There is a new headline about the United States’ conflict with Iran every day.

On June 7, Iran and Israel traded missiles. CBS News reported that, soon after, President Donald Trump told the two Middle East states to “stop shooting,” with Iran announcing on Monday that it had halted attacks on Israel.

The war has not gone as planned when it was originally touted by the Trump administration, and has come as a surprise to many given Trump’s numerous campaign trail promises that he would not start new wars.

In November 2024, following his victory over Democratic nominee and former Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

In an interview with “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Trump denied ever saying that.

“First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?” Trump said.

Professor David Lublin is chair of the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. When President Trump announced the initial attacks on Iran in late February, he made it clear that the goal was a regime change. Lublin said, now, the goalposts of victory seem to have shifted dramatically.

“The major goal at this point appears to be for Trump to get out of this without looking like this is the mess that it is,” Lublin said. “He telegraphs his desperation for a deal routinely with his repeated ‘the deal is imminent’ statements, which are strange, because while they may reassure the markets and the American people, they telegraph to the Iranian leadership, ‘you should stand firm, because I’m weak at this point.’”

Lublin said Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz has been crippling to the United States and has turned out to be a political chess piece that is, in some ways, more important than the United States’ nuclear threat, because “nuclear bombs can’t really be used in the sense that carrying out that threat is advancing everything to unimaginable levels.”

In March, The Guardian reported that the closing of the strait had led to a disruption of energy supplies not seen since the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution created similar crises in the 1970s. In late April, barrels of oil reached prices as high as $126, with CNN reporting that those Brent Crude barrels had been trading at around $73 before the war.

Now, Lublin thinks that reopening the strait has become a top priority for this administration.

“One gets the sense that any agreement is going to be simply to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in some fashion, and to kick everything else down the curb, which would really constitute, no matter how it’s framed, a devastating loss for the U.S.,” he said.

Area resident Eli Siegel was in Pikesville on Sunday, and said that what he wants to see and what he considers to be a victory in Iran is “eliminating the threat.”

“I think there needs to be a regime change,” he said. “The regime now has openly stated that they look to destroy America and Israel.”

Siegel said the idea that Iran has in any way changed its perspective on dealing with the United States and Israel is untrue.

“It’s nonsense,” he said.

One Baltimore Jewish resident, who preferred to remain anonymous, agreed that the United States and its allies shouldn’t back out at this point without accomplishing the original goal.

“[I want to see a] regime change,” he said.

When Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed by a joint U.S. and Israeli airstrike in February, it was celebrated by many, including the Trump administration, as the first step in toppling the Iranian regime and creating a new era of political leadership in the country. Unfortunately, Lublin said, what has played out since then shows that the attack may have been misguided in the big picture.

“Instead of toppling the regime, we’ve instead given them ideological strengthening by killing off their aged leader, who was widely unpopular, and who has now been replaced with his son, with the Revolutionary Guard in even greater control,” Lublin said.

Ken Coleman is a Baltimore-area Jew who said that he thinks the United States needs to end its campaign in Iran as soon as possible. He said that, while “everyone already hates the U.S. and Israel as it is,” the war has only furthered worldwide negative perceptions of the two nations.

“They need to end the war,” he said.

Coleman added that people need to stop fighting with Israel, the United States included.

The U.S. is, of course, not at war with one of its strongest allies, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump have been reported to be at odds more in the past year than they were at any point before that, including Trump’s first term.

Norman Gras, a Jew who was in Pikesville on Sunday, said that he thinks the best option at this point is peace.

“I want to see the bombing stop on both sides,” Gras said.

Last week, the U.S. announced a ceasefire with Iran to engage in a new round of talks, although Lublin said that it is hard to determine exactly what that will mean.

“There’s so many ceasefires that are announced that don’t actually lead to much change. In this case, it seemed to lead to new strategizing … the administration announced closing access to Iranian ports afterwards, so while that’s not per se launching missiles and the like, it’s still a clearly hostile act. Iran and the U.S. have continued to continue to exchange various kinds of tit-for-tat bombings, but not at the rate of the earlier attacks, and also far short, certainly of Trump’s threats to bring Iran back to the Stone Age,” Lublin said.

Lublin added that the conflict has helped show the tenuous relationship between the heads of state in the U.S. and Israel, a relationship that was at one point exceptionally strong.

“It’s also creating huge problems for Netanyahu, who had always basically cast himself as the Trump whisperer, and now instead appears to sort of weaken Israel in terms of they haven’t been able to really accomplish anything in Iran, and the Arab Gulf states are all now much more nervous about the ability of Israel and/or the United States to be an ally that is both dependable and also capable,” he said. “Because even despite the great bombing and air force capability that both sides demonstrated quite well and impressively, one might even say, a lot of Iran’s military is now apparently still intact.”

For Lublin, the situation in Iran is becoming increasingly similar to the Iranian Hostage Crisis that tanked President Jimmy Carter’s reputation and largely led to him losing overwhelmingly in a bid for a second term in 1980. Lublin said that he wonders if Trump is in danger of “following in Carter’s footsteps” by being humiliated by the Iranians.

“Trump sort of said I was the only one who was brave enough to do this, and increasingly, it looks like ‘I was the one who was only foolish enough to do this,’” he said. “Past presidents — regardless of what one thought of their military approaches — neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama nor Joe Biden seem very interested in doing any of this. That’s now looking like a reasonably wise decision, because nothing has been accomplished.”
President Trump has called on European nations to aid his efforts, something that Siegel thinks the powers of the continent should do.

“I don’t think we need the help of Europe, but to see them offering their support would be a good gesture since we’ve been supporting them all along. It’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Lublin thinks that there is no reason for Europe to do so, in part because of how Trump has treated them since he’s been in office.

“He threatened to take away territory from one of their members, Denmark, and generally has shown that even if [European nations] do this, it’s not like [they will] get anything. [They see it as] ‘you’ll just pocket our efforts and continue to treat us badly with tariffs and whatever else,’” he said.

Ultimately, the war has turned into something that will be a defining characteristic of Trump’s second term and overall presidential legacy. While what the end looks like is uncertain, the conditions Americans are living with right now have led many to question whether it was a good idea in the first place.

“In a way, he’s trying to get us all to forget this is going on, but the prices at the pump just will not let us forget it,” Lublin said. “The fact that continued violence appears to occur, and the negative effects on the world economy — this isn’t sort of a small disaster you can just pretend didn’t occur, and walk away from.”

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com