Trump’s New Red Line Could Set the Iran War on a Fateful Course

“The president is not messing around,” Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday on Fox News.

“Unlike his predecessors, he stands by his red lines, and he’s not going to allow this genocidal regime to hold the world’s energy supplies or economies hostage.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, meanwhile, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.” His comment struck chilling parallels with modern US conflicts, from Vietnam to Iraq, that started small but degenerated into vast and losing wars of attrition.

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Still, advocates of the administration’s strategy insist that the air assault has weakened Iran’s military threat and that Israel’s attacks on leadership — including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — will soon begin to tell.

“The more that goes on, that’s another symbol of the (fragility of) the government and their strategy to outlast Trump, which I don’t think is going to happen,” US Navy retired Vice Adm. Robert Harward told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday.

Some analysts believe Trump may try to break Iranian resistance with an assault on Iran’s oil exporting epicenter on Kharg Island or by seeking to flush out missiles and drone sites along the Strait of Hormuz. But such operations might require the use of ground troops, in a gamble even greater than Trump’s threatened assaults on Iranian power plants.

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Trump faces a narrowing equation. He may need to escalate the war to preserve his credibility and to grapple for a way out. But doing so would intensify an increasingly intractable conflict he claims to have already won.