America’s war with Iran entered a new phase this week, with a concerted push by President Donald Trump to find exit terms he could claim as significant achievements.
How, and how soon, he might be able to get a deal remains unclear: Iran is publicly dismissing the idea of major concessions and proposing terms of its own that the United States is certain to reject.
Yet Mr. Trump, while signaling his readiness to escalate if a deal can’t be found, has been insistently upbeat about the Pakistan-mediated talks. He has also been clear about his desire for the war to end – maybe partly, as a Wall Street Journal report suggested, because he doesn’t want it hanging over a scheduled mid-May summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Why We Wrote This
With all the focus on what the Iran War is, or isn’t, achieving, the U.S. and its regional allies will have to grapple with an issue critical to the shape of a post-war Middle East: the war’s “opportunity cost.”
Still, even if he does get a deal he can present as a victory, the U.S. and its regional allies will have to grapple with an issue critical to the shape of a post-war Middle East, yet ignored since the fighting began.
Economists call it “opportunity cost.”
It’s the idea that you need to measure the success of a purchase or investment not just by the returns. You also have to consider what you’ve given up by not allocating your resources to something else.
In the case of Iran, the prewar alternatives weren’t just theoretical.
They involved Trump administration policy across the region: toward Iran and the Gulf Arab states; Syria and Lebanon; Gaza; and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict.
The broader strategic aim was to promote stability, derive economic benefit, and ultimately free the U.S. to shift its primary security focus east, toward China.
The “opportunity cost” of the war was to put all of that on hold.
And a key postwar question will be whether Mr. Trump will, or even can, revive it in a Middle East that has been fundamentally altered by the conflict.
Perhaps the best gauge of the magnitude of the postwar changes awaiting Mr. Trump in a “day after” Middle East is to look at the “day before” the war began.
Iran was undeniably a security threat. Israel was warning especially of the Iranians’ growing arsenal of ballistic missiles – weapons they’ve been firing across the region during the war.
But Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon had been dealt a major setback by U.S. and Israeli attacks against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities last June, with no signs it was restarting the program.
Regionally, the Iranian regime was at its weakest in decades, denuded of antiair defenses.
Its “axis of resistance” – a web of allies and proxies along Israel’s borders – was in tatters.
Its linchpin, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, had been overthrown. Hezbollah in Lebanon had been hobbled by Israeli military and intelligence successes; Hamas had been pummeled during Israel’s war in Gaza following the group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack that left hundreds of Israeli citizens killed or abducted.
The prewar approach to Iran was essentially one of containment.
In both Syria and Lebanon, the Trump administration was working to strengthen governments determined to resist any attempt by Iran to reassert its regional sway.
Lebanon’s prime minister shared the U.S. and Israeli aim of seeing Hezbollah disarmed. Never since the extremist group’s formation in the 1980s had it been so isolated politically.
In Gaza, Mr. Trump had launched his reconstruction plan, with funding, he hoped, from Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states – also leaving open the prospect of an eventual two-state Israel-Palestinian peace.
Mr. Trump’s crowning vision was to complete the breakthrough Abraham Accords of his first term, which normalized ties between Israel and several Arab states, by bringing in Saudi Arabia and other countries.
None of this was without potential obstacles. “Containing” Iran might not have worked in the long run. Though Lebanon’s government had restrained Hezbollah’s military freedom and was committed to disarming the group, it hadn’t yet done so.
And the scale of destruction in Gaza, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a Palestinian state, was making Saudi Arabia and other Arab states hesitant about buying into the reconstruction plan.
Yet, on all those fronts, the Iran war has made it difficult, if not impossible, for Mr. Trump to pick up where he left off.
Lebanon’s government is particularly anxious. Signaling its hope for Washington’s resumed involvement and support, it has proposed direct talks with Israel. On Tuesday, it expelled Iran’s ambassador.
But Israel, responding to Hezbollah’s entry into the Iran conflict, has moved its troops across the border and is now saying that it will take open-ended control of southern Lebanon.
The Saudis and other Gulf Arab states, meanwhile, would appear in no mood to revert to prewar regional politics. Until the final stages of the U.S. military buildup in February, they had hoped Mr. Trump would use that pressure to get a negotiated agreement with Tehran.
But having borne the brunt of Iranian missile and drone fire over the past four weeks, they now fear Iran will constitute a permanent threat to them as long as its regime survives. That – not Gaza, or a wider Middle East détente – is their immediate, overriding focus.
President Trump expressed hope this week that the war would be “settled very soon.” And he’ll want to be able to point to what it has achieved – making the argument that the conflict has so severely depleted Iran’s military capacity that it has made the region, and the wider world, safer.
But the “opportunity cost” of opting for war could prove to be his prewar vision for a more stable, economically robust and collaborative Middle East.
