President Trump has told aides privately that he would consider ending the ceasefire with Iran if Tehran kills American troops, U.S. officials said, insisting that the weekslong pause in airstrikes remains intact despite a steady stream of violent skirmishes.
The president’s reluctance to reignite the war suggests he might be willing to withstand smaller flare-ups for weeks—or even months—to avoid a broader conflict in the Middle East.
The U.S. and Iran this week engaged in some of the most intense fighting yet since a ceasefire went into effect in early April, with Iran firing missiles and drones on regional U.S. bases and Kuwait’s international airport. The attacks left one person dead.
The fight over control of the Strait of Hormuz has caused massive disruptions in global energy markets and international shipping, with Tehran restricting the free flow of trade in the strategic waterway and the U.S. imposing a strict blockade to and from Iran’s ports.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the tit-for-tat attacks as purely defensive in nature and not a renewed outbreak of full-scale war.
“They are happening in response to an Iranian action,” Rubio said in a House hearing Wednesday. “If they don’t shoot at those ships, we don’t shoot, but we have to respond.”
But U.S. officials said the repeated attacks have ratcheted up pressure on Trump and cast doubt over the long-term viability of the ceasefire. The president, meanwhile, has said repeatedly that he is on the verge of signing an end-of-war agreement that reopens the strait, dismantles Iran’s nuclear work and eliminates the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
Trump adds that he is in no rush to complete the pact, saying in a New York Post interview published Wednesday it is unlikely—although still possible—that the U.S. blockade could last until Labor Day. At the same time, the president was quick to intervene and press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off a planned military offensive in Lebanon after it threatened diplomatic progress.
Trump and his aides vowed the conflict would last no longer than six weeks after it started on Feb. 28, saying the goal was to eliminate Tehran’s nuclear and missile threat.
“In that part of the world, ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. He said the current situation was under control and peace talks with Iran were advancing.
“It takes two to tango. We hit them very hard on something else and so they were responding,” he said.
A White House official reiterated that Trump prefers to rid Iran of its nuclear program diplomatically but has been clear about his red lines.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday that Israeli attacks on Beirut would lead to a return to all-out war, linking the fate of that conflict with the future of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.
The heightened fighting in the strait and Iran’s escalation against regional targets—one of a handful of mounting crises in the Middle East—sharpens Trump’s diplomatic dilemma. The question before him is whether to sign an Iran agreement that falls far short of his maximalist goals, or hold out for the terms he wants but is unlikely to get.
For several weeks, Trump and his team have been working on a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran that would define the issues for negotiations over a roughly 60-day period. Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal last Friday, telling aides that Iran needed to make serious concessions up front, not over an extended period. Tehran shouldn’t receive any benefits until it had done so, Trump told aides.
Iran, however, says it would negotiate its nuclear program only after the U.S. unfreezes its assets, or provides some other financial windfall.
Iran also wants to end fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, its proxy, leading Trump to angrily demand Monday that Netanyahu call off planned attacks in Beirut. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continued Wednesday, with the U.S.-designated terrorist group firing rockets into Israel while Israeli attacks hit near the Lebanese capital.
“We have to disarm Hezbollah, and we have to demilitarize Lebanon,” Netanyahu told CNBC on Wednesday. “This is a goal that the president and I share, and that is what we have to do.”
Tehran feels the outcome of the war leaves it in a position to shape the content and sequence of the negotiations, Iranian officials have repeatedly said.
Each proposal and counterproposal takes days to negotiate, complicated by the time it takes to wind new text through Iran’s fractured leadership structure. The start-stop negotiations have bored the president, Trump himself said this week, as analysts say he is feeling the squeeze of a worsening diplomatic situation.
“He does seem stuck,” said Steven Cook, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “The Iranians are demonstrating that they are willing to endure pain and thus haven’t capitulated. That leaves the president in a bad situation.”
If Trump wants to bring an end to the conflict quickly, it can probably be done, analysts say. But it would require accepting some vague agreement with Iran not to develop nuclear weapons and agreeing to future talks on issues like enrichment and Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium. These wouldn’t be hard commitments.
That was the direction the administration seemed headed toward in recent weeks. A senior U.S. official told reporters that a framework deal would end the war by first reopening the Strait of Hormuz and unwinding the U.S. blockade. Iran would pledge to dispose of its highly enriched uranium but without saying when or how, and there wouldn’t be at this stage any Iranian pledge to suspend enrichment for years.
Trump’s alternative is to accept that the war can’t be wrapped up quickly and that the economic pressure on Iran will eventually become impossible to manage, even if that is months away. So far, Trump has avoided making a choice, flipping between threatening further military escalation and claiming a deal is nearly complete.
“The Iran war seems to be the first mess created by the administration’s predilection for hard power, high-stakes gambits that the president can’t either ignore or extricate us from,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president for foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com
