The New York Times: Trump wants to move on from the Middle East – It’s not letting him

President Trump may want to let go of the Middle East. But it won’t let go of him, The New York Times writes.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said his new strategy was to be “low-keying it” in Iran, a suggestion that he wants to pressure the country into making a favorable deal without taking major military action. But a stark reminder of the limits of U.S. power in the region came from Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday he was “ruling out” Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The two Middle East conflicts have underscored Mr. Trump’s eagerness to declare success and his inability to impose his will on them, despite the enormous military firepower that he has been able to deploy.

Mr. Trump is “clearly trying to find a pathway as the midterms approach to downgrade all of this,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Instead, Mr. Katulis went on, “reality is slapping him in the face.”

Mr. Trump laid out his low-key approach to Iran in a brief interview with the news website Axios on Sunday. Rather than make new military threats, he said that “we are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

“Now, can they make trouble? Yeah, they can make trouble,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday, acknowledging Iran’s ability to keep harassing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “But they’re broke.”

In describing the Iranian regime as suffering from economic pressure, Mr. Trump evoked his own predicament. The average price of a gallon of gasoline remained above $4 this week, more than $1 above the price when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. Polls show even Republicans growing disenchanted with the Iran war and Mr. Trump’s political movement has fractured over his decision to launch military action.

“I don’t think the president has very good options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The pressure points for the Iranians are, while real, more endurable and bearable than those that are impacting the U.S. economy and the strategic calculus of the administration.”

In Iran, for all of Mr. Trump’s efforts at finding a way out, a renewed flare-up of violence could come at any moment. The U.S. military has kept up its naval blockade of shipping to Iranian ports and said Saturday it had redirected 53 commercial vessels in recent weeks, along with disabling two ships and boarding two others. Mr. Trump’s enormous buildup of U.S. military force in the region, including two aircraft carrier groups, has remained in place.

“These tools are not low-key,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert on Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that is hawkish on Iran, referring to the U.S. sanctions and blockade. “Iran is likely not going to take them lying down.”

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