The war with Iran had barely been joined when the search for an off-ramp began.
“Exclusive: Trump Floats ‘Off-Ramps’ After Attacking Iran,” Axios reported Feb. 28, the same day that the United States and Israel started bombing targets. “It’s Too Soon for Iran ‘Off-Ramps,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board countered the next day, suggesting that Iran’s military capabilities needed to be destroyed before the Trump administration looked for an exit sign.
Other news outlets soon adopted the metaphor. “As the Iran War Continues, What Are the Potential Off-Ramps for Trump?” NPR asked. BBC News reported that “Trump’s Iran Strategy Is to Pursue Two Off-Ramps at Once,” a driving strategy I would not recommend. The New York Times described the eventual ceasefire agreement in early April as “an 11th-hour off-ramp,” and PBS’ “Washington Week with The Atlantic” convened last week to discuss “Trump’s Struggle to Find an Off-Ramp From the Iran War.”
It is a seductive image. An off-ramp implies a safe and easy exit from a highway, an especially appealing option if it turns out the highway isn’t taking you where you’d originally hoped. Too many traffic jams, accidents or potholes in this “little excursion,” as President Donald Trump called the conflict with Iran? Just take the off-ramp back to normality — and leave the war behind.
Even the administration uses the term. “Iran is looking for an off-ramp following your powerful threat,” Steve Witkoff, a US special envoy to the Middle East, said to Trump in a March Cabinet meeting, referring to the president’s warning that he would “obliterate” the country’s power plants if Iran’s leaders did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (They didn’t comply, and he didn’t follow through.) And David Sacks, a venture capitalist and influential White House technology adviser, has argued that Trump should just claim victory and “get out” of the conflict. “We should try to find the off-ramp,” Sacks said.
Except an off-ramp from war rarely returns you to the roads you once drove or the world you once knew. The United States will find no off-ramp to a prewar status quo. The conflict has changed the maps, and all roads now lead somewhere new. The war has revealed the Iranian regime to be far more resilient and capable than US authorities, who, enamoured with the speed of the operation against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, had expected.
American leaders have long fantasised about off-ramps from war, even if they have used different terms. Richard Nixon promised “peace with honour” as a path out of Vietnam; Barack Obama pledged a “responsible transition” of U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. The Clinton administration listed an “exit strategy” as an essential component of planning for any military deployments in its National Security Strategy of 1994. “Do we have timelines and milestones that will reveal the extent of success or failure, and, in either case, do we have an exit strategy?” it asked.
The exit-strategy imperative also makes the departure of US forces an objective — rather than a consequence — of a successful military operation, thus mixing ends and means. “The key question is not how we get out,” Rose argued, “but why we are getting in.” And that is a question that the Trump administration, with so many competing explanations and justifications, has not clearly answered in Iran.
Trump promised no more forever wars; Iran could be his whatever war.
Any off-ramp looks distant today. The president has called Iran’s latest list of demands a “piece of garbage,” derided the Iranian leaders as “stupid people” and declared the ceasefire struck in early April to be on “life support.” Next month it will be one year since Trump affirmed that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated by Operation Midnight Hammer, yet he remains stuck in neutral in a war that has accomplished virtually none of his stated objectives and that risks leaving Iran in a stronger geopolitical position and less damaged militarily than the administration has claimed.
Even some face-saving agreement — one that allows Trump to say he won and to assure Americans that his deal is better than the one the Obama administration negotiated and Trump ripped up during his first term — will not undo the damage the conflict has caused or the weakness it has revealed.
In war, off-ramps are rarely well marked or well paved.
The New York Times