Trump says Iran war is going ‘extremely well,’ despite drone attacks, unmet goals, shipping upheaval

Even as a ceasefire was crumbling, leading the U.S. to wage new attacks on Iran, President Donald Trump touted the United States’ war as a success.

“We’re doing very well against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said at a July 23 event in Washington, D.C. “We’re doing extremely well.” Later in the event, Trump reiterated this, saying the U.S. was “doing very well, very, very well” in the war.

He also voiced confidence July 29 in a tele-rally for a Wisconsin congressional candidate: “We’ll finish off Iran pretty soon. It’s gonna happen.”

The war, which began Feb. 28, has cost at least $37.5 billion in direct military expenditures through mid-July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers. It has also led to the deaths of 18 service members, with 624 wounded, as of late July.

Has it been a tactical or strategic success? The U.S. has degraded Iran’s conventional military assets. But Iran has been able to use what’s called “asymmetric warfare” — including the use of inexpensive drones to attack U.S. forces and allies — to leverage its military power.

The obliteration of Iran’s nuclear program and genuine regime change have remained elusive, while new problems, notably Iran’s newly asserted control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, have emerged.

Foreign policy experts are skeptical of Trump’s bullishness.

“The charitable assessment is that the administration would get an ‘incomplete,’” said Aaron David Miller, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow. “If the war were to end today, it would be a major strategic defeat by the administration’s own metrics.”

Barbara Slavin, a Stimson Center fellow, said the Iranians so far “have consistently out-strategized Trump. They are betting that they can hold out longer than American consumers.”

The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

The U.S. military offensive has been successful, to a point

The U.S. has inflicted significant damage on Iran’s military, including to its air defenses and conventional naval assets. 

“Rebuilding some of these facilities will likely take considerable time and cost billions of dollars,” said Arman Mahmoudian, a research fellow at the University of South Florida’s Global & National Security Institute. “Iran has also lost a number of senior nuclear scientists and high-ranking military commanders.”

However, military experts caution that Iran has maintained significant capabilities, because it planned for a war in which it faced the United States’ superior conventional military.

Iran can continue its fight by launching missiles or drones from deep inside its own territory. A missile attack in July against a U.S. base in Jordan, combined with continuing drone attacks against Persian Gulf states, “indicates that Iran still possesses both munitions and operational launching capabilities,” Mahmoudian said.

Preventing such attacks would require a substantial U.S. ground force to seize territory inside Iran to create a buffer zone, he said — which would represent a major escalation.

Key U.S. goals remain unmet

Trump hasn’t fulfilled several goals he laid out for the war.

One is regime change. The U.S. has killed many top Iranian officials, including its supreme leader, but Iran’s government structure shows no sign of loosening its hold on power or changing its ideology. The Iranian people who Trump once expressed solidarity with have seen no expansion of their rights and freedoms.

In January, before the war, “I was convinced we were in the last period of the Islamic Republic,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University. “I don’t think that’s true now. … The more we do, the more we seem to solidify the position of the real bad guys in that system.”

Trump’s foremost goal — neutralizing Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon — has not yet been accomplished, nuclear policy specialists say. The program has been damaged but not destroyed.

The Iran war “did not fundamentally alter the status of Iran’s nuclear program,” which made clear that airstrikes alone “cannot eliminate Tehran’s residual capability to build a bomb,” said Daryl G. Kimball, Arms Control Association executive director.

In theory, U.S. military forces could have pushed Iran into negotiating a nuclear agreement, said Brendan Green, a University of Cincinnati political scientist. But it’s unclear whether the Iran war has been damaging enough so far to drive Iran to a negotiated nuclear settlement, he said. 

The war, Kimball said, has further delayed the return of international inspectors to search for enriched uranium and centrifuges, and it has “severely damaged what little trust may have existed in Iran regarding any future agreement.”

In addition, the U.S. failure to derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions could weaken its leverage with other nations who might see nuclear weapons as a national security asset. “Once again we are reminded of why states want the bomb,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. “And the list (of states) is growing longer.”

Problems caused or exacerbated by the war itself

The biggest economic and geopolitical concern to emerge from the war is Iran’s newfound ability to control the commercial traffic that transits the Strait of Hormuz, including petroleum and other key products like fertilizer, aluminum and other industrial commodities.

Iran “may no longer possess a navy capable of dominating the Persian Gulf, but it likely retains enough capability to disrupt, or even temporarily paralyze, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz,” Mahmoudian said. “Large oil tankers are particularly vulnerable because of their size and relatively slow speed, especially while navigating narrow waterways.”

The war’s effect on the global economy could worsen if the Houthis, a Yemeni proxy of Iran, move to block shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Saudi Arabia and Africa — one of the primary alternative shipping routes to the Strait of Hormuz. And an Egyptian port near the Suez Canal was attacked July 29, believed to be by a drone; it’s unclear whether Iran or one of its proxies carried it out. 

The most direct effect on Americans from the shipping squeeze has been higher prices for gasoline. Prices at the pump are about $1.15 higher now than they were before the war in late February; at times since the war began, gasoline has been as much as $1.55 higher than pre-war levels.

“I don’t think we can assume any return” to the pre-war status quo,” said Hugh Daigle, a University of Texas at Austin petroleum and geosystems engineering professor. “Iran and Oman have been talking about imposing tolls on traffic through the Strait, while the U.S. has talked about security fees for vessels coming and going. Iran has realized how much of a bargaining chip the strait can be and will be more willing to use it in the future.”

Because gasoline is factored into many other consumer prices because of transportation costs, overall inflation has spiked as well. 

In early June, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated the cost of the Iran war, including consumer impacts, to be $100 billion in the first four months. That would be about $685 per U.S. tax return — and that’s before counting the costs from June and July.

Another problem that has been exacerbated by the Iran war: a reduction in U.S. weapons stockpiles. 

Several reports have found that U.S. weapons stockpiles are rapidly decreasing as the Iran war continues. 

A May 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security-focused think tank, projected that certain heavily-used munitions in the Iran war — such as the Tomahawk missile system and Patriot and THAAD interceptors that defend against missiles and drones — will take from three to four years to replenish. 

Diplomatic strains

Continuing Iranian missile attacks against the United States’ Persian Gulf allies have contributed to tensions between those countries and the U.S.

U.S. relations with Israel have also been “increasingly strained,” Slavin said. 

Operational coordination against Iran between the U.S. and Israel has been “remarkable,” Miller said. However, the war has likely exacerbated the existing level of dissatisfaction rank-and-file Americans feel toward Israel.

And the war has boosted a U.S. rival: China.

“China’s oil stockpiles, diversification of suppliers, and growing reliance on non-hydrocarbon energy sources have made it better able to weather the storm than most,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the South Asia and China programs at the Stimson Center.

China’s expansionist impulses could also get a boost from the drain of U.S. stockpiles, by making the U.S. less able to counter possible Chinese attacks on Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province. “Every time we launch a missile, it’s one less that will be in our arsenal if China decides to increase its pressure on Taiwan,” Miller said.