I had to watch it twice. I thought I had missed something.
In the hours before Wednesday night’s address, seasoned journalists in Washington had been briefed to expect something else. The President would use his 20 minutes to declare something close to “mission accomplished”. He didn’t. They were told he would challenge Nato allies for failing to send their navies to force open the Strait of Hormuz. He didn’t.
This was a rare primetime address, the kind that clears network schedules, reserved for moments too important for a Truth Social post. What we got instead was a collage of those posts, familiar lines delivered in the language and setting of a wartime address.
But in the gaps, a clearer message emerged. The White House wants this conflict to end – but it does not know how. It is chasing a conclusion that is not yet within reach.
That uncertainty surfaced almost immediately. Three minutes in, Donald Trump turned to his domestic audience’s clearest sign that this war is not over: the cost to the American consumer.
The United States is “totally independent of the Middle East”, he boasted, adding “we don’t need their oil, we don’t need anything they have”. He talked up domestic production, “drill baby drill”, insisting that “the United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait”. The disruption is someone else’s problem, he implied. The responsibility to fix it lies with those who depend on a waterway which has been destabilised by a war Washington helped to ignite.
And yet it is the rising price of oil that is shaping the urgency of this moment.
This has been one of the clearest consequences of Iran’s response, and a reminder of how much easier it is to start a war than to end one. Firepower and intelligence-gathering helped to deliver the strikes. Successfully anticipating the adversary’s response has proven to be harder. Negotiating the slow, diplomatic path that follows is harder still.
One of the central double-speaks of this war is the idea that completing military objectives amounts to victory. It does not. And Trump seemed to edge towards that reality, insisting that “we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly”, before promising two to three more weeks of “hitting them hard”, presumably to force the Iranian regime to accept Washington’s terms.
But this phase is already under way. For weeks, the war has been described as “all but won”, even as the White House has searched for a way to bring down oil prices and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump called to “keep this conflict in perspective”, but among the examples he chose were reminders of the gap which can open between rhetoric and reality: “The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days. Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days.”
This may be the most difficult phase of the war for the White House. Not the opening campaign, but what comes after. Diplomacy demands patience, judgement and trade-offs that cannot be reduced to displays of force. America faces an adversary that can raise costs through energy markets and strike US allies and assets across the region.
He returned to his familiar line that he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and he has succeeded in achieving this. But to many American officials this represents a deliberate blurring of Tehran’s intent and its capability.
As the address ended, there was no conclusion. Shortly afterwards, almost 10,000 miles from Washington, DC, the Malaysian government announced a work from home policy for some civil servants due to the rising cost of energy – proof that the consequences of the war are spiralling across the globe.
The primetime address did little to prove that this war really is in its final stages.
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