Neither War nor Peace With Iran

Vice President J.D. Vance told confidants last week that walking out of negotiations with Iran and announcing a blockade on Iranian ports “would probably force the Iranians to fold within a few days,” according to the Financial Times. Instead, Vance found himself stood up by Iranian negotiators, who waited until the last minute on Tuesday afternoon to announce that they would not attend the second round of talks in Pakistan.

President Donald Trump, who had threatened “to be bombing” the minute that the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire expired on Wednesday, instead announced that he would “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” while continuing to enforce the blockade. Axios reports that privately, the Trump administration is willing to extend “another three to five days of ceasefire.” In other words, the U.S. and Iran are now locked in a state of neither war nor peace.

As in the war itself, the Trump administration walked into the ceasefire negotiations confident that U.S. pressure could force Iran to surrender quickly and at a minimal cost. And instead, the administration has again discovered that Iran is able to hold out longer than expected and do damage in return. Although mercifully fewer people are being killed than during the full-on war, the standoff in the Persian Gulf is an unstable situation, and the damage to the world economy is accumulating. 

On Wednesday morning, Iranian forces attacked and stopped two container ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the only entrance to the Persian Gulf, causing “heavy damage” to one of them, according to the U.K. Maritime Trade Organization.

In his announcement of the ceasefire extension, Trump claimed that Iran was unable to show up to talks because its government was “seriously fractured.” But factions of the Iranian government, across the board, have been clear that they do not want to negotiate as long as the blockade remains in place. Iranian Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, whom the Trump administration had identified as a moderate leader, stated on Tuesday night that the blockade violates the ceasefire and Iran is “prepared to reveal new cards on the battlefield.”

Throughout the last few days of the ceasefire, Trump tried to box Iran in by claiming it had already agreed to give up “everything,” including its uranium enrichment and interventions in other countries, for free. He had, after all, successfully pushed the limits once before. Pakistani mediators had insisted (and Trump privately agreed) at the beginning that the U.S.-Iranian truce would include a Lebanese-Israeli ceasefire. Then Trump and Vance claimed that Lebanon was not part of the deal, and Israel would have to continue fighting there.

Despite Iranian leaders insisting that the continued fighting was a deal-breaker, Ghalibaf showed up to talks in Pakistan anyway. Trump declared a ceasefire in Lebanon a few days later.

So it seemed to go with the blockade. While Ghalibaf publicly accused Trump of “lies” and “tricks,” he left the door open to negotiations. Perhaps, as Trump promised, the blockade would be lifted “very quickly” after the resumption of talks. However, an Iranian source told the BBC that “everything changed” on Monday, when the U.S. Navy decided to enforce the blockade by blowing a hole in an Iranian cargo ship. Iran decided that talks were not worth it.

The blockade does give the U.S. leverage over Iran. Trump’s confidence in starting the war came from the January 2026 uprising, when an economic crisis sent Iranians pouring into the street. The government put down the uprising by killing thousands of people. Now that Iran has suffered heavy war damage, with no easy way to pay for reconstruction, the country is staring down an even worse postwar situation.

Yet the blockade has not caused the kind of instant collapse that Trump and Vance were hoping for. Iran has somewhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months before its oil storage fills up and it is forced to cut production. Other Iranian industries had about 100 days of inventory when the war started. Despite the U.S. Navy turning around or seizing some ships, dozens of other Iranian ships may have made it through the blockade. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is also running down the clock because of Iran’s own blockade of Hormuz. Arab monarchies in the gulf have already shut in around half of their oil production, leading to what the International Energy Agency is calling as”the biggest [energy] crisis ​in history.” The effects of it are spreading outward. Several Asian countries and Slovenia have imposed gas station rationing, with Australia expected to follow soon. Airlines around the world have started canceling flights due to fuel shortages.

Trump has repeatedly bragged about the Hormuz blockade attracting empty oil tankers to American shores. While some American oil producers will profit, that also means less oil supply (and higher prices) for American consumers. And the U.S. Treasury is considering a financial bailout for the United Arab Emirates, according to the Wall Street Journal, due to the threat that an economic crisis in the gulf could threaten the U.S. dollar.

Still, neither the U.S. nor Iran seem eager to return to full-on war, partly because both sides are running out of ammunition. In a month of fighting, the U.S. military burned through about half of its air defense interceptors, half of its Precision Strike Missiles, and 30 percent of its Tomahawk cruise missiles, all weapons that are needed elsewhere in the world and will take years to replace. It’s unclear exactly how much ammunition the Iranian military has left, but different estimates put Iran’s missile arsenal between 50 percent and 70 percent of prewar levels.

So for now, the region is stuck in an awkward, tense standoff that continues to hurt everyone. It is possible that eventually, one side (or both) will back down. But it is also possible that—out of desperation, overconfidence, or just plain impatience—one side will decide to restart the war. Despite its promises to avoid “endless war,” the Trump administration has walked into a situation whose timeline it cannot control.

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Source: https://reason.com/2026/04/22/neither-war-nor-peace-with-iran/