Donald Trump misjudged how quickly he could win this war. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Within two hours of entering No 10 on Monday afternoon, Andy Burnham had his first call with Donald Trump. After chit-chatting about the football (both agreed England had an “excellent tournament”) and Manchester (our new prime minister invited the president to visit the city Trump once described as a “town”), they got on to far trickier territory: the strait of Hormuz.

The US has attacked Iran for the eleventh consecutive night, hitting aircraft hangars and drone storage sites across the country. It came after Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US air bases and neighbouring Gulf states, which have accused it of deliberately targeting desalination plants that are essential to life in the region. Each side now claims it is preventing the other from gaining control over the strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil was shipped before the war began. Vessels carrying crucial shipments of oil, gas and fertiliser remain at a standstill.

“Operation Epic Fury” started with the aim of regime change. Since then, its objective has morphed into reopening the strait and undoing the damage caused by the US and Israel’s decision to start the war. The president drastically underestimated Iran’s capacity for enduring pain, and is now trying to bomb his way out of a conflict that he created.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told the Senate the US-Israel war on Iran had cost $37.5bn so far, as he faced lawmakers furious over the conflict’s soaring price tag and the deaths last week of three American service members.

Donald Trump told voters on election night in 2024: “I’m not going to start wars.” His decision to bomb Iran on 28 February in partnership with Benjamin Netanyahu was astonishing both in its aggression and its audacious break with this promise. Trump did nothing to prepare the US for war, gave seemingly no thought to the fact that Iran would inevitably hold the strait hostage if it came under attack, and resorted to contradictory explanations for his decision. In the war’s early days, he described “what we did in Venezuela” as a model for what he hoped to achieve. “He thought he would go down in history as the American president who had resolved the Iran problem,” Nasr told me. “In his mind, this was a legacy-building transformation that would be quick and cost-free.”

That has proven a fatal miscalculation. Pete Hegseth, the US self-styled “secretary of war”, said the early US strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had “cut off the head of the snake.” But regime change is now a distant prospect. Trump underestimated the resilience of the Iranian regime and overestimated the power of protests against it. After just five months, his misadventure is as unpopular with American voters as the Vietnam war was six years in. It could yet escalate into a wider regional conflict, with the Houthis threatening a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia. Even Trump – whose private firm, The Trump Organization, is at work on a skyscraper in Dubai – won’t be insulated from the consequences of this violence.

The memorandum of understanding, a vague, short document that the US and Iran signed on 17 June, gave a brief respite from the strikes and (supposedly) initiated a 60-day negotiation period in which time both sides could reach permanent agreement on – among other things – the future of the strait. But it broke down when Iran fired on three commercial tankers that had used a shipping lane close to the shores of Oman, rather than a route off the Iranian coast approved by Tehran. “When ceasefires are violated, you have two options; either react to preserve the ceasefire, or use the violation as an excuse to end it,” Nasr says.

Trump went with the latter option, calling Iran’s leaders “scum” and declaring the ceasefire “over” earlier this month. This week, the US energy secretary Chris Wright said the US mission had shifted towards ensuring oil shipments could move through the strait. It’s worth remembering that the strait had never been closed for an extended period. Before 28 February, ships had been sailing through it without obstruction.