Trump’s Iran war deadline is a midterm political message, analyst says

U.S. President Donald Trump says he believes the war with Iran will end after the midterm elections in November. He also said that's when he expects oil prices to come down. Currently, the price per barrel is back at $100. I think the war will end immediately after the election, because they can't hold out any longer. They're desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon, and if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble. Are you still hoping for a nuclear deal? Secretary Wright said a nuclear deal might not be on the table anymore. Is that true? I'm doing much more than a nuclear deal. There's a lot more than nuclear. We're going to have nuclear. That's 99.9. But there's going to be a lot of other things on the table that wouldn't have been on the table three months ago. Let's speak to Alex Vatanka about all this. He's a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and joins us from Washington, D.C. Thank you so much for being with us again, Alex. I'll ask you about your reaction to President Trump's new deadline in just a moment. First on what's happening on the ground, we're seeing more tit-for-tat attacks, reports of explosions heard on Kashim Island. How far are we up the escalation ladder right now? Is this still controlled, do you think? Phil, it's great to be back with you. Look, I think we've been on this trajectory, escalation for more escalation from both sides now for some time. The latest from what I could understand listening to Iranian sources is that these sounds that are heard in southern Iran in the Hormuzgan province, including the island of Resh, as you just pointed out, are coming from the sea. That suggests to me that tankers, presumably tankers linked to Iran, are being targeted by the U.S. military. That's speculation on my part, but that would seem to make sense, because we've also heard fully in recent days the idea that U.S. might actually, again, return to the sort of plan of maybe landing special forces to take some of these Iranian facilities that are targeting maritime traffic out. We haven't seen that done yet, but it's been speculated for months now. Yeah, I mean, this escalation, Phil, if I could just quickly point to one thing here, could go worse, if you will. My fear, my fear would be that those more radical voices in the Iranian regime decide to actually start targeting more deliberately, if you will, more effectively, American naval assets, resulting potentially in American deaths. That would be the kind of escalation where it should happen. What would trigger that sort of escalation from Iran's point? From Iran's point, it essentially basically boils down to get Donald Trump's attention. That would be a gamble on the part of Iran if they did that, because the Iranians might look at this war as hugely unpopular in the United States and say that's one way of getting Trump to sort of essentially want to wrap this up. So, you get his attention by essentially killing Americans. Again, a huge gamble on the part of Iran should they decide to go in this direction, because I think very likely the opposite could happen, which this conflict going from Trump's unwise war against Iran to an American national cause with Americans rally around the flag. And that's exactly what the Iranians should try and avoid. Right now, the president is saying that this war will end immediately after the midterm elections because he says the Iranians can't hold out any longer. We've seen him shift timelines many times during this conflict in the last six months or so. What do you make of this latest one? Why is he saying this now? You know, my immediate reaction, this is a political domestic message. He said that as he was getting on a plane to go to Texas to attend the Republican convention. So he's basically trying to sort of politicize this saying, oh, the Iranians would rather have the Democrats do well in these elections because Democrats are weaker. They'll give Iran what Iran, what the Iranians want. Again, very much a political message based on the political competition that happens in the United States. You know, you could make the argument that Donald Trump perhaps has something in mind that he doesn't want to give the Iranians what they want till after the elections, because it's easier for him to do so, because after the November elections, he politically doesn't have to worry about anything else. He's a second term president. His time will be up, and then, you know, he can leave it to his successors to deal with Iran. It could be that that is the case. But then, in his interview, in his remarks, he also said something else that leaves us scratching our heads. He said 90.9 percent is about the nuclear program, and then 0.1 percent is about everything else. Well, we want to know what everything else is. He didn't give us any clarity. That lack of clarity on the Trump administration's part when it comes to what the end mission is has been a problem from get-go when this war started back in February. So is it clear to you, then, what the Trump administration would consider a success after the midterms, if the war is ending, indeed, after the midterms? Who knows? I mean, they have changed the goalposts so many times in terms of what success looks like. I mean, Donald Trump could have said months ago that he's been successful, that his twice-hit Iranian nuclear facilities, that they're buried underground, killed the supreme leader, Iran's proxy network in the region is weak. He could declare victory and walk away. But it wouldn't be a very convincing victory, because others would point out that the regime is still standing, and the regime is, in many ways, as strong as it was before this war began. And Donald Trump knows that. So, for now, he's trying—he's still hoping that the sanctions on Iran will bring the regime down. But, again, that's a hope on his part, not necessarily a clear-cut strategy in terms of what happens next. Just quickly on the sanctions, at what point do you think those will become counterproductive? Well, look, from a U.S. point of view, they become counterproductive if the Iranians feel that they are so cornered they really have to lash out, to hit out. You have Iranian officials openly saying one way you get America's attention is to identify American energy and other critical infrastructure in the Gulf states and target them. You know, that, again, is a part of an escalation that would be—I think the region would want to avoid to see. But, you know, right now, that's where we're at. It's escalation mode that we're in. While—and this is a faint hope we might have—the diplomatic track is still not dead. We're maybe—have to be hopeful that perhaps something can happen on that front in the next few weeks, perhaps not until after the U.S. elections. But that's only a few weeks away, anyway. Thank you so much, Alex, for talking to us, as always. Alex Sotankhe, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.