Stalemate in the Gulf: Why Neither Washington Nor Tehran Can Chart a Path Out of Conflict

The United States and Iran remain locked in a six-month conflict with no clear exit strategy, each side clinging to unrealistic expectations of what the other will accept to end the fighting.

The human and economic toll is already severe. Iranian casualties number in the thousands from U.S. and allied strikes, while thousands more have died at the hands of Tehran’s security forces. Decades of sanctions compounded by wartime disruption have devastated Iran’s economy. On the American side, more than 750 service members have been wounded and 18 killed since the war began on February 28. The Pentagon has committed tens of billions of dollars to military operations, with a current focus on securing oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz in an attempt to restore pre-war maritime trade levels.

That effort, while resource-intensive, has yielded disputed results. Even by the White House’s most optimistic assessments, only a fraction of pre-war oil traffic is moving through the strait. Independent data suggests the effectiveness of the operation remains hotly debated.

Diplomatic off-ramps have failed. Multiple third-party mediation attempts have collapsed amid deep mutual distrust. Analysts assess that Tehran’s current objective is to impose sufficient costs to deter future U.S. and Israeli military action.

“The lesson in Tehran is that neither diplomacy nor a temporary ceasefire has yet produced durable restraint from the United States,” says Negar Mortazavi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy and host of The Iran Podcast. “That deepens the argument that Iran still has not established enough deterrence.”

Mortazavi notes a doctrinal shift: Iran is moving from a primarily defensive deterrence posture toward a more offensive form of coercion. “The thinking is that simply responding when the United States escalates is not enough,” she says.

Despite heavy degradation of its conventional military, Iran retains significant asymmetric capabilities. “Iran definitely still retains the capacity and will to conduct asymmetric operations outside the region,” says Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Group. “Iran has been very deliberate and proportional with its asymmetric responses, and so could be holding a terror attack in the West as an ace up its sleeve, if the situation escalates again or Trump tries to send ground forces to Kharg Island.”

Indications suggest Tehran is exploring expansion of the conflict beyond the Gulf. Both sides are already engaged in a shadowy hybrid war involving cyberattacks, sabotage, and disinformation campaigns. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) maintains dedicated units for extraterritorial operations and has a history of terror attacks against U.S. interests abroad, as well as assassination plots targeting dissidents and American officials.

“The assassinations are definitely something to take very seriously,” Clarke says. “Trump killed [IRGC commander Qasem] Soleimani and had a hand in killing the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]. He’s likely to remain on Iran’s hit list for the foreseeable future, as are members of his family.” Iranian state media has recently hinted at potential threats against Barron Trump, the president’s son.

“The hardcore IRGC figures currently in charge of Iran are unlikely to drop their attempts to kill Trump, even if the U.S. and Iran agree to a ceasefire,” Clarke adds.

Any strike on a U.S. official or military asset would almost certainly trigger renewed air strikes. Yet Pentagon planners appear increasingly cognizant of both resource limitations and the vulnerability of U.S. facilities across the region. Experts tracking Iran’s missile program say Tehran retains enough attack drones, ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles to continue threatening vessels and U.S. bases throughout the Middle East.

While Israel, the United States, and their Gulf allies have destroyed substantial portions of Iran’s offensive drone and missile stocks, launchers, and production facilities, they have not eliminated the programs entirely, says Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and expert on arms control and nonproliferation.

Early in the war, Iran launched salvos of up to 300 missiles per day. “There was this nice curve, where you saw all the big salvos happen, and then they dropped,” Lewis says. “And it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re dropping to zero’ — and then they were just hanging out at 30 launches a day for a couple of weeks, before the ceasefire.”

“All of these attack plans are based on a kind of theory of the case that there are people or components or materials that we can destroy, and then they can’t be replaced,” Lewis continues. “The evidence seems to be that you can always replace these things.” He notes that Israel’s effort to dismantle Iran’s ballistic missile program dates back to the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. “What they did was make judgments about bottlenecks in what they hit. And it seems like those judgments were wrong.”

In the first 30 days of open conflict, U.S. and partner forces expended hundreds of advanced interceptors designed to defeat Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. Experts now warn the U.S. may lack sufficient stocks of these critical air defenses to sustain a prolonged defense. Tehran is well aware of this vulnerability and will almost certainly retaliate if strikes resume.

“Iran views the U.S. military infrastructure surrounding it as part of the problem,” Mortazavi says. “American bases across the Persian Gulf and the wider region are seen not as defensive installations, but as the architecture that makes repeated attacks on Iran possible. That is why Tehran has targeted U.S. bases so extensively: it wants to raise the cost of maintaining the military infrastructure that could enable the next war.”

For now, Washington appears content to avoid further air strikes or complex ground operations. No major new troop movements have been detected beyond rotations involving the 50,000 personnel, hundreds of aircraft, and nearly two dozen naval vessels already deployed to the region.

President Trump routinely threatens game-changing action, but his rhetoric has not translated into strategic shifts since the April ceasefire. Despite invoking “maximum pressure,” “unconditional surrender,” and warnings that “a civilization will cease to exist,” the fundamental dynamic of the conflict remains unaltered.

The administration’s latest initiative, dubbed an “Economic D-Day,” bets that additional sanctions — atop 47 years of existing measures — will make life in Iran untenable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent notably declined to announce “secondary sanctions” targeting countries that help Iran evade direct sanctions, a move that would primarily target China. Asked why, Bessent replied: “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

Historical precedent offers little optimism: decades of economic pressure on Iran, North Korea, and Russia have rarely produced a straight line to regime change.

Notably, Iran’s nuclear program — long framed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the central casus belli — is scarcely mentioned by any belligerent today. Strategic discourse is dominated instead by the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flowed before the war.

The White House is aggressively courting international shippers and insurers to convince them that transit through the strait is safe. If successful, analysts expect Tehran to simply shift pressure to another vulnerability. The regime’s priority is less the war’s impact on the global economy than securing a victory against the U.S. and ensuring its own survival.

“For Tehran, victory means survival, restored deterrence, a durable end to the war… and reducing the ability of the United States and Israel to launch another attack,” Mortazavi says. “Washington may possess military supremacy, but Tehran believes it is fighting for survival. And the side that considers the war existential is often prepared to absorb costs that the more powerful but less committed adversary is not.”

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