadership, and in the war's early days he demanded Iran's "unconditional surrender." By the war's end, the regime remained in power: Khamenei was killed, but the theocratic government held, with his son Mojtaba installed as supreme leader—the strikes, Reuters noted, destroyed major sites "but not forcing the collapse of the Islamic republic." Iran's nuclear program was not eliminated; its enriched-uranium stockpile survived, IAEA monitoring lapsed, and the material's disposition was deferred to post-war talks. Pressed on whether the administration was any closer to removing Iran's nuclear material—Trump's stated primary objective—Rubio pointed to the destruction of facilities rather than the material itself, acknowledging it "has to be addressed." Iran's missile program was not eliminated either: U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran retained roughly 70% of its missile stockpile and most of its launchers. The administration maintained it had nonetheless met its aims, with Rubio citing the dismantling of the infrastructure shielding Iran's nuclear program and "catastrophic destruction" to Iran's economy, and the Pentagon describing Iran's navy as destroyed.

The conflict also left as its central unresolved issue a problem that had not existed before it: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway was open and uncontested before February 28—Iran had not moved to close or disrupt it even during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War—but it became choked after the strikes, and reopening it consumed the war's final months and the June memorandum. Reopening the strait was not among Epic Fury's original objectives, as some accounts noted, and Rubio acknowledged that Project Freedom would not "solve the whole straits problem." The stated rationale had itself shifted over the course of the war—variously presented as a response to an imminent Iranian threat, as necessary to halt Iran's nuclear program, as a demand that Iran end all enrichment, as regime change, and, in the April State Department legal memo, as an action taken "at the request of" Israel. The administration held that its objectives were achieved; critics, including some of the war's strongest Republican backers, argued the moving rationale reflected the absence of a defined endgame.

The Cost of the War

The war's economic cost became a point of contention in late April, when the Pentagon offered its first public figure. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on April 29, the Defense Department's acting chief financial officer, Jules Hurst III, said the United States had spent "about $25 billion on Operation Epic Fury," most of it on munitions, with a supplemental request to Congress to follow once costs were fully assessed. Hegseth defended the expense, asking lawmakers what it was worth "to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon." Ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA) said the committee had been seeking the figure "for a hell of a long time."

That figure was quickly challenged as incomplete. Three people familiar with the matter told CNN that the $25 billion did not account for repairing the extensive damage to U.S. bases in the region, and that a fuller estimate—including the cost of rebuilding installations and replacing destroyed assets such as the THAAD radar in Jordan and the E-3 Sentry aircraft lost in Saudi Arabia—ran closer to $40 to $50 billion. Hegseth declined to say whether the $25 billion included base repairs, and Hurst told reporters the Pentagon had no "final number" for the damage to its overseas installations, that the repair costs were "not reflected" in the $1.5 trillion budget request, and that allied host nations "might contribute a share" of the reconstruction. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called the $25 billion estimate "totally off," noting the Pentagon had earlier told Congress the war cost roughly $11 billion in its first six days alone; the department had separately asked the White House to seek more than $200 billion in additional war funding from Congress.

Economists argued the $25 billion captured only a fraction of the war's true cost. Writing in The New York Times, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers called the Pentagon's number "cash flow accounting"—a tally of dollars already spent on missiles and aircraft—rather than a measure of the war's full economic toll, which he estimated would run to "hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions." OMB Director Russell Vought had conceded the uncertainty, telling the House Budget Committee on April 15, "I don't have a ballpark for you."

Wolfers's accounting drew on several strands. He cited research by Federal Reserve economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello suggesting that the spike in geopolitical risk could cost roughly $200 billion and leave about a million fewer Americans employed within a year; a comparable cost if the Fed raised interest rates to counter war-driven inflation; and a Goldman Sachs estimate that U.S. growth would run about 0.5 percentage points lower because of the war—on the order of $400 billion in lost income over two years, which Goldman warned could be nearly twice as large. He estimated the conflict had depressed U.S. equities by roughly 5%, while noting that the broader market's strength likely reflected other forces such as AI stocks. The IMF and World Bank both marked down their global forecasts, with the heaviest effects falling on the world's poorest, who spend the largest share of income on food and fuel.

He also pointed to longer-term obligations. The administration had requested a $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027—roughly a 40% increase over the prior year, or about $600 billion in additional spending—and Wolfers invoked the work of economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, who estimated the Iraq war ultimately cost some $3 trillion once postwar expenses such as veterans' medical and disability care were counted. As with all such projections, the estimates carried wide uncertainty; Wolfers acknowledged "the economic fog of war" and wrote that the best economists could do was get the order of magnitude right.

The formal supplemental request arrived on June 24. The White House asked Congress to approve $87.6 billion in additional spending for the year, most of it tied to the Iran war. About $67 billion would go to the Pentagon—including roughly $21 billion for munitions, $17.3 billion for operational costs, and $12.1 billion for classified programs—with the remainder split among about $11.1 billion in farm aid and $1.4 billion for an Ebola response in Central Africa. The request landed the same day Trump berated Senate Republicans over the war powers vote, and it appeared all but dead on arrival: it needs bipartisan support to clear the Senate, and nearly all Democrats have said they will not vote to fund a war they oppose. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top Democrat on Appropriations, said the administration had "failed to answer basic questions about its aims and justification for the Iran war," adding that Trump "is telling the American people there's no money for health care, housing or child care—but there should be endless taxpayer dollars to fund wars they don't support."

The war also became the backdrop for a far larger spending fight. In mid-July 2026, Speaker Mike Johnson pressed to pass a separate $350 billion defense increase through budget reconciliation—the reconciliation slice of the administration's $1.5 trillion FY 2027 defense request, documented in the entry on Trump's FY 2027 budget—telling reporters the money was needed because "we're fighting communism on our own shores, and we're fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world." On July 14, the same day, Senate Democrats blocked the annual National Defense Authorization Act on a 50–46 procedural vote in protest of the unauthorized Iran operations, with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warning the bill could not become "a permission slip for that recklessness that we see occurring in Iran."

Assessments of a Strategic Defeat

As the war settled into stalemate, a debate developed among foreign-policy analysts over whether its outcome amounted to a strategic defeat for the United States. The most widely discussed contribution came from an unexpected source.

On May 10, Robert Kagan—a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a prominent advocate of the 2003 Iraq War, and one of the leading intellectual proponents of American military intervention over the past three decades—argued in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered "a total defeat" that could "neither be repaired nor ignored." The essay drew attention as much for its author as its argument: a figure long identified with assertive American military power was describing a war waged by a U.S. president as an irreversible setback. (Kagan is married to former senior State Department official Victoria Nuland and is the brother of military analyst Frederick Kagan.)

Kagan's argument centered on the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. and Israel had bombed Iran for 37 days, he wrote, killing much of its leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, "yet couldn't collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it." With Iran retaining effective control of the strait, he argued, Tehran had acquired leverage over a major share of the world's energy supply that was "greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran's nuclear program," while the positions of China and Russia were strengthened and that of the United States diminished. He maintained that another round of bombing could not accomplish what 37 days had not, and that escalation would invite Iranian retaliation against Gulf energy facilities capable of throwing the global economy into a prolonged crisis. Citing Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney—"A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now"—he argued that economic pressure was equally unlikely to force capitulation. "If this isn't checkmate, it's close," he wrote, concluding that defeat was "not only possible but likely." He pointed to the March 18 energy exchange as the moment the risk calculus turned against Washington.

The assessment was not universally shared, even among those who took it seriously. On a Brookings podcast, Kagan's colleagues Michael O'Hanlon and Melanie Sisson largely agreed on the gravity of the situation while examining possible mitigations. O'Hanlon pointed to longer-term options such as new pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula to bypass the strait, but cautioned they "can't help us in 2026 or 2027" and added, "I don't see a solution... count me yet again in the Kagan camp." Both estimated that forcing the strait open by conventional naval power would require U.S. forces on the Iranian coastline and could cost hundreds of casualties and the loss of warships. Arms-control analyst Joe Cirincione, a longtime critic of the Iraq War, wrote that while Kagan's "overall point is correct," he "goes too far in predicting Iran's emergence after the war as the dominant power in the Gulf."

A similar verdict came from outside Washington. Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch in Israeli military intelligence now at Tel Aviv's Institute for National Security Studies, argued that even a months-long blockade would not force Iran to yield—"the problem is they don't think they need to capitulate"—and that the war, despite its battlefield successes, could still end in strategic failure. A campaign launched to topple the regime and dismantle its nuclear and missile programs, he wrote, "may instead leave Iran's regime stronger than before," retaining significant missile capability, its network of proxies, and uranium enrichment on its own soil.

A related argument held that Iran's decisive achievement was deterrence. Writing just before the ceasefire, commentator Richard Hanania—who had been comparatively optimistic at the outset and maintained the decision to strike "wasn't completely irrational" given the recent success of the Venezuela operation—concluded that by the truce the war had become a failure, with the "status quo ante clearly preferable to what we have now." Iran, he argued, had shown it could inflict enough economic pain—shaving points off equity markets and driving oil above $100—to make war a "negative sum proposition," so that "every American president from now on will know that deciding to go to war with Iran will tank the global economy." Underlying that view was the strait: a March Congressional Research Service report noted a pre-war "consensus among analysts that the U.S. military has the capacity to counter Iran's forces and restore the flow of shipping," but cautioned the effort could take "days, weeks, or perhaps months," and defense analysts told NPR that convoy escorts remained too risky while Iran retained drones and missiles, with The Economist noting that escorting tankers with warships risked handing Iran "juicy American targets." CSIS similarly judged that the United States retained the capacity to clear the strait but that doing so was "not a costless proposition," with Trump wary that U.S. casualties "could prove a political disaster"—the practical effect being that Iran could keep the waterway contested for longer than was politically tolerable in Washington.

The June memorandum hardened the defeat verdict among many commentators. On the night the deal was announced, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that the United States had "just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary": the war would close with the regime intact and in the grip of the IRGC, the strait still under threat of Iranian attack, Iran's drone and missile stocks and terror-sponsorship capacity preserved, and billions in unfrozen assets flowing to Tehran—"the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own." Economics commentator Noah Smith called Iran "Trump's Katrina," arguing the defeat displayed incompetence "even more flagrant than George W. Bush's": Iran had dispersed and hardened its forces, sustained a blockade of Hormuz that U.S. planners assumed it could not, driven U.S. inflation to roughly 4%, and emerged with regime consolidation, sanctions relief, and toll leverage over a chokepoint carrying a fifth of the world's oil. Graeme Wood, in an Atlantic essay titled "Iran Has Humiliated Trump," distinguished humiliation from defeat—"Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss"—noting that Iran's neighbors now regarded it as an outright threat and its economy remained "a total wreck," while for the U.S. the war delivered "the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one."

Trump's own defense of the deal at the mid-June G7 summit in France drew particular scrutiny. He told reporters "I never cared about regime change"—despite having listed leadership change among the war's objectives and promised Iranians their rulers would be gone—described the officials who replaced the leaders U.S. strikes had killed as "very rational people… not radicalized," and, defending Iran's retention of its missile arsenal, said that "if other countries have" ballistic missiles, "it's a little bit unfair" for Iran "not to have some"—though eliminating those missiles had been a primary war aim. He also stressed the U.S. could have kept bombing "for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open"—words Wood observed sounded "a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job." Nichols argued the statements showed a president who "doesn't understand the war he started," offering "desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts." Bloomberg's John Authers offered a terser verdict: "It's hard to see what the American escapade has achieved, beyond killing a very old man."

The administration rejected the defeat framing entirely, casting the war as a demonstration of American strength: Trump declared it won and the eventual deal "complete," and Rubio argued no president had been tougher on Iran. Whether the conflict is ultimately judged a strategic defeat or a costly but limited setback will depend in part on the outcome of the nuclear negotiations the June memorandum left unresolved—though Haberman and Swan's Regime Change, drawing on two years of interviews inside the administration, rendered an early historical judgment: the United States won the war militarily but "lost the peace."

The Nuclear Question

The war's central justification was preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon—yet the conflict left the fate of Iran's enriched uranium more uncertain than before it began. A New York Times analysis of quarterly IAEA reports traced how Iran had accumulated roughly 11 tons—about 22,000 pounds—of enriched uranium across all purity levels. Iran began industrial-scale enrichment in 2006, describing its aims as peaceful, and by 2010 was enriching to 20%. The 2015 nuclear deal capped enrichment at 3.67% and the stockpile at under 660 pounds, and Iran shipped out 12.5 tons; it held less than a single bomb's worth of material in 2018, when Trump withdrew from the accord. Iran then breached the limits, reaching 20% by early 2021 and an unprecedented 60%—a short technical step from weapons grade—under the Biden administration, with the stockpile growing at its fastest recorded rate after Trump returned to office in 2025.

On the eve of the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, the IAEA had verified that Iran held about 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%—highly enriched material that the agency notes only Iran, among non-nuclear-weapon states, has produced. Whether that amounted to an imminent threat was contested. The U.S. intelligence community's 2025 assessment, like its predecessors, held that Iran was not actually building a weapon and that Supreme Leader Khamenei had not reauthorized the weapons program suspended in 2003—a judgment later cited by critics including former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent. At the same time, Iran's enrichment had shortened its "breakout"—the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade material for a single device—to as little as days or weeks, leaving it a threshold state with the capacity, if not the demonstrated intent, to build a bomb. Hawkish analysts such as the Institute for Science and International Security argued there was no civilian justification for hundreds of kilograms of 60% material and that Iran's purpose was to be able to produce weapons-grade uranium quickly.

The June 2025 strikes hit the enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow and the storage tunnels at Isfahan, and within weeks Iran suspended cooperation with the IAEA and withdrew its inspectors, ending the monitoring that had tracked the material for years. By 2026, with the February war compounding the damage, the agency could no longer account for the stockpile's size, location, or composition. Analysts assessed that the bulk of the 60% material was stored underground in the tunnel complex adjoining Isfahan; IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi estimated that just over 200 kilograms of it lay buried there—enough, if further enriched, for roughly five warheads. The Times reported that parts of the stockpile were hidden or buried under wartime rubble, difficult even to confirm. Experts cautioned that even if Iran recovered the material, converting it into a deliverable warhead would take many months, perhaps more than a year—particularly after the strikes damaged Iran's weaponization capacity—and that Iran had posed no imminent nuclear threat when the war began.

The administration maintained that U.S. satellites were monitoring the buried uranium and that the cache was of little use given the destruction of Iran's nuclear sites and expertise. Analysts questioned both claims, noting that Iran may have built a new enrichment plant in the Isfahan tunnels—raising the prospect of a covert site for further enrichment—while Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran had no plans to retrieve the material. The unresolved stockpile drove the administration to weigh a ground operation to seize it, an option officials described as logistically daunting. Nonproliferation specialists offered a broader critique: by ending IAEA monitoring without eliminating either the material or the expertise to use it, the war had arguably made Iran's nuclear program harder to track than it was before the first bomb fell.

The Obama Comparison

Throughout the war and the diplomacy around it, Trump repeatedly measured his effort against the 2015 nuclear accord he had abandoned. In his April 1 address, and again around the June signing, he cast the earlier deal as a bribe: "I terminated Barack Hussein Obama's Iran nuclear deal, a disaster. Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash… in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty, but it didn't work. They laughed at our president and went on with their mission to have a nuclear bomb."

Trump did withdraw the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018, over the objections of the agreement's other parties—Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany, and the EU. The $1.7 billion, however, was not a gift. As Brookings and contemporaneous fact-checks documented, the sum originated in a pre-1979 transaction in which Iran, under the Shah, had paid roughly $400 million for U.S. military equipment that was never delivered after the revolution; the claim had sat in arbitration at the Iran–U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague for decades. The January 2016 settlement returned Iran's $400 million principal plus about $1.3 billion in interest—less, U.S. officials argued, than the tribunal might have awarded—and was paid in foreign banknotes because sanctions barred normal bank transfers. Because the first tranche arrived around the release of American detainees, critics called it ransom; Obama rejected that characterization: "We do not pay ransom for hostages."

The accord Trump discarded had traded verifiable nuclear constraints for sanctions relief. Under the JCPOA, Iran shipped 97% of its enriched uranium abroad, capped enrichment at 3.67%, dismantled thousands of centrifuges, and accepted intrusive IAEA inspections, with the terms embedded in a UN Security Council resolution; separately, the deal released roughly $55 billion in Iran's own frozen assets held overseas. The Biden administration later tried, without success, to revive it. Trump's 2026 memorandum drew criticism for the reverse: a two-page framework that, as former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan noted, did not cap Iran's nuclear activities, left its enriched-uranium stockpile inside the country, and deferred inspection and verification measures to later talks. It also committed the United States, "with regional partners," to help develop a reconstruction fund of at least $300 billion for Iran—a figure Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said would make "Iran's payoff under President Obama's 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison." The administration said no U.S. taxpayer money would fund it—Vance described Gulf-state and private investment contingent on Iranian compliance—and Trump denied any U.S. payment, calling the $300 billion "fake news." Reuters reported that roughly half the fund had already been pledged as private investment involving no government grants.

After the memorandum's signing, the comparison became a staple of the deal's coverage—generally to Trump's disadvantage. The Washington Post published a side-by-side analysis on June 19, and a Cronkite News assessment concluded that Trump's arrangement gives Iran hundreds of billions of dollars more than the JCPOA did—which released roughly $50 billion in frozen assets—in exchange for far less: the 2015 accord imposed concrete enrichment caps and intrusive IAEA inspections while preserving terrorism, human-rights, and arms sanctions, whereas the memorandum provides funds without nuclear preconditions and contemplates ending every category of sanctions. The University of Pennsylvania's Daniel Schneiderman called the memorandum's implicit grant of Hormuz toll authority—which no prior arrangement had ever contemplated, and which maritime-law experts consider a violation of international law—"significant and extraordinary." The Financial Times framed the political problem in a headline: Trump was battling claims that his deal was a "humiliation" worse than Obama's, an inversion of a decade of his own rhetoric. Analyst Tina Fordham added a forward-looking concern: the deal revealed an American unwillingness to sustain the use of force, which could undermine U.S. diplomacy in future crises.

The Auto-Deleting Signal Chats

At the end of June, the war's record-keeping itself became a scandal. On June 30, 2026, The Atlantic reported—under the headline "The Trump Administration Just Can't Quit Signal"—that the State Department had released records revealing 13 previously unreported Signal group chats among senior administration officials, disclosed in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by Democracy Forward, which had sought the group names, deletion timelines, and participants for all Signal conversations Rubio and his then-counselor Mike Needham used for official business. The most striking disclosure involved the three officials at the center of the Iran war's military and diplomatic direction: a screenshot from Rubio's phone showed that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine administered a group with Defense Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Rubio—named "SS/APNSA,SD,CJCS," after the acronyms of the three men's titles—that was set to automatically delete its messages after eight hours. The group's name dates it to after May 1, 2025, when Rubio added the national security adviser role to his duties, placing it in the period spanning the June 2025 Twelve-Day War—the conflict the administration's own April 2026 legal memo characterized as the opening round of its ongoing armed conflict with Iran—and the buildup to the February 2026 war those same three men would direct. Another chat with 17 participants, including Hegseth, Vice President Vance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, was set to erase messages after one week, as was a third. Other group names were suggestive of substantive official business: one chat, which included special envoy Steve Witkoff, was labeled "Iran/Ukraine Planning," and another "State USAID." The Atlantic noted that the screenshots mostly lacked context about what was discussed, and did not rule out that other chats in the release had been set to auto-delete at earlier points.

The revelations landed as a direct sequel to the March 2025 "Signalgate" episode, in which then–National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a "Houthi PC small group" chat in which Hegseth shared strike plans. Trump himself had drawn the lesson publicly, telling Goldberg in an Oval Office interview on April 24, 2025: "I think we learned: Maybe don't use Signal, okay?... I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal." The new records showed his top advisers did not heed the advice—ten days after that interview, Rubio and Needham were conversing on the app with then–Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone in a group labeled "MMM," and one newly disclosed 17-member group nearly replicated the Houthi chat's roster. Caine, who was not in the original Houthi chat, had testified to the Senate on April 1, 2025, that he "always communicated proper information in the proper channels" and would "weigh in and stop it" if he saw classified information on an unclassified chat.

The auto-delete settings raised the possibility that senior officials violated federal record-preservation law—principally the Federal Records Act for agency heads like Hegseth and Rubio, with the Presidential Records Act governing White House officials—which requires that official communications on non-governmental messaging platforms be preserved, including by forwarding them to official accounts within 20 days. Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, described the three auto-deleting chats as "likely violations" of the Federal Records Act in a June 29 letter urging the National Archives to initiate an enforcement action: "Given that numerous agency heads are personally implicated in these likely FRA violations, your action to initiate an enforcement action is critical." The concern had a litigation history. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ordered Rubio—then also serving as acting archivist of the United States—to seek recovery of records at risk of deletion, after government attorneys refused to state in court that all records transmitted over Signal had been retained; the State Department told a separate court on July 22, 2025, that Rubio "does not use the auto-delete functions in third party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records," and said it had installed commercial LeapXpert software on some senior officials' phones to capture Signal chats even when messages were set to disappear. Yet at an August 2025 hearing before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, a Justice Department lawyer conceded the department could not say whether responsive messages from earlier chats had already been automatically deleted: "State is not in a position to make a representation on that."

Reaction was swift. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) urged the National Archives to open an investigation into the use of non-governmental apps on sensitive national-security communications; House Oversight Committee Democrats demanded an investigation into what they called the purposeful deletion of federal records, a violation of federal law; and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington formally alerted the agencies to potential Records Act violations. Law&Crime reported a watchdog's conclusion that Hegseth, Rubio, and others "broke multiple laws" by using a disappearing-message app to discuss military strikes, framing it as "unlawful destruction of federal records." Democracy Forward subsequently said it had secured the preservation of key records through its litigation. The New York Times ran its own June 30 account of the administration's persistent Signal use.

The administration and the officials dismissed the story. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly called the records "old news" and repeated the administration's standing defense: "Signal is an approved app that is pre-loaded on government phones." Joe Holstead, a spokesperson for Caine, said the chairman "uses the Signal app for administrative and coordinating matters within the parameters of DoD Instructions concerning online information and records management" and does not use it to share classified information. Current and former officials told The Atlantic that senior leaders routinely use Signal because government-approved secure devices are less efficient for text communication, though the app is not approved for classified information. The State Department did not immediately comment. The episode nonetheless carried a particular weight for the historical record of the war: the deliberations of Hegseth, Rubio, and Caine—already reconstructed largely through leaks and the Haberman–Swan book rather than official disclosure—may in part have been conducted in channels engineered to leave no record at all, and as of July 11 the National Archives had not announced whether it would pursue the enforcement action the watchdogs demanded.

Deportations to Iran and the Asylum-Data Lawsuit

A different strand of the U.S.–Iran relationship surfaced in July 2026, when a federal lawsuit alleged that even as it prepared for and waged war on Iran, the administration was quietly cooperating with Tehran on deportations—and unlawfully sharing asylum seekers' confidential files with the government they had fled. The suit, filed July 7 in U.S. District Court in Washington by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen Litigation Group, alleges that the administration violated federal law by providing Iran's government with information detailing the asylum applications of Iranians it planned to deport—information that is confidential by federal regulation precisely because disclosure to an applicant's home government can expose them and their families to persecution. "The law couldn't be more clear that information in asylum applications is protected," said Public Citizen attorney Michael Kirkpatrick, calling the case "potentially a matter of life and death" for deportees, including pro-democracy protesters, religious minorities, and LGBTQ Iranians.

According to the complaint, which names Secretary of State Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and acting ICE director David Venturella, State Department officials began meeting representatives of the Iranian Interests Section at Pakistan's embassy in March 2025, handing over a list of roughly 150 names, after which ICE and Iranian officials held monthly meetings to share information about Iranians in U.S. custody. In-person meetings halted after the war began on February 28, the suit alleges, but ICE continued sending documentation to the Iranians. Advocacy groups say roughly 115 Iranian nationals were returned on three deportation flights—the most recent on January 26, weeks after the regime's crackdown on protests had killed thousands and days after Trump told Iranian protesters "help is on the way." The State Department declined to comment on "private diplomatic discussions"; a DHS spokeswoman called the allegations "FALSE," saying "ICE meets and works to get travel documents for detainees with every country." Broad same-day coverage noted the dissonance of deporting Iranian dissidents—and allegedly exposing their claims—to a regime the United States had just bombed and whose overthrow the president had publicly encouraged.

The Ceasefire Collapses (July 2026)

The interim agreement began to unravel within weeks of its signing. The June 25–26 clash over the Ever Lovely proved to be the first of a widening cycle of attacks on shipping and U.S. reprisals, and by the second week of July the truce had broken down into the heaviest exchange of fire between U.S. and Iranian forces since the June 17 memorandum. President Trump said he considered the ceasefire over while leaving the door open to further talks, and Iran again declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. Reuters described the barrage as marking "an escalation in pace and range," and Al Jazeera counted Iranian attacks on five Gulf states in a single weekend.

Renewed U.S. Strikes

On Saturday, July 11, U.S. Central Command said its forces had hit 140 Iranian military targets, and that more than 300 had been struck over three nights that week, describing the campaign as an effort "to degrade Iran's ability to attack civilian mariners and commercial vessels freely transiting the strait." Iran said the United States launched a further round on Sunday afternoon, with Iranian media reporting missile attacks and explosions around the port of Bandar Abbas—home to military facilities on the strait—and nearby Qeshm Island. NPR reported the strikes ranged across southern Iran, hitting missile- and drone-launch sites, ammunition storage, naval facilities, and communications networks. Iranian state media reported explosions in several port cities and said an Iranian army officer had been killed; Iranian health officials put the toll from the week's two rounds of strikes at at least 17 killed and 115 wounded. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded tersely: "Iran made a poor choice. Now they pay."

Iran's Retaliation Across the Gulf

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had struck back across the region, reporting that they had destroyed a command-and-control centre and drone hangars in Jordan, targeted a U.S. radar site in Kuwait, attacked U.S. aircraft-carrier support and refueling platforms in Oman, and destroyed a jet-maintenance centre and command facility in Qatar. The strikes reached Qatar, a ceasefire mediator that had not come under attack since April, and the United Arab Emirates, which had not been targeted since early May and said its air defenses had engaged missiles and drones from Iran.

Gulf states reported the effects across their territory. Qatar—which had said it would not act as a mediator so long as it was under attack—said three people, including a child, had been injured by falling shrapnel and called Iran "fully legally responsible" for the attack. Bahrain said it intercepted several Iranian aerial attacks; Jordan reported missile strikes; and Oman reported being targeted with drones, summoned Iran's ambassador to protest attacks in two regions, and saw the U.S. embassy tell Americans in Duqm and Musandam to shelter in place. Kuwait's army reported damage from strikes, including an attack on an oil-drilling platform that injured a worker.

The Second Strait Closure

Iran again declared the Strait of Hormuz—which carried roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and LNG shipments before the war—closed. Late on Saturday it said it had shut the waterway after firing a warning shot that struck a vessel travelling on an "unauthorised" route, and on Sunday it said it had disabled a second. India said one of its nationals was missing after an attack on the container ship GFS Galaxy off the coast of Oman; Oman said 23 crew members had been rescued. Qatar advised all vessels—including leisure boats, fishing boats, and jet skis—to suspend activity. Iran's recently created Persian Gulf Strait Authority said passage was "not currently possible due to 'recent illegal movements of the United States military forces in the region,'" adding that permits would be issued "as soon as stability and calm are restored."

The United States rejected the closure. Having revoked the licence authorising the sale of Iranian crude earlier in the week, it said its forces were positioned to safeguard freedom of navigation despite what it described as "aggression, harassment, threats, and arbitrary declarations" from Iran, insisting that "Iran does not control the strait. Traffic is flowing." The U.S. Navy–led Joint Maritime Information Center reiterated that, despite a severe security threat, an "expanded" southern route near Oman remained available for two-way traffic.

Diplomacy and Rhetoric

Even as the strikes intensified, indirect diplomacy continued. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi in Oman on Saturday in talks Iran said were aimed at coordinating arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz and were set to continue with a Qatari presence; Araqchi separately discussed regional developments by phone with Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, whose country had been a key mediator between Washington and Tehran. But the tone from Iran hardened. The country's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, installed after his father's assassination in February, vowed that "revenge is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out." Iran's top negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, posted on X: "The era of one-sided deals is OVER. We told you: keep your word or pay the price. Reality is knocking."

Trump's Threats and the NATO Summit

Speaking on July 8 as a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, wrapped up, Trump declared the ceasefire and the underlying memorandum of understanding over: "I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them any more, they're scum." He called Iran's leaders "sick people" and "vicious, violent people" and said, "Frankly, I don't want to waste my time with them. Now, I'll let our wonderful negotiators keep talking if they want, but I don't see it." The characterization was a sharp reversal from a month earlier, when Trump had praised the same leaders as "very rational people" who were "nice to deal with" and "strong people, smart people."

Trump also confirmed that U.S. forces had struck Kharg Island — the terminal through which roughly 90% of Iran's crude oil is exported, handling some 950 million barrels a year — on the night of July 7, and renewed his threat to seize it outright: "Maybe we'll take over Kharg Island, and we may take over Kharg Island. There's not a thing they can do about it." An operation to hold the island would require a substantial commitment of ground forces; Iran warned that no American soldier who invaded would "return alive." Alongside the island threat, Trump revived his earlier warnings to strike Iranian civilian infrastructure, including bridges and desalination plants — targets that, as during the March–April ultimatums described above, legal analysts warned would risk war crimes if aimed at pressuring the civilian population rather than at legitimate military objectives.

Asked whether he would order more strikes, Trump said the answer was "probably," adding, "I'll give them a little warning. We're going to hit them hard tonight, but we'll see how it all works out" — before assuring reporters hours later that "we're not looking for long term." Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, a former professor of strategy at the Naval War College, argued that the pattern — threatening the enemy and then broadcasting a reluctance to follow through — was evidence that Iran, not Trump, was now "setting the terms of this conflict," with the president reacting to events rather than directing them.

The Ankara summit itself was marked by a string of verbal slips. Over roughly 24 hours Trump confused Iran with Japan, referring to the "Islamic Republic of Japan"; called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "Putin"; renewed his demand that the United States acquire Greenland; and referred to the video platform TikTok as "Tic Tac," in what Foreign Policy described as a gaffe-strewn close to the summit.

The July 15 Strikes and the Reimposed Blockade

The escalation deepened the following week. On Tuesday, July 14, the United States reimposed a naval blockade of Iran's ports, and on Wednesday, July 15, U.S. forces struck Iran's coastal defenses and missile sites in two waves as Tehran threatened to cut off still more regional energy exports and declared itself in an "existential war" with America. U.S. Central Command said it had attacked coastal-defense systems and cruise-missile storage and launch sites on Iran's Greater Tunb Island starting around 6 a.m. EDT and completed the wave within roughly 90 minutes, then reported a second wave of strikes nine hours later. The strikes, Central Command wrote on X, "are targeting Iranian military capabilities used to threaten vessels freely transiting through the Strait of Hormuz," adding that the military was "holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief's direction." Three U.S. officials told Reuters the campaign to force the strait open was also aimed at Iranian military capabilities the United States would want to destroy before executing more complex operations. Enforcing the blockade, the military said it had disabled an unladen oil tanker sailing toward Kharg Island—the export terminal U.S. forces had struck on July 7—by firing Hellfire missiles into its smokestack after it ignored multiple warnings; since resuming the blockade on Tuesday, the U.S. said it had redirected two ships and disabled another.

Iranian outlets reported strikes across the country's south. Iran's Mehr news agency said four locations around Ahvaz, just inland from the northern end of the Gulf, came under attack, as did the port city of Bandar Abbas on the strait, reporting no casualties in either case; Tasnim reported explosions in Konarak at Iran's southern end, and semi-official media said U.S. projectiles hit near Sirik and Qeshm. State broadcaster IRIB reported that the strikes hit near a hospital in Ahvaz housing a pediatric cancer center, forcing its temporary evacuation, with families gathering in the surrounding streets to care for their children. After the first wave—which Iran said struck a location on Hengam Island in the strait—Qalibaf declared that Iranian security depended on maintaining what he called "Iranian arrangements" in the waterway: "We are in an essential and existential war with America." The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had struck U.S. military targets across the region, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan; Kuwait said its forces intercepted four missiles and 21 drones in an attack that caused material damage but no injuries. Tasnim, citing a health-ministry official, said U.S. attacks had killed 35 people in July alone.

Trump struck a triumphant note at a roundtable during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, saying, "We'll have Iran defeated soon. They'll be defeated very soon," and claiming the Iranians wanted to "settle so badly." "They don't like what we're doing, and they do want to settle," he said. "We'll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off." A day earlier he had said U.S. negotiators contacted their Iranian counterparts to warn them, "you better make a deal." Iran's military spokesperson countered that the only way to reopen the strait was for the United States to comply with the 14-point memorandum the two sides signed in June and to implement "Iranian regulations" governing ship traffic. Amid the fighting, Trump said Iran had allowed an American "wrongfully detained" under the Biden administration in 2024 to leave the country—"The United States of America appreciates this gesture of Goodwill by Iran," he wrote on Truth Social. Human-rights attorney Jared Genser identified the freed American as Dena Karari, who had been barred from leaving Iran since December 2024, writing that she was "now safe and traveling back to the United States."

The renewed violence cast fresh doubt on the June 17 memorandum, which had aimed to reopen the strait and end the war after a further 60 days of negotiations. With the strait closed again and energy prices climbing—Brent crude closed at a one-month high of $84.95 a barrel on July 15, a politically sensitive dynamic for Trump ahead of November's congressional elections—the interim deal that had ended the war's first phase appeared to be breaking down less than a month after it was signed.

Status (as of July 15, 2026)

The interim ceasefire survived a serious test in its second week. On June 25, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard drone struck the Singapore-flagged cargo ship Ever Lovely as it exited the strait along the U.S.-favored route near Oman's coast; the following day, June 26, U.S. Central Command carried out what it called a "powerful response," striking Iranian missile and drone storage sites and coastal radar—the first U.S. strikes on Iran since the memorandum was signed. Trump called the ship attack a "foolish violation" of the ceasefire, writing that Iran had fired at least four drones and that U.S. forces had downed three; asked what consequences Iran would face, he said, "You'll find out." The IRGC said it had struck back at U.S. positions in the region and warned that "if the aggression is repeated, our response will be broader," while Vice President Vance posted that the U.S. had honored the agreement and that "violence will be met with violence." Iranian officials rejected the violation framing: Ebrahim Azizi, who chairs the Iranian parliament's national-security commission, wrote that the strait is "governed by Iran" and that the episode was "not a violation of the ceasefire; it is ceasefire management."

The clash laid bare the central ambiguity the memorandum left unresolved—how ships would actually transit the strait. The deal committed Iran to arrange safe, toll-free passage for 60 days only, but the United States favored a southern route hugging Oman's coast while Iran insisted vessels seek its permission and use a northern route closer to its own shore, and has not ruled out imposing tolls once the window closes. Former U.S. diplomat Alan Eyre told Al Jazeera the strikes underscored how loosely the accord was written—"a one-and-a-half-page document where ambiguity was the feature and not the bug." The reopening stalled briefly: a UN maritime agency that had evacuated roughly 115 of some 600 stranded vessels paused the operation after the attack, several tankers reversed course, and the shipping-data firm Windward reported that a week of "widening commercial confidence" in the strait had hit "its first significant test." The ceasefire held for roughly another two weeks, with implementation proceeding unevenly: the partial lifting of oil and petrochemical sanctions and release of frozen assets that began June 22 continued, Brent crude eased to the high $70s, and technical talks led by Vance and Iranian parliament speaker Qalibaf continued in Doha into July—"going well," Vance said July 1—but no IAEA visits to the bombed nuclear sites had been scheduled, and Congress left for recess with the administration's $87.6 billion war supplemental facing near-certain defeat. That fragile calm did not last. As detailed above, by the weekend of July 11–12 the truce had collapsed into renewed fighting—fresh U.S. strikes on more than 300 Iranian targets over three nights, Iranian attacks on five Gulf states, and a second declared closure of the Strait of Hormuz—after Trump pronounced the ceasefire "over." The hardest questions—the fate of Iran's enriched-uranium stockpile, the dismantling of its main nuclear sites, the full sanctions schedule, and reparations Iran is demanding for an estimated $270 billion in damage—remain deferred to the 60-day negotiating window, which runs out in mid-August absent an extension, and which the collapse of the ceasefire has thrown further into doubt. On July 14 the United States reimposed a naval blockade of Iran's ports, and on July 15 it struck Iranian coastal defenses and missile sites in two waves while Iran—warning it was in an "existential war" with America—kept the strait closed and threatened to choke off further energy exports, even as Trump declared Iran would be "defeated very soon" and both sides signaled that indirect talks remained possible.

Iran's theocratic government emerged from the war intact, with Mojtaba Khamenei installed as supreme leader following his father's assassination. Inside Iran, roughly 3,400 to 3,500 people were killed according to Iranian authorities and the U.S.-based monitor HRANA, including more than 1,600 civilians; thirteen U.S. service members died and more than 500 were wounded. The war's conclusion drew sharply divergent verdicts: the administration described it as peace through strength, while critics ranging from Democratic lawmakers to some of the conflict's most prominent Republican supporters argued it had ended without achieving its central aims. Whether the deal endures, and on whose terms, depends on talks that—by the admission of negotiators on both sides—remain difficult and unfinished, and that the July collapse of the ceasefire into renewed U.S.–Iranian strikes and a second closure of the Strait of Hormuz has left more precarious still.