How Trump's team misjudged Iran's war response
Trump administration officials have been improvising responses, from rushing embassy evacuations to scrambling together proposals to stabilise fuel prices.
On 18 February, as US President Donald Trump weighed launching military action against Iran, Energy Secretary Chris Wright publicly dismissed concerns that a potential conflict might destabilise oil markets.
Pointing to the brief and limited market reaction during the previous year's Israeli and US strikes against Iran, Wright suggested there was little reason for alarm, reports The New York Times.
Several other Trump advisers privately echoed this view, brushing aside warnings that Iran might this time respond by targeting the shipping corridors responsible for transporting roughly a fifth of the world's oil.
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That miscalculation has since become difficult to ignore.
Iran has moved to threaten commercial vessels navigating the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway through which all Persian Gulf oil shipments must travel, bringing maritime traffic to a halt, driving up oil prices and forcing the Trump administration into damage-control mode as gasoline costs rise for American consumers.
The episode reflects a broader failure to anticipate how Iran would react to a conflict it views as a direct threat to its survival.
Tehran's response has been significantly more forceful than during the 12-day war the previous June, involving sustained missile and drone attacks on US military installations, neighbouring Arab nations and Israeli population centres.
Trump administration officials have been improvising responses, from rushing embassy evacuations to scrambling together proposals to stabilise fuel prices.
Following a classified congressional briefing on Tuesday (10 March), Senator Christopher Murphy of Connecticut said publicly that the administration lacked any strategy for reopening the Strait of Hormuz safely.
Within the administration itself, some officials have privately grown doubtful about the absence of a coherent endgame, though they have largely avoided voicing those concerns to a president who continues to publicly characterise the military campaign as an unqualified success.
The disconnect between Trump's sweeping stated objectives, including demanding that Iran produce a leader willing to submit to his terms, and the narrower, more achievable goals described by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has added to the confusion over the war's direction.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration's approach, saying a solid plan had been in place before hostilities began and predicting that oil prices would fall once the conflict concluded.
She framed the market disruption as a temporary but necessary consequence of confronting what she described as a terrorist threat.
Trump urges courage from oil tanker crews
Hegseth conceded at a Tuesday Pentagon briefing that Iran's aggressive posture toward its neighbours had not been fully anticipated, though he characterised Tehran's behaviour as a sign of desperation rather than strength.
Trump, for his part, has publicly vented his irritation at the shipping disruption, urging oil tanker crews to show courage and sail through the strait anyway.
While some military advisers had flagged the possibility of a severe Iranian reaction before the beginning of the war began and warned that Tehran might interpret the strikes as an existential assault, others in the administration believed that eliminating Iran's senior leadership would bring more pragmatic figures to power who would seek to end the fighting.
When briefed on the risk of an oil price spike, Trump acknowledged it but treated it as a secondary concern.
He directed Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to develop contingency options, including government-backed political risk insurance and the possibility of Navy escorts for oil tankers. However, he did not address these options publicly until more than two days into the conflict, and the naval escorts had not yet been carried out.
Wright himself contributed to market instability on Tuesday when he posted on social media – and then deleted – a claim that the Navy had successfully escorted a tanker through the strait.
The post briefly lifted stock markets and calmed oil traders; its retraction sent markets back into turmoil.
Complicating efforts to resume shipping, US intelligence detected early signs that Iran was preparing to seed the strait with naval mines.
In response, the US military reported striking 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels on Tuesday evening.
Congressional Republicans have grown uneasy, worried that sustained high oil prices could undermine their ability to sell an economic agenda to voters before the midterm elections.
Trump has been privately and publicly promoting Venezuelan oil as a buffer against energy market shocks, and the administration announced on Tuesday the opening of a Texas refinery it said would help offset any long-term supply disruptions.
Finding an exit
The administration's apparent confidence that commercial shipping could continue uninterrupted is striking, given recent precedent.
Just last year, Trump authorised a military campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen after the group's missile and drone attacks had effectively shut down Red Sea commerce, a disruption Trump himself had publicly blamed for costing the global economy billions.
Since the start of the Iran war, Trump's public messaging has been inconsistent.
Aides have privately expressed frustration at his lack of discipline in communicating clear war objectives.
The president has said both that the conflict could last more than a month and that it is essentially finished, while also promising that the United States will press forward with even greater resolve.
Meanwhile, Rubio and Hegseth appear to have agreed on a more defined public framework, articulating three specific military objectives: destroying Iran's capacity to launch missiles, eliminating the factories producing those weapons and dismantling the Iranian navy. That framing seemed designed to create conditions for an earlier conclusion to the war.
Matthew Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser during Trump's first term, observed that Trump had appeared at his news conference to be weighing whether to pursue more expansive goals that could prolong the conflict, particularly given Iran's continued defiance and its grip on the strait.
Pottinger, now affiliated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted that Trump was signalling he wanted to avoid having to fight the same war a second time.
Urgency around finding an exit has intensified as oil prices climb and the US military's munitions stockpiles are drawn down rapidly.
Officials told members of Congress in private briefings that the first two days of fighting had consumed approximately $5.6 billion in munitions, a burn rate far higher than publicly acknowledged figures had suggested.
Iranian officials have shown no signs of backing down, warning that the strait's future depends on whether the US and Israel stand down.
Ali Larijani, Iran's top national security official, captured Tehran's position bluntly in a social media post on Tuesday saying, "Strait of Hormuz will either be a Strait of peace and prosperity for all, or it will be a Strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers."
