President Donald Trump’s conflicting signals over the future of the war in Iran have spurred deepening frustration among GOP lawmakers and allies who fear the administration still lacks a clear endgame after four weeks of fighting.
Trump over the last several days has simultaneously expressed a desire for peace and a willingness to plunge the US into a new and more dangerous phase of the war.
He has insisted that Iran is eager to negotiate a truce while also ordering thousands more troops to the region over the coming days and weeks.
And as Trump nears his self-imposed deadline for a war he insists is ahead of schedule and effectively won, he has repeatedly declined to specify what would constitute a victory — leaving all but his closest advisers largely in the dark.
“I just read a story today that I’m desperate to make a deal. I’m not,” Trump said Thursday, just days after hailing progress toward negotiating a “complete and total” resolution of the war. “I’m the opposite of desperate. I don’t care.”
The minute-by-minute vacillations and conflicting signals coming out of the White House have unnerved lawmakers, political allies and even some Trump aides and advisers, who acknowledge they have little idea what will happen next and harbor increasing doubts about the administration’s management of a conflict laden with political and economic peril.
Trump in recent days has sought to force Iran into a quick deal, raising the specter of strikes on critical infrastructure and a potential ground invasion to convince the regime to give in. But should those threats fail, his allies worry it could set the stage for an even more unpredictable and potentially destabilizing endgame.
Despite Trump’s desire to conclude the war in a matter of days, officials have struggled in recent classified briefings to detail how they plan to achieve key objectives if Iran doesn’t cooperate — such as reopening the Strait of Hormuz or permanently ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, according to lawmakers in the room.
The White House has come under competing pressures, as Arab allies urge Trump not to leave behind an even more dangerous Iranian regime, while some in the GOP press him to declare victory and get out before voters sour further on his presidency.
Across global financial markets, the warning signs are intensifying, too. Following a brief retreat earlier this week spurred by optimism that a diplomatic solution was in reach, oil prices have continued to surge to fresh highs, ignoring Trump’s assurances that the pain from his “little stopover” in Iran is close to finished.
“Everyone is worried about a quagmire in the Middle East,” said one close Trump ally, who was granted anonymity to describe the darkening mood among many in the president’s orbit. “That’s been the history of the Middle East as long as I’ve been alive, so I’m not sure why they didn’t see the potential for what this could become.”
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump’s “first instinct is always diplomacy,” which was why he initially sought to negotiate with the Iranian regime before launching his military campaign.
“Now that the regime’s ballistic missile capacity and navy is getting annihilated by the United States, they are begging to make a deal,” she said. “The President is willing to listen, but if they fail to accept the reality of the current moment, they will be hit harder than ever before.”
Still, even among Trump’s top advisers, their preparations for the next stage of the war reflect uncertainty over which path the president will choose.
Officials have sought to provide Trump maximum optionality, offering him a wide array of choices for conducting his campaign. They have taken care not to make any firm commitments that he might later contradict, even if it’s meant confusing allies or heightening market anxieties.
Trump officials over the last week have both downplayed the prospect of putting troops on the ground and insisted that Trump is willing use all options at his disposal to crush the regime. They have characterized his war aims as nearly complete, while refusing to specify how much longer fully achieving them will take.
“It’ll be over when the president decides it’ll be over,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at an energy industry conference earlier this week, even as he claimed that the spike in oil and gas prices triggered by the war amounted to only a “temporary increase.”
Trump has privately indicated in recent days that he’s eager to wrap up the war soon and move on to other priorities, people familiar with the matter said — especially as concerns grow about the economic consequences and November’s midterm elections grow nearer. One recent Reuters/Ipsos poll put Trump’s approval rating on the economy at 29%, a lower number than former President Joe Biden ever saw during his term.
The White House this week rescheduled a trip to China for mid-May, which some interpreted as a soft deadline for the war’s end. Trump in the meantime has pressed for diplomatic talks, deputizing Vice President JD Vance alongside envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to spearhead the negotiations.
Yet those discussions could be slow going, and the two sides appear far apart — at least publicly. It remains unclear who even will speak for the Iranians in those negotiations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday, as the US awaited a response to its opening 15-point peace proposal.
Trump and his team have offered little clarity on how they plan to orchestrate a clean exit from the Middle East, especially in the next couple weeks — a prospect that has exposed fresh cracks within the Republican Party.
Some senior Republican lawmakers have grown so desperate for information that they publicly criticized the Pentagon over a pair of briefings they described as lackluster. During those classified sessions, Defense Department officials were evasive when confronted with questions from members on both sides of the aisle about why Trump was massing troops and how exactly he planned to bring an end to the war, lawmakers said.
“It’s fair to say that not every question that every member asked could be answered,” said GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota.
Others, including some of the GOP’s biggest defense hawks, have been alarmed by the administration’s efforts to mitigate the ripple effects of the war, such as lifting sanctions on Russian oil and considering diverting US military resources from Ukraine.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Texas Rep. Michael McCaul said of easing pressure on Russia. “They’re providing active intelligence on our military and making Shahed drones with the Iranians.”
While most Republican lawmakers have remained aligned with Trump on the war so far, at least publicly, many have urged him to finish the fight as quickly as possible — and do whatever he can to avoid putting boots on the ground.
Several lawmakers have already warned that deploying troops would drive a wedge through the party, prompting a push for the first formal vote to authorize military force since 2002 and further imperiling any effort to approve hundreds of billions of dollars in additional funding for the war.
“I support our president, I support our troops. But I hope we’ve learned from Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan,” said GOP Rep. Jeff Van Drew, adding “I pray to God” the US isn’t drawn into a protracted war. “We can’t get involved in every country in the world. We just can’t.”
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he’s frustrated that he’s getting information about troops and other matters “through press reports” instead of classified briefings.
“If there are ground troops that are en route or that are planning on being stationed there — clearly we’ve had troops in the region for decades — but if this is something different than that, then we absolutely need to be briefed on it and we need to concur,” Fitzpatrick said.
Those rising political pressures, however, are only likely to complicate Trump’s options for easing the more urgent energy crisis spurred by the war. Iran has vowed to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz, a seizure that’s effectively halted the flow of oil and driven up prices across the world.
At the energy conference in Houston earlier this week, oil executives warned the supply crunch would only get worse the longer the war drags on, intensifying competition for available barrels and rippling across other parts of the economy. In a sign that contagion is already beginning, US stocks have steadily declined over the past month, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing more than 7% of its value.
But simply declaring an end to the war will do little to change those dynamics if Iran maintains power over the strait, analysts and investors warned. Among the military options that Pentagon officials have prepared for Trump is a proposal to attempt to seize control by invading Iran’s Kharg Island or other smaller islands that are critical to the strait. Still, those could open the US up to heavy casualties with little guarantee that it would succeed.
“There is a conundrum here in this war in that you have to figure out how to get the strait open if you’re going to settle it,” said Sarah Bianchi, chief strategist of international affairs and public policy for investment bank Evercore ISI and a former senior Biden administration official. “There’s not really an obviously clear path to do that.”
Among some Trump advisers and allies, restoring the Strait of Hormuz to its pre-war status quo is now seen as the objective that could allow the president to declare victory and end the conflict — even as they acknowledge it’s a far cry from the lofty goals of regime change and a US-friendly era in Iran that Trump had hoped for one month ago.
Yet even that could prove too ambitious; during a meeting with US allies in Europe, Rubio said he told them that once the war is over, they would likely need to embark on a separate effort to secure the strait.
As for the US’ current mission in Iran, Trump later that day provided a familiar refrain: “They are being decimated. We are talking now. They want to make a deal.”
He didn’t offer any more specifics.
Lauren Fox and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.
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