US and Iran exchange strikes after Trump threatens wider attack, expert warns Washington is ‘entirely stuck’

The US and Iran traded intense barrages of strikes on Wednesday as both sides escalated their rhetoric, with no immediate off-ramp evident.

US forces launched waves of attacks early Wednesday and overnight, which the US Central Command said hit “dozens of military targets” near the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s coast along the disputed waterway.

Iran, meanwhile, launched strikes on what it said were US military targets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

Speaking at a ceremony in Tehran on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei addressed the status of the memorandum and said that Iranian “fighters will respond with full force and power to US aggression” and “are prepared to defend every inch of the nation’s territory.”

This latest round of strikes by both sides comes amid continued threats by President Donald Trump to “knock out” Iran’s power plants, and “all their bridges,” next week, unless Tehran comes back to the negotiating table.

When asked if he would provide another deadline before ordering the strikes, Trump told reporters in Pennsylvania, “I don’t like giving deadlines but they pretty much know.”

Legal experts largely agree that targeting civilian infrastructure violates international law, although the matter can be complicated in instances of dual use.

Analysts said that the moment marks an impasse, with neither side targeting civilian infrastructure at the same scale as in the war’s early days, but the pathway back to a peace agreement is difficult to see.

Ilan Goldenberg, senior vice president and chief policy officer at J Street, said that the United States in this moment is “entirely stuck.”

“I’ve been working on Iran policy for 20 years, and it is always hard. But this is the most stuck we’ve been,” said Goldenberg, who served as the Iran Team Chief at the Department of Defence under the Obama administration.

The Iranians, he said, “have a tremendous amount of leverage that they didn’t realise that they had before,” with the Strait of Hormuz.

“They are determined to try to humiliate the United States and to get the best deal possible, in order to send a message,” he said of Iranian officials.

The United States, meanwhile, is left with two options, he said, either bribing Iranian officials to open the strait, which he equated to “financial surrender” or “military action that is unlikely to work.”

On Tuesday, Trump backed off of a threat to impose a “reimbursement fee” on ships transiting the strait, a narrow waterway that is vital to global commerce.

Iran, too, has claimed the right to impose a toll on cargo vessels — a claim Trump has rejected.

He said the US would proceed with a blockade of ships coming to and from Iranian ports or carrying Iranian cargo, which he had announced Monday.

The seemingly inconsistent, even erratic, messaging from the White House has contributed to global uncertainty and worry that the economically damaging war will continue indefinitely, with no clear pathway to end the fighting.

A memorandum of understanding intended to wind down the war, signed last month, has collapsed, and the US and Iran appear to have highly contradictory interpretations of its loosely written terms.

Oil prices, which have spiked in recent days, were slightly up on Wednesday at more than $US85 a barrel.

The key point of contention, analysts say, remains control of the strait, which was open to maritime traffic before the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran in late February.

Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said that both sides see “the MOU that was signed on June 17 very differently.”

The Iranians wanted all ships passing through the strait to have their permission, he said, and saw the US Navy helping ships evade that by escorting them closer to the Omani coast, a breach of the MOU.

Misunderstandings, he said, have been fuelled in part by a lack of “respect for technical expertise” by the Trump administration, which has gutted the State Department and often relied on a small group of White House and defense officials to make war-related decisions.

“Trump calls the Iranian leaders ‘scum’ one day and ‘lovely people’ the next,” Vatanka said, adding that he should stop “the rhetorical posturing and many threats” that are hurting the diplomatic process.

What is needed for the situation to de-escalate, Vatanka said, is a combination of “technical expertise and patience.”

Those who have been negotiating on behalf of the Trump administration, he said, appear not to fully grasp Iran’s history or strategy.

“One thing they need to understand is that the Iranian regime has a much higher threshold for pain than the Trump administration and the Republican Party,” he said.

US Centcom announced two waves of strikes — one a 90-minute barrage on Wednesday morning targeting “coastal defense systems and cruise missile storage and launch sites” on Greater Tunb island in the Strait of Hormuz, and the other an overnight seven-hour wave of strikes that it said involved precision munitions and were intended to “degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping and civilian crews.”

Admiral Brad Cooper, the Centcom chief, said in a statement that US forces were “holding Iran accountable for unwarranted aggression” that has endangered civilian lives, including attacks on seven commercial ships in the past week, resulting in the deaths of nearly a dozen crew members, and a wave of strikes against Gulf nations.

Iran, meanwhile, said that it had launched attacks against US targets in Gulf nations, including Kuwait and Bahrain, and in Jordan, where it said it struck “major US military storage facilities” at Al-Azraq base.

Seven people were killed and 13 injured during a US missile attack on an Iranian army base in southeastern Iran, according to a military statement shared by Iranian state media.

So far, the US attacks since last week have unfolded “in a relatively narrow window of targets along Iran’s southern coast,” said Naysan Rafati, the senior Iran analyst with International Crisis Group, while Iranian attacks on other Middle Eastern nations have focused on military rather than civilian infrastructure.

“There is a pattern in these tit-for-tat strikes,” he said. “There are certain rules of the road. … But Trump has hinted at willingness to go up the escalatory ladder.”

Trump knows that Iran’s military has been “degraded and its air defence system is basically nonfunctional,” Rafati said, but he also knows that Iran retains the drone and missile capacity to do substantial damage in the region.

“Both sides have the option to escalate,” he said, “but know that if they do, so will the other side.”