Opinion | Trump's Iran War Is Running Out of Logic—and Money

Whatever analytical tools are available to his advisers—and those advisers have grown increasingly reluctant to push back—Donald Trump is likely to chart a course defined less by strategic calculation than by financial interest. That pattern now shapes the trajectory of a war with Iran that is becoming harder to sustain and harder to exit.

​Trump's record is consistent. Early in his second term, he moved against Venezuela, successfully ousting President Nicolás Maduro and opening the country's oil sector to American energy companies. He reclaimed operational leverage over the Panama Canal, framing it as a hemispheric consolidation.

Energy assets and infrastructure concessions are, for Trump, simply money by another name. His comment about Cuba was characteristically blunt, noting he could liberate or take it as he pleased because he felt he could do what he wanted with it.

The same underlying financial logic governs his recent Middle East engagement. After brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, Trump strategically inserted himself as the permanent chair of a newly formed reconstruction council.

He defined this role with unilateral veto power, complete agenda control, and the ability to name his own successor. Critically, the position features no oversight mechanism and no sunset clause. While the stated purpose was regional peace, the structural reality was direct access to a massive Gaza reconstruction fund estimated at $50 billion to $70 billion.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was appointed as a founding member of the council's executive board. This designation was carefully engineered to bypass Senate confirmation while allowing Kushner to operate simultaneously in private commercial and quasi-official diplomatic roles.

Kushner's governing framework essentially treats complex geopolitical conflict as underperforming commercial real estate. By injecting capital, building infrastructure, and aligning opposing parties around shared commercial interests, the administration believes deeply entrenched political disputes will eventually resolve themselves.

At Davos in 2026, Kushner unveiled a $30 billion "New Gaza" blueprint proposing to transform the devastated territory into a booming tourism and economic zone modeled on the French Riviera. Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, a former real estate developer and close confidant, is another primary architect of this plan.

The through-line of this administration's foreign policy is unmistakable: international crises are viewed as lucrative development opportunities, and war is considered a viable path to profit.

This transactional framework extended heavily into global trade policy. On April 2, 2025—branded internally as "Liberation Day"—Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on countries worldwide, claiming the goal was to correct chronic trade imbalances and make America wealthy again.

The aggressive initiative immediately ran into two massive walls: Beijing firmly refused to yield, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump could not legally invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose reciprocal tariffs. Trump quickly pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposing a 150-day temporary tariff regime to ensure the revenue campaign continued uninterrupted.

It was against this highly transactional backdrop that Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran. Israeli intelligence enabled a sudden decapitation strike on Feb. 28 that successfully killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Trump's decision to strike drew on several converging pressures, including the confidence boost from the recent Venezuela operation and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's deliberate release of Khamenei's precise movements. Critically, the decision was also heavily influenced by the allure of Iran's vast oil reserves.

The war, Trump was repeatedly told by advisers, would ultimately pay for itself. Even if he understood that Netanyahu had deliberately drawn him into a geopolitical trap, Trump gave the order to strike Tehran because the financial logic was deemed sufficient.

The central question now is whether Trump remains willing to follow Netanyahu's increasingly dangerous strategic script. Israel's objectives from the outset have been clear: entirely remove the Islamic Republic's leadership and degrade Iran's military capacity so severely that recovery takes at least a decade.

The first phase—drawing Trump into the conflict and eliminating Khamenei—succeeded. However, the second phase has notably failed, as Iran has absorbed the massive strikes and continued to launch regular missile and drone counterattacks.

Israeli and American bombing campaigns have produced severely limited results because Iran long ago dispersed and deeply buried its critical military infrastructure. Netanyahu's response has been to strike Iranian oil fields directly.

This is a calculated move designed to drive global oil prices high enough that other nations, feeling the intense economic pain, would join the coalition and press for a faster resolution. The underlying logic is that the more deeply the United States is committed to the conflict, the more secure Israel ultimately becomes.

Joseph Kent, Trump's counterterrorism director, made this dynamic explicit in a scathing resignation letter dated March 17. Kent accused the administration of having been deliberately deceived by Israel and its lobbying networks into launching a war that fundamentally lacked the legal requirement of an "imminent threat."

"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran," Kent wrote. He suggested the intelligence community never reached consensus on that crucial threat threshold, but under heavy Israeli influence, Trump progressively convinced himself it had been met.

The price of oil is now the war's single dominant variable. Every Iranian threat to close the vital Strait of Hormuz sends global prices higher, and every American or Israeli strike on Iranian oil infrastructure does the same thing.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that a negotiated ceasefire would immediately restore prewar energy prices. Yet he has simultaneously dispatched massive additional military forces to the Gulf, clearly signaling an escalation rather than an exit strategy.

This glaring contradiction is not lost on allied governments. Trump recently appealed to Japan, South Korea, China, Australia, and the European Union to contribute naval vessels to keep the Strait open, but the international response was largely cold.

A joint statement issued on March 19 by five EU members and Japan expressed a vague willingness to contribute to "appropriate measures" for navigational safety—without ever specifying what those measures would actually be. Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Japan welcomed the International Energy Agency's authorization to release strategic reserves.

They also pledged to work with oil-producing nations to rapidly increase output, but none directly answered Trump's explicit request for warships in the Strait.

When Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Washington on March 19, and Trump publicly demanded more vessels, Tokyo's response fell well short of what he sought.

The grand international naval coalition Trump imagined has simply not materialized.

Meanwhile, the USS Tripoli amphibious assault ship has been deployed to the Gulf, carrying approximately 2,500 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, normally based in Okinawa. This specialized force is trained specifically for complex island assault and offshore defense operations.

The likely objective is Kharg Island, a crucial facility that handles roughly 90% of Iran's oil exports. At approximately 8 square miles, it is a tactically manageable target, and the Marines could plausibly execute an assault by March 24.

However, while the tactical question is straightforward, the strategic one is deeply problematic. Kharg Island sits incredibly close to the Iranian mainland, meaning holding it would expose a relatively small American garrison to sustained Iranian counterattacks, with casualties potentially mounting rapidly.

The island's primary value lies in disrupting Iranian oil exports, which is a far narrower objective than actually controlling the Strait of Hormuz itself. Controlling the Strait requires extensive allied naval cooperation that has not been forthcoming.

There is also a glaring internal political contradiction to this plan. Last June, American B-2 bombers struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, after which Trump and Netanyahu prematurely declared total victory.

Launching a massive new ground operation to seize or destroy nuclear infrastructure would effectively acknowledge that the administration's earlier declaration of success was entirely false.

The complex intelligence situation severely compounds these operational risks. The Pentagon has relied heavily on AI-assisted decision support, including advanced tools built on Anthropic's Claude platform.

However, many of Iran's strategic assets—including drones, ballistic missiles, and launch systems—have been moved deep underground, creating massive, dangerous gaps in the targeting picture. The accidental bombing of an Iranian girls' school and several recent incidents of friendly fire against American aircraft suggest that the intelligence fusion between U.S. and Israeli forces is deeply flawed and incomplete.

The situation has been made significantly worse by a sudden breakdown in the relationship between the Trump administration and Anthropic. The Pentagon recently suspended the use of Claude entirely and formally designated the tech company a "supply chain risk."

Without comprehensive data flowing into sophisticated AI-assisted analysis systems, the latest highly dangerous phase of American operations is being conducted with severely degraded situational awareness. Ground combat in Iran's deep interior against dispersed, hardened, and partially invisible targets would expose large American formations to brutal attrition without commensurate strategic gain.

For a president who carefully calculates every decision in strict financial terms, that equation simply does not work. The more realistic scenario involves limited, high-value operations: seize Kharg Island, strike a nuclear site if it can be reliably located, and then rapidly withdraw.

But operations of that limited kind produce tactical results with extremely limited strategic consequences. They do not end the war, they do not stabilize global oil prices, and they certainly do not justify the massive force posture Trump has hastily assembled in the region.

Trump inherently understands commercial warfare and leverage, but he does not appear to understand the incredibly complex kind of war he is now in. The vital Strait of Hormuz remains entirely outside his control, and crucial allied military support has not arrived.

Global oil prices are currently beyond his administration's management, and the strategic, geographic, and diplomatic conditions are clearly not in his favor. If he continues to press forward regardless, the severe military, financial, and political losses are most likely to fall heavily on the United States and Israel themselves.

The author is a university lecturer. （Related： Exclusive | The Catalyst Of Invention: Nobel Laureate Sir Gregory Winter On Science, Survival And The Making Of A Blockbuster Drug ｜ Latest ）