Middle East: forever war?

By Richard North - July 9, 2026

It says something of British politics (and the media) that while open season has been declared against the Farage entity, the Iran demi-conflict has been grumbling away in the background, with not a fraction the attention devoted to it.

But now that open hostilities have erupted again, with US forces conducting strikes against Iranian targets for the second night running, it has become impossible to ignore. Thus, the legacy media is once more, albeit grudgingly, covering the conflict which many people hoped but no-one sensible believed was actually over.

What makes this episode very different is that it looks as if we are in for the long haul, signalled by Trump’s declaration that his hard-won ceasefire “is over”, and the initial peace agreement was dead, to which the president added the comment that dealing with Tehran was simply “a waste of time”.

One could express surprise that it’s taken Trump so long to come to that conclusion, when the regime’s favourite chant has remained “death to America” – unmodified by diplomatic contacts – while he remains the Ayatollahs’ No 1 target for assassination.

However, it could also be said that the president must be seen to go the extra mile in pursuit of a lasting peace, before launching the mother of all airstrikes that will put the regime down for keeps – assuming that such an outcome is guaranteed by airpower alone.

The dilemma that Trump faces is thoroughly explored in an analytical piece by The New York Times, which tells us by way of a headline: “As Iran Cease-Fire Frays, Trump Faces a Muddled War and Unpalatable Options”.

In a less than complimentary sub-head, the paper the intones: “The president appears to be confronting the consequences of a cease-fire deal cobbled together in haste, with little movement toward resolving the key issues driving the conflict”.

The NYT might be expected to have a down on president Trump – it is not his most prominent fan – but the president has held himself as hostage so many times, with expressions of unguarded hubris, that it was inevitable that he was going to find the collision with reality a little bit bruising.

It is hardly unkind, therefore, for the NYT to remind us that, just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East”.

It was typical bravado for Mr Trump, the paper says as it remarks: “But the “peace” he was celebrating – the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month – was already beginning to unravel.

It also says – articulating a brutal truth – that the result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.

It’s there that the paper gets to intone its sub-head phrasing, somewhat expanded, as surmises that Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

That, it adds, has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme – to say nothing of its missile programme, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.

All these, in fact, are the things which were left on the sidelines in Trump’s Gadarene rush for a deal, when these elements should have been the bedrock of any agreement – leaving him wide open to criticism from the likes of the NYT.

The options open to Trump are messy. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on yesterday, after the two sides had already exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those, the NYT says, included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants.

An alternative is to reimpose the US blockade of Iranian ports, an attempt to cut off the country’s economic lifeline. But that would require a continued, intense American presence in the region, and while Trump contended in April that it would lead to Iranian economic collapse, his earlier imposition of it did not, the paper reminds us.

That leaves him electing for a twilight world where neither peace nor all-out war prevail, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust, comforts the NYT – to some degree they already have.

That’s not the view of the Financial Times though. Oil prices rose by the most in two months on the flare-up of tensions. Brent crude settled 5.2 percent higher at $78.02 a barrel – its biggest one-day jump since early May. The international benchmark had earlier risen as much as 8.7 per cent to $80.59. Global stocks slipped, while government bonds sold off as rising oil prices stoked inflation concerns.

The Washington Times is also expressing its concern about gas prices, noting that oil prices rose to their highest point in weeks. I guess that’s the way the energy markets adjust.

Either which way, the NYT is able to opine that, for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary – “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks – an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon.

And, it tells us, the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.

Needless to say, the BBC – vying with the NYT as a non-fan – is happy to join the ranks of the Trump critics (it would be most unhappy in any other role). It has the Mighty Sage Jeremy Bowen pronouncing that, “For all his bluster, Trump has no better option than talks with Iran”.

This is after Trump had said at the Nato summit in Turkey, “I don’t want to deal with them (the Iranian regime) anymore, they’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people”.

With him then adding: “And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over”, there doesn’t seem an awful lot of room for a negotiated settlement, even if Bowen thinks the door has been left open for more talks.

If the escalation between the two sides can be stopped, he says, mediators involved in the negotiating process believe it is possible to do a deal with Iran that will allow shipping to transit the Strait. It would, he opines, have to be part of a wider agreement that unfreezes Iranian assets held abroad, allows Iran to sell its oil and most critically for the regime acknowledges Iran’s authority over the Strait.

In return, Bowen thinks Iran would have to accept limits on enriching uranium, allow UN nuclear inspectors back in, and to account for stocks of what Trump calls “nuclear dust”. But, he concedes, the events of the last 24 hours show how hard that will be.

Generally, though, none of the legacy media commentors seem to have any words of good cheer for Trump. The Washington Post thinks that the new hostilities thrust Trump and his administration back into a familiar corner: mired in an unpopular war that he cannot seem to end, with midterm elections less than four months away.

Now, with that deal in tatters, Republicans face those elections tied to a war most voters oppose, unable to end it but also, for the most part, unwilling to break with the president who started it.

Even the Telegraph here – potentially a lukewarm ally – is having critics say that Trump’s deal “was no good in the first place, a desperate sticking plaster to bring a halt to an unpopular war”.

Now he is faced with an unpalatable choice: grant further concessions to Iran to restore freedom of navigation, accept that Iran controls the Strait indefinitely, or return to all-out war.

For us, this is a timely reminder of what real-world politics look like – far from the cloying, parochial concerns about the soon-to-be former MP for Clacton. But then, how can the prospect of an all-out war in the Middle East even compete?

Only one national paper in today’s crop runs Iran on its front page.