Tryfigure out if the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is close to ending or intensifying is becoming increasingly difficult. ing to On Thursday, President Donald Trump urged Iran to consider the United States’ peace plan and also said, “in the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away, unimpeded, unstopped.” “Many of us are wondering what’s going on,” said Mark Cancian, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I would say the U.S. is following two tracks right now; one is negotiations and the other is military force.” Trump also has set a Friday deadline for Iran to stop its bottleneck of oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or face possible bombing at its power plants that keep the lights on in Iran. Here’s the latest. Iran’s fighting seems to be going strongA likely factor in Trump’s decision to start the war alongside Israel was the appearance of the Iranian regime in disarray after massive protests against its government, said Suzanne Maloney, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations on Iran, in an interview as the fighting started. But this week, Iranian missiles over Israel and Lebanon have intensified rather than subsided, and there’s evidence that what’s left of Iran’s regime is more radicalized than when the war started. That’s even though U.S. officials trumpeted Monday that they’ve sunk about 150 Iranian naval ships and destroyed much of Iran’s military capabilities, and Israel said it killed an Iranian military leader. As The Washington Post’s Susannah George and Rachel Chason describe it: “While Iran has been battered by nearly a month of U.S.-Israeli attacks, the war has not succeeded in toppling its government. Instead, it appears to have made the leadership in Tehran even more defiant and hard-line.” The U.S. could ramp things up tooIt was big news this week when the U.S. moved several thousand elite troops to the region. In total, there are about 7,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East, said Cancian. He doesn’t think that’s enough for a ground invasion of Iran — which he said has roughly 1 million fighters — but it could give the U.S. a chance at regaining control of the flow of oil in the region. “The U.S. is assembling the forces it would need to get ahold of islands in the Strait of Hormuz,” Cancian said. “But that’s still a major military operation.” It’s not clear if there are peace talksEarlier this week Trump backed off his ultimatum to start firing at Iranian power plants by Monday because of “productive conversations” with Iran. It seems he overstated the talks, according to New York Times reporting that U.S. officials clarified talks were actually in the very early stages. Now that the U.S. has presented a peace plan, the U.S. and Iran governments are saying totally different things on whether they’re negotiating. As The Washington Post’s Leo Sands and Susannah George report: “The Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Thursday that Tehran and Washington were exchanging messages through intermediaries but said he did not consider that a negotiation, according to Iranian state news agency IRNA.” But Trump asserted otherwise Thursday. “They’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating,’” he said of Iran. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” The sticking points seem to be whether Iran is willing to dramatically reduce its missile stockpile and nuclear program and whether the U.S. will give Iran control long term over the Strait of Hormuz. Cancian said it’s possible that if Trump decides peace talks aren’t going anywhere, he will ramp up the fighting. “We will see where things lead,” U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Thursday in a televised Cabinet meeting, “and if we can convince Iran that this is the inflection point with no good alternatives for them other than more death and destruction.” The war is expensive in many waysThe U.S. military has already spent billions bombing Iran and is considering moving weapons from Ukraine to the Middle East to be able to continue the fighting. “The sheer shortage of critical weapons on the US side makes a sustained high-intensity campaign unlikely,” said Rosa Brooks, a national security expert at Georgetown University Law Center. Gas prices are obviously higher for Americans and around the world. There are major concerns about inflation. And now even mortgage rates in the U.S. are rising in part because of the fighting. | 
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