Donald Trump took the United States to war with Iran on February 28 to prove that American power still wrote the rules of the Middle East, and that meant Tehran would never get nuclear weapons. If the war ends the way it now looks like it might, with Tehran left controlling the Strait of Hormuz and the rest of the world paying for the privilege of passing through it, he will have proved something close to the opposite. The verdict history reaches on a war is rarely the one its author wants, and the one taking shape over this conflict is harsh: that a president who promised to cut energy costs and restore deterrence instead handed the Islamic Republic a chokehold on a fifth of the planet’s oil, then negotiated his way out by ratifying it.
As one former Trump National Security Council member from his first administration warned in a conversation I had with him this morning: “The Iran War will decide what every American thinks of Donald Trump’s presidency. Forget the whole nuclear weapons worries, this is all about oil and Hormuz now.” Oh, how true it is.
President Donald Trump greets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Friday, February 28, 2025, in the West Wing Lobby. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
President Donald Trump signs an Executive Order alongside Kid Rock in the Oval Office, Monday, March 31, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
Donald Trump Sold The Iran War As Restored American Deterrence
When the operation began in the small hours of February 28, the president’s announcement to the country focused entirely on military justification and made no mention of the economic fallout that was about to follow. Beyond the standard fears about nuclear weapons, the framing was confidence itself. Days earlier, Trump had told an audience in Texas that slashing energy costs was among the most important things his administration could do, and that doing so would bring down the cost of everything else. The war was supposed to be a demonstration of strength that would leave Iran chastened and American deterrence refurbished.
What followed instead was an Iranian response that the administration had insisted it was ready for and plainly was not. Within hours, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was warning commercial vessels away from Hormuz, Qatar had halted liquefied natural gas production, and an IRGC official had declared the strait closed. The White House initially waved away the danger, with a spokesperson emphasizing American insulation through domestic production and Venezuelan oil and an official explicitly rejecting any release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That confidence did not survive contact with the market.
Iran’s New Persian Gulf Strait Authority Turns Hormuz Into A Toll Booth
The most consequential development of the entire war may be the institution Iran has quietly built in the months since. Tehran has set up a body to force shippers to comply with its rules for transiting Hormuz, vowing to keep the operation running without interruption. A Qatari LNG tanker was permitted to cross in mid-May, a passage Iran approved as a confidence-building gesture toward Qatar and Pakistan, which made the point more vivid rather than less. Passage through the Strait is becoming something Iran grants rather than something the world takes for granted.
That is the architecture of a toll booth, and it is the heart of the scenario that should worry the administration most. If a settlement leaves that machinery standing, if commercial traffic resumes only under Iranian rules and Iranian permission, then the war will have converted the Strait of Hormuz from an international waterway into a revenue stream for the regime the United States went to war to weaken. A peace that ends the shooting while leaving Tehran installed as the gatekeeper of global energy would not restore deterrence so much as transfer it.
President Donald Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast, Thursday, February 6, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley.)
President Donald Trump attends an event celebrating Women’s History Month, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Trump Went To War Without A Plan To Get Out Of Hormuz
The criticism that has hardened around the conflict is not that Trump used force, but that he used it without a way to end it on his terms. As the strait stayed shut, the president was reported to be cycling through options, jumping from securing the waterway by diplomacy to lifting sanctions to threatening Iran’s civilian infrastructure, an erratic progression that fueled the charge he had gone to war with no clear exit. At one point, he issued an ultimatum giving Iran 48 hours to open the strait or face the obliteration of its power plants, a threat his aides defended as hardball and his opponents read as panic. Senator Chris Murphy put it bluntly, saying the president had lost control of the war and was casting about for answers.
The pattern continued into late spring. Trump threatened to “blow up” Oman over the strait and reiterated his vow to finish the job if Iran refused acceptable terms, while dismissing concerns about war-weariness at home and insisting the Iranians had misjudged him when they assumed they could outwait him through the midterms. Tehran, for its part, vowed never to bow even after Trump dismissed its counteroffer to end the war as totally unacceptable, and it has demanded the United States lift its blockade of Iranian ports as the price of reopening the waterway. A negotiation in which the adversary sets the conditions for ending a blockade it imposed is one being conducted from weakness, not strength.
A Deal After July 4 And The Optics Of America’s 250th
Here is where I would argue the scenario sharpens into something history will scrutinize, and it won’t be kind to Donald Trump. The emergency oil reserves the world has leaned on to keep prices from spiraling are projected to run dry around July 9, which means the real economic reckoning, the one no amount of messaging can paper over, arrives in mid-summer. A president facing that cliff, and facing the Fourth of July that opens the United States’ 250th-anniversary year, has every political incentive to have a deal in hand before the fireworks, so the semiquincentennial is framed by peace rather than by gas lines and recession warnings.
A deal struck on that timeline would be sold as triumph and statesmanship, and the optics would be carefully managed. But the substance is what history grades, and the substance of a rushed midsummer settlement is the problem. A deadline visible to both sides hands leverage to the side that did not set it, and Tehran has shown every sign of understanding that the closer the calendar creeps toward America’s celebration and the reserves’ exhaustion, the more it can extract. A peace negotiated against a clock that the adversary can read tends to produce terms that reflect who needed the deal more. If those terms leave Iran’s toll regime intact and the world paying to move its oil, the July 4 framing will not age as a victory. It will read instead as the moment the rush to look strong produced a settlement that was anything but.
President Donald Trump signs an Executive Order alongside Kid Rock in the Oval Office, Monday, March 31, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
The War Is Wrecking The Economy Trump Promised To Fix
The cruelest irony of the conflict for a president who ran on affordability is that the war is, in the words of one assessment, wrecking Trump’s economy.
The man who promised that cutting energy costs would cut the cost of everything has presided over the reverse, with the war reigniting inflation, fouling supply chains, and dampening the growth he staked his second term on. Gas prices have run at their highest since 2022, and the United States has proven far less insulated from the shock than the White House insisted it would be.
The damage is visible in the nation’s own emergency stockpile. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the administration first refused to tap, has since been drained to its lowest since April 2024, down more than 50 million barrels, a buffer being spent to soften a price spike the war created. The economic record will be part of the verdict, because a war justified to American voters partly on the promise of cheaper energy that instead delivered dearer energy, drained reserves, and posed a risk of recession is a war whose costs landed squarely on the people it was meant to serve.
Tehran’s Tollkeeper And The Long Shadow Of Bush’s Iraq
The historical analogy already being drawn is the one that should most unsettle the administration. The comparison to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, a war of choice launched on confident assumptions that curdled into a quagmire of its own making, is being made openly, with critics arguing Trump’s war has failed to achieve the objectives the administration set for it.
The parallel is not perfect, but its logic is what matters for the verdict. Iraq is remembered not for the speed of the initial victory but for the absence of a plan for what came after, and for the strategic gifts it handed America’s adversaries.
A Hormuz war that ends with Iran institutionalized as the gatekeeper of the world’s most important oil passage fits that template with uncomfortable precision.
The Case Trump’s Defenders Will Make
A durable judgment has to take the strongest counterargument seriously, and there is a real one. Trump’s defenders will argue that he did not start from a clean slate but inherited an Iran that had spent years advancing toward a nuclear weapon, and that the do-nothing alternative carried its own catastrophic risk that critics conveniently ignore. They will point out that any settlement that reopens the strait and rolls back Iran’s nuclear program is, by definition, a win, and that ending a war before it metastasizes is the mark of a president who knows when to close rather than one who has failed. They will note that hard lines against Tehran have been vindicated before, that markets recover and anniversaries fade while strategic outcomes endure, and that a president who ends a war and brings oil back online will be judged on that result, not on the anxiety of the months that preceded it.
This case is not frivolous, and its strongest version turns entirely on the terms of the exit. If Trump secures a deal that genuinely dismantles Iran’s nuclear program and restores free transit through Hormuz without leaving a toll regime behind, history may well credit him with a hard war ended on favorable terms, and the critics will look like they panicked early.
The verdict, in other words, is not yet written, and it hinges on a single question: what, exactly, does Iran keep when the shooting stops.
How History Will Judge Trump, Iran, And The Strait Of Hormuz
That question is the whole game, and the early signs point the wrong way for the administration. A regime that has built a standing authority to tax passage through Hormuz, that grants transit as a favor, and that is negotiating from a blockade it refuses to lift unconditionally is not a regime preparing to surrender its leverage. If the war ends with that leverage intact, dressed up as peace and timed for the Fourth of July, the durable judgment will not turn on the framing. It will turn on the fact that the United States went to war to break Iran’s grip on the region and came home having tightened it.
And that means history won’t be kind to Donald Trump.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
