The Iran War reached its six-month milestone on August 28 with little seeming prospect of a political resolution.
A conflict which US President Donald Trump declared would be over within four to six weeks when the US and Israel launched military operations on February 28 now risks dragging him into the type of quagmire he campaigned so vocally against in 2016.
A decade ago, Trump’s criticism of the “Forever Wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq resonated with his base of political support within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
The pledge to end the open-ended conflicts which had defined so much of the post-September 11 landscape also generated a rare issue of bipartisan consensus in Washington in the late-2010s.
It is therefore a matter of considerable irony that Trump now faces a similar predicament in Iran.
It is just 15 months since Trump gave one of the most honest speeches ever delivered by a US president in the Middle East.
In Riyadh in May 2025, Trump lambasted his predecessors in office who “spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad” and “wrecked far more nations than they built”. For good measure, Trump added that “the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves”.
His remarks displayed a degree of reflection and self-awareness that few had previously associated with the president and were very well received across the region.
And yet, within weeks of his visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, the sense of optimism engendered by Trump’s trip to the Gulf – of the prospects of a stable, secure and prosperous region – were punctured by the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran.
Trump not only approved of the Israeli action and sought to take credit for it but also involved the US directly in airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
The seeming success of the 12-Day War, followed by the stunningly quick removal of Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela in early-January this year, appeared to instill in the president a feeling of over-confidence in the ability of military force to bring about swift and decisive outcomes on the ground. Six months later, Trump finds himself, possibly for the first time in his political career, facing an implacable foe which will not bow to intimidation or bluster.
For a man who proclaimed in 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”, the decade since those comments demonstrated, time and again, how there was more than a grain of truth to the sense of invincibility, that the normal laws of political gravity did not apply to him and that he was different from all other politicians.
After so long, it must be disorienting to come up against an issue that defies easy resolution and to feel a certain loss of control over developments and an inability to deliver an outcome. Analysts have reached for historical analogies and more than a few have started to compare Trump with Jimmy Carter, whose presidency and bid for re-election in 1980 was gravely undermined by his failure to resolve the hostage crisis on terms favourable to the US.
Carter had a very distinguished post-presidential career that spanned decades and earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, but his time in office will be remembered for the way the Iranian leadership used the hostages to inflict maximum political pain on the White House, to the extent that the hostages were only released on 20 January 1981, while the swearing in ceremony of Ronald Reagan was taking place and as the new president was giving his inaugural address. The Iranian leadership may be calculating that they can impose a similar political humiliation on Trump as the Congressional midterm elections draw ever closer.
Another historical comparison is with the Suez Crisis of 1956 which sounded the final death-knell for European colonialist designs in the Middle East.
Britain and France were militarily exhausted and economically weakened after World War II and Suez was a desperate last spasm of an era of gunboat diplomacy that had long since passed.
It may be argued that, for the US, the Suez equivalent began with the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent mismanagement of the eight-year occupation which followed. In this regard, the weaknesses and limitations exposed by the Iran War in 2026 are part of a continuum whose endpoint has not yet been reached and is still not entirely clear.
After all, while Suez is today remembered as the endgame for the British in the region, it took a further 15 years for the final withdrawal from all positions East of Suez to take place, in 1971.
Historians of the future may look back at the Iran War as a final act of hubris that sealed the end of a regional order that began in response to Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
The subsequent buildup of US and coalition forces represented a significant departure from the “over-the-horizon” deployments hitherto favoured by the US and culminated in the network of military facilities across the region that lasted to this day.
It is this network that has been targeted and hit by Iranian missiles and drones over the past six months which may prompt future US administrations to reassess basing priorities. Any shift in regional order will be momentous and consequential and there are many in the Gulf who recall that it was neither preordained nor inevitable that the US would eventually supplant the British role in the region, albeit with a nearly-20-year gap between 1971 and 1990.
In the end, a president who was so vocal in his criticism of George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden may find that his own legacy is as defined by a signature foreign policy misstep as Bush in Iraq and Biden for the chaotic nature of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
This is not the outcome a bullish president anticipated six months ago.
- The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.