President Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every time Trump touts a possible breakthrough in negotiations, the hard-liners in Tehran seem to delight in changing their terms and yanking away a possible deal. It’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, except this time, the pigskin is the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing has worked. So Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain. The hope is that a return to this strategy—which was used, in spurts, earlier in the conflict and has been championed by some in the administration all along—will finally force leaders in Tehran to seriously engage in negotiations to open the strait and end the war.

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But this new tack will require the president to show patience. Trump is, to say the least, not known for his self-discipline. Or for his ability to stick to a plan. Or for his capacity to avoid being influenced by the last segment he saw on cable TV. Advisers privately acknowledge that a single Truth Social post fired off in anger could lead to an escalation that derails the entire plan. And there are risks even if the strategy works. Iran has repeatedly surprised U.S. officials with its economic resilience; the time now needed to effectively squeeze the country all but ensures that there will be no quick resolution to the war—and no corresponding decline in energy costs—before Republicans try to defend their congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections. But Trump and his aides see few other options to end their war of choice.

Within the White House, a new set of statistics is winning the debate. In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy, two senior administration officials told me. The case has been laid out before the president in Oval Office meetings—and, in at least one instance, in a call from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent while Trump was wrapping up a round of golf—that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The idea is hardly new: Trump has relied on an economic “maximum-pressure” campaign since his first term to try to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. And earlier this year, further sanctions were applied.

Aides think it may work this time. And Trump underscored this belief yesterday, telling reporters that “Iran is broke, totally broke.” But he has repeatedly misjudged the Iranians. In the conflict’s early days, Trump was convinced that the war would take a few weeks at most and that—despite warnings provided by the Pentagon—Iran would not try to close the Strait of Hormuz. Those assumptions were wrong, as was the belief held within the intelligence community that Iran would buckle quickly under the economic strain. But the regime seems willing to endure significant hardship, and its own citizens’ struggles, to maintain its grip on power.

And it has responded with its own changing list of demands that includes an insistence on collecting some sort of toll or fee for use of the narrow channel. More than once, and as recently as last week, it appeared that a deal to reopen the strait was close and that Trump was prepared to declare victory in the conflict and move on (conveniently ignoring that the waterway had been open and free for all to use prior to the war). Allies in the Persian Gulf have registered unhappiness at any increased Iranian control over the strait but were told that they would have to live with the new arrangement, at least for a while. Bessent asserted to Trump, and later in interviews, that the Strait of Hormuz would become irrelevant within two years, claiming that up to 70 percent of the energy that transits the waterway will eventually flow through underground pipelines.

But once more, the regime leaders in Tehran altered the deal, this time insisting that the strait would reopen only once the United States paid reparations for losses suffered during the five-month war. That condition was deemed a nonstarter in Washington, and an enraged Trump countered by declaring that the U.S. would need to be paid its own set of reparations for the deaths of American forces over the decades as well as for the families of Iranian protesters slain in the past 50 years, including in recent demonstrations (which won’t happen either). Despite the occasional hopeful-sounding statements from mediators in Oman and Pakistan, negotiations remain at an impasse. Trump has furiously told aides that he doesn’t feel that Iran is negotiating in good faith.

The White House stressed to me that Iran’s economy is already reeling, with soaring inflation, redacted energy revenue, and some agricultural shortfalls. One official added that “there are many levers the president can crank harder in the weeks and months ahead.”

But there is another set of numbers that also informed Trump’s decision to sit tight: the dwindling stockpiles of some U.S. munitions, especially missile defenses. Before the war, there was no monthslong buildup of forces and no large-scale deployment of troops. Although the military has since surged additional forces into the region, many assets—particularly Navy ships—were diverted from other theaters of war rather than trained for the conflict. And as my colleague Nancy A. Youssef and I reported last week, some missile stockpiles are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have. There may not be enough to defend American interests in Asia, and stores of some sophisticated interceptor missiles are too depleted for the U.S. to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or to effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles.

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This shortage has curtailed Trump’s options. Were he to authorize another wide-scale strike against Iran, U.S. officials are not confident in their ability to protect American bases or allies in the region from retaliation. And Iran has proved effective in striking against U.S. forces. Last month, during a renewed stretch of fighting, an Iranian missile slipped through defenses at a base in Jordan and detonated on a barracks housing U.S. troops.

The danger posed by Tehran is so great that the Secret Service took extraordinary measures to safeguard Trump last month when he left a NATO summit in Turkey, which shares a border with Iran. The Qatari-made luxury jet filling in as the presidential aircraft was deemed to lack appropriate defensive measures, so the original, standard Air Force One was purportedly assigned the task of taking Trump out of Ankara. But according to The Washington Post, the threat was so credible that Trump had to secretly move to another aircraft via a small catering truck. The smaller plane carrying the president took off without notice, and the Boeing 747 normally designated Air Force One then departed, carrying some senior officials and the traveling press pool.

Of course, no one in the White House knows whether Trump will be patient enough to stick to the new plan. He has been bored of the war for a while, but perhaps the slow economic squeeze will allow the conflict to slip from the headlines and permit him to focus on other things (such as the Reflecting Pool and maybe Cuba).

But Iranian leaders have proved effective at goading Trump into action, and there are hawks in Congress and the Pentagon who have advocated for wider strikes. The president might also hear from Republicans running for reelection this fall who are saddled with the party’s poor poll numbers and the politically damaging high price of gas, who might beg him to do something—anything!—about it. Trump tends to be swayed by viral social-media posts and cable-news chyrons. His longtime adviser Steve Bannon told me years ago that Trump doesn’t try to “win a news cycle”; instead, he aims to win “a news moment, a news second,” and that trait has only intensified since. It likely wouldn’t take much to get him to shift course again.

But for now, at least, the White House thinks Trump’s best play might be to do just the opposite.

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