The United States and Iran resumed near-daily bombardment on Monday in a struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, with both sides refusing to yield despite mounting American casualties and rising petrol prices at home, underscoring the limits of President Donald Trump’s strategy of escalating air strikes to force Tehran into submission, according to AP.
Although the Trump administration insists it remains open to negotiations, Iran has so far declined to loosen its hold over the vital oil corridor in the Persian Gulf, raising doubts about Washington’s approach for the next stage of the confrontation.
Intensifying strikes have already unravelled an interim truce reached last month, claimed further American military lives, and pushed US fuel costs higher, complicating matters for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
Despite occasional signs of a possible thaw, the two nations may be heading back towards full-scale conflict. Trump has cautioned that any future killing of an American soldier by Iran would be met with retaliation many times over.
Mona Yacoubian, who directs the Middle East Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the renewed escalation reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian thinking and a failure to absorb lessons from earlier rounds of fighting.
She suggested both governments appeared to believe that intensifying military pressure could break the deadlock and force the other into concessions, but warned that the more the conflict escalates, the harder it becomes to find a path back to diplomacy.
Washington maintains door to talks remains open
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Sunday evening that Iran continued to signal a willingness to negotiate, but that Washington’s response was being shaped by Tehran’s actions on the ground — namely the launching of missiles and drones at vessels transiting the strait, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil ordinarily flows.
Rubio reiterated that the United States remained willing to pursue a diplomatic resolution, noting that such efforts had been attempted with Iran before and would continue.
According to a US official who was not authorised to speak publicly, Trump is focused on ensuring Iran pays for the recent deaths of American troops, breaches of the interim agreement struck last month, and the attacks on shipping in the strait.
The official said military operations would continue until Trump determined otherwise, though diplomatic contacts between the two countries would proceed in parallel. Some analysts believe the administration is struggling to identify a viable exit, on both the military and diplomatic fronts.
Alan Eyre, a former US diplomat who took part in previous nuclear negotiations with Tehran and now works at the Middle East Institute, described the administration as flustered and lacking a coherent, consistent strategy for extracting itself from the crisis.
Air power alone has shown clear limits
Analysts say the American military’s options are constrained even as strikes intensify. Christopher Preble of the Stimson Center think tank said the conflict had exposed the shortcomings of relying purely on air power, though he noted that deploying ground forces would be deeply unpopular with the American public and many in Congress.
He observed that while Trump retains the capacity to keep bombing, Iran likewise retains the ability to keep the strait shut, or effectively so.
David Schenker, who served in the first Trump administration and is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that the renewed strikes on Iranian infrastructure mirrored the campaign’s opening weeks, when roughly 13,000 targets were hit within the first six weeks of the war without forcing Iranian capitulation.
Frank Kendall, a former US Air Force Secretary under President Joe Biden, pointed to earlier conflicts such as Vietnam as evidence that air power typically needs to be paired with ground and naval operations, and increasingly with space-based capabilities, to be decisive.
He explained that when the war began on 28 February, American and Israeli forces struck numerous fixed targets identified before hostilities started, but Iran had used the intervening time to disperse and conceal its weapons systems, meaning the straightforward targets had largely been exhausted.
He added that Tehran could now hide ballistic and cruise missiles as well as small aircraft with relative ease, making it extremely difficult to suppress the threat over time — which he said explained Iran’s continued ability to strike not only shipping in the strait but also American bases across the region.
Deep mistrust continues to hamper diplomacy
A negotiated settlement also appears elusive. Eyre said the Trump administration had shown little inclination towards genuine diplomacy, relying instead on inexperienced advisers while delegating much of the mediation to countries such as Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt.
He acknowledged that a difficult path towards negotiations theoretically existed, but said the near-total absence of mutual confidence and bilateral trust between Washington and Tehran made progress far harder to achieve.
Both Schenker and Yacoubian noted that recent remarks from Trump, Rubio and their Iranian counterparts hinted at some openness to dialogue.
Yacoubian pointed to what she described as a measured reaction from Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth following the recent killing of US service members in Jordan as a possible sign of an opening, alongside Iran’s release last week of an Iranian-American woman previously barred from leaving the country, which she read as a gesture of goodwill from Tehran.
However, these tentative positive signals could be swiftly overtaken by developments in the Red Sea region: Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels announced on Monday a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia, a move that, should it widen into a full closure of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Yacoubian warned could trigger a perfect storm of disruption for an already fragile global economy.
