Back in March, Senate Republicans were hopeful the war in Iran would last only a matter of weeks — a limited operation that would allow gas prices to fall back in place and avoid the prospect of a conflict dragging closer to the midterm elections.
Nearly six months on, the protracted war has thoroughly vexed President Donald Trump and administration officials as they try to bring it to an end. It also means Republican lawmakers are being pressed regularly to explain the strategy.
“We get a lot of calls about it into the office. They’re just wearing out on it,” said West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a member of Republican leadership, adding that the timeline has become the war’s most problematic part for constituents.
“We’ve done this before where we’ve had very elongated engagements,” Capito said. “People don’t want to see that. They don’t want to see boots on the ground. They don’t want to see our money going there. There’s a fatigue factor, for sure.”
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The administration has been seeking an off-ramp for months, especially amid reports that U.S. munitions are dwindling rapidly. Officials pointed to a “memorandum of understanding” that was agreed to in mid-June, but the framework was effectively dead only weeks later after fighting reignited when commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz were fired upon by Iranian forces.
Most recently, Iran said it would only allow American ships to navigate freely through the strait if the U.S. met a series of high demands. Among those were billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the end of the naval blockade and the exit of U.S. troops from the region.
This has put Trump and the administration in a tough position as they work for a deal to reopen the strait for business — which has become the main priority ahead of November. But lawmakers believe the roller-coaster nature of the war and the negotiations to bring it to a halt aren’t doing them any favors.
“I wish the president were more clear about what his objectives are,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “This off again, on again [cadence] is creating some confusion in people’s minds.”
Cornyn argued that the weekslong timeline laid out by the administration at the outset was a mistake in itself.
“The enemy always gets a vote. That’s the problem with providing timetables and deadlines in a military conflict,” he said.
The war is also colliding with Election Day, less than three months out, something Republicans who wanted the war wrapped up prior to the summer warned about when it was launched in February.
According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, only 35 percent said they approve of the U.S. strikes against Iran, with only 17 percent saying that stability in the Middle East will get better over the next year
Consumers are also still being hit with high gas prices, which sit around $4 per gallon on average — about a dollar more than at the start of the war.
Few believe that figure will improve. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they believe gas prices will worsen.
And the public doesn’t understand the endgame. Sixty-nine percent said in a previous Reuters/Ipsos poll that Trump has not “clearly explained the goals” of the military effort in Iran.
For now, the White House is trying to take an alternate tack after months of threatening to wipe Iran off the earth at times.
“We are low-keying it,” Trump told Axios recently. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” Trump said of the back-and-forth with Iran.
Adding to the frustrations for lawmakers has been a lack of briefings from the administration. Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told reporters he couldn’t remember the last time he received a briefing from the Pentagon regarding the war.
“It’s not recent and it’s not frequent or routine,” he told reporters.
But as the Senate tackled the final week pile-up before the summer recess, Iran was the dominant subject when Vice President JD Vance attended a Senate Republican luncheon.
According to members, Vance was peppered with questions about the conflict, with some urging the administration to be more transparent.
Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy suggested he and other officials hold a news conference “and spend all day talking straight up to the American people about where we are, why we went in, what the hold up is, how much damage has been done to Iran, what we know about their nuclear stockpiles, what we think about the strait.”
He told reporters he thought “there’s a lot of confusion about Iran.” And, Kennedy admitted, “I wish the American people could have heard what the vice president told us.”
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