CNN:

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

President Donald Trump is heading toward a vexing crossroads in Iran.

He can’t honestly declare victory; he seems to be losing control of an expanding war; and the strategic and economic consequences of quitting would be more disastrous than those of staying in.

Trump is not yet facing the dire predicament of presidents like Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush who prolonged conflicts that were already lost.

But danger signs are everywhere.

There’s one chapter in the near-two-week war that most epitomizes Trump’s eroding capacity to control its expansion — Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil exportation choke point. The regime’s defiance shows that while the US enjoys huge military dominance, not everything can be solved by violence, notwithstanding the administration’s scorched-earth rhetoric.

The Strait’s closure presents Trump with a military conundrum that will be extremely dangerous for the US Navy to try to solve despite the Islamic Republic being military outmatched. It is also the latest fallout from a war that Trump launched based on a “feeling” that seems to betray negligent lack of forethought. US officials have, after all, understood for decades how Iran would respond to an attack.

“You can’t have victory if you can’t use the Strait of Hormuz,” retired US Navy Capt. Lawrence Brennan told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday. “The Strait of Hormuz has to be reopened to international trade and that is a difficult if not impossible thing to do under the present circumstances.”

Brennan, who served on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier during the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis, added, “As much as I appreciate the president’s optimism … declaring victory after the first day or two is just not the right thing to do. … This is going to go on far longer than any of us hope.”

The widening chain reaction goes beyond oil prices. The loss of a US tanker aircraft over Iraq on Thursday in what officials described as an accident underscored the costs of mass military mobilizations, following the earlier deaths of seven Americans in the conflict.

In the United States, violent incidents in Virginia and Michigan on Thursday highlighted the possibility of domestic blowback from a war half a world away. It is not clear that the incidents are definitively linked to the war in the Middle East. But amid heightened tension and elevated threats, the shooting in Virginia is being treated by authorities as terror-related. The FBI, meanwhile, described a vehicle ramming at a synagogue in Michigan as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”

The foreboding atmosphere undercuts White House assurances that the conflict has already made Americans safer by removing the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb and crushing the country’s ballistic missile program.

“The situation with Iran is moving along very rapidly. It’s doing very well. Our military is unsurpassed. There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said Thursday.

Calling Operation Epic Fury an epic failure would be premature.

There’s no doubt the combined US-Israeli air assault is an operational success and may have eviscerated Iran’s capacity to project threats outside its borders; set back its ability to replace its destroyed missiles and drones; and damaged assets used by the regime’s brutal security state to enforce repression. Plus, the pace of Iranian missile attacks on US Gulf allies has slowed.

While every combat death is tragic, US losses do not yet compare to the killings of US personnel during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan — quagmires Trump has pledged not to emulate. Warfare is always characterized by strong emotions and is hard to judge in real time.

And although the anointing of a new Iranian supreme leader dashed hopes a regime that has antagonized the US for nearly 50 years might fall, his failure so far to appear in public doesn’t necessarily promote a sense of permanence.

“Assessments that you make today … may not necessarily be true on April 5, and certainly may not be true on November 10,” said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I always say to people during this particular time, ‘You have to be a watchmaker.’ You have to take yourself apart and put yourself back together every day, because this is a dynamic situation, and it requires profound degree of intellectual flexibility.”

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