Barely a week after American bombs rained down across Iran, Donald Trump picked up the phone to a reporter at the New York Post. “I have a plan for everything, OK?” the president snapped, after being asked about turmoil in the energy markets. “You’ll be very happy.

” At the time, Iran’s regime was reeling from the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a joint US-Israeli operation on 28 February. Oil prices surged as Tehran moved to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes each day.

Six months on, Trump is caught in a quagmire of his own making. Both sides continue to trade strikes, shipping through Hormuz has slowed to a trickle and the war is no closer to a resolution. Oil prices are still 25 per cent higher than in February and the US military continues to record casualties, while Trump’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since he took office.

Despite his claim to have destroyed Iran’s military, analysts say it is damaged but remains intact. Meanwhile, control of Hormuz has given Tehran a vital piece of leverage, with consumers across the world facing hikes in energy prices. The Independent has examined data that lays bare the astonishing cost of Trump’s war to the global economy, the wider Middle East, the US military and his own domestic popularity.

Without a face-saving exit strategy, experts say, the US is at risk of “drifting towards a form of forever war” that could prove to be Trump’s greatest miscalculation. More than 8,000 people across the Middle East have been killed since 28 February, according to an aggregate of local tallies.

While both sides have scaled back strikes in recent months, casualty figures continue to grow. According to the Iranian government, at least 3,468 Iranians had been killed by mid-April. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency put the figure at 3,636, including 1,701 civilians, in May.

As of this week, the Pentagon has tallied 14 US service member deaths and 417 injuries directly linked directly to its Operation Epic Fury. A further four have been killed in overseas operations since 7 July, while 341 have been injured, for a total of 18 deaths and 758 wounded.

Another 60 injuries were listed just last week. Civilians have been caught up in the conflict. The US military was accused of killing a young family with a 907kg bomb in renewed strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island at the end of July. An interim agreement to stop the fighting, signed in June, was repeatedly flouted by both sides before being scrapped entirely.

An Indian sailor was killed and eight others were injured when two oil tankers were struck by cruise missiles in the strait last month. And three sailors were reported to have been killed in US strikes in June. There have been more than 150 deaths recorded across the wider region linked to the conflict.

Iran’s grip of the Strait of Hormuz has sent ripples through the global economy by halting shipping and forcing up the cost of oil. Benchmark crude prices are still around $90 per barrel, up 25 per cent from $72 on the eve of the conflict. In the US, gasoline prices have risen by around 30 per cent over the past year.

Energy inflation has cost consumers $91.6bn as of 26 August, according to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. They say the higher cost of gasoline has cost the average US household an additional $381.64 since the start of the war.

The Center for American Progress estimates that, as of 20 August, the war has cost the average US household $1,200 in total. Trump’s popularity has sunk to a new low among voters as the war takes its toll. Just 33 per cent of Americans said they approved of the president’s performance in the White House so far, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Monday.

The survey found just 31 per cent of Americans support US military action against Iran, down from 37 per cent in March and driven by a fall in support from Republicans. Even some of Trump’s allies have jumped ship; the former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said last week the Republicans “could get smoked” in the November midterms, in part over broken trust around a promise of “no more foreign wars”.

Trump will be under pressure to show progress towards resolving the crisis and bringing down energy prices in the lead-up to the midterms, in which all seats in the House of Representatives will be contested, along with a third of the Senate. Following the 18 August primaries, polling showed the Democrats with a six-point lead.

Dr Lindsay Newman, associate fellow with Chatham House, told The Independent that Trump had taken lessons from the quick ousting of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in January and misjudged a conflict with Iran. “Iran was always going to be a much bigger and more complex proposition … Operation Epic Fury represents tactical success but strategic failing,” she said.

“Trump wanted a quick operation and instead got a Middle East-sized headache … The US administration finds itself six months along no closer to a conflict resolution, even after toggling between tactics. She added: “As Trump has gone searching for an offramp, the US strategy now is an economic security play to squeeze Iran.

This new approach makes sense. It has been clear for months that Trump was not willing to pay the cost to end the war militarily, and there was little domestic appetite to do so.” Andreas Krieg, associate professor in security studies at King’s College London, told The Independent: “Trump does have a way out, but it requires redefining victory.

He needs a deal that allows him to say the United States restored freedom of navigation, forced Iran to accept restrictions on its behaviour and imposed unprecedented economic costs.” The war has left the Middle East in turmoil, damaging US relationships with Gulf states and degrading American diplomatic power in the region.

The war was meant to remove Iran as a threat to the Middle East, but analysts say it has instead emboldened Tehran. Iranian missile and drone attacks have hit previously safe Gulf Arab states and disrupted air travel, while attacks on shipping have raised insurance and transport costs across the region.

Iran is now negotiating for a deal with Oman to control passage through Hormuz, which before the war was an international waterway and free to transit. The US has meanwhile threatened its old ally Oman, all while depleting its stockpiles and reducing readiness for a potential future confrontation.

Dr Krieg assessed that the biggest loss for the US is the strategic freedom of manoeuvre as it absorbs military assets, intelligence and political attention “at precisely the moment Washington wants to concentrate resources on Asia”. “The US has won most of the battles, but it it cannot win the war,” he said.

Dr Newman said: “The conflict in Iran has truly been an application of the Trump Doctrine to use all available means at any time to champion core American interests as defined by the US administration. It is an approach of heavy footsteps and pulling many levers.

Six months in, the report card is very mixed.

As the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran reaches the six-month mark, the Islamic Republic retains dangerous options to impose even higher costs on its militarily superior foes. One tactic raises particular concern among former officials and analysts. At a time when Iran has inflicted billions of dollars of damage in its missile and drone attacks against regional military sites and infrastructure and upended global energy markets with its throttling of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a dedicated Iranian cyber campaign could strike at the heart of the U.

S. and potentially prove even more disruptive to both national security and everyday life. Recent reports have already linked Iran to hacks in July that shut down a power plant in the United Kingdom and up to 30 water systems across the U.S. "Cyber is tailor-made for Iran’s asymmetric playbook," Frank Cilluffo, a former Department of Homeland Security official who played a lead role in the White House's immediate post-9/11 security overhaul, told Newsweek.

"Tehran does not need to match the United States plane for plane or ship for ship," Cilluffo, now director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, said. "It can look for softer seams in our economy and critical infrastructure, impose costs far from the battlefield, and create uncertainty about when and where the next shoe may drop.

" The War on Data Since the start of the conflict, Iran has already displayed the capacity to supplement its attacks on military and trade logistics with targeting data centers in the Persian Gulf region that serve a similarly crucial role. In the words of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi during a conference on Monday, "when we destroy an Amazon data center in Bahrain, it does not mean we destroy a company or a complex, it means that we have destroyed and shattered the brain of the operations processor.

" Cilluffo called this strategy "particularly instructive," as it demonstrated Tehran's awareness of how "data centers are no longer simply commercial facilities, they are increasingly the backbone of our economies, AI capabilities and, in some cases, national security.

" An even more dire scenario he pointed out could see Iran combine its kinetic drone and missile capabilities with an added cyber component, potentially even artificial intelligence, to create simultaneous pressure across physical and digital targets.

Even "a limited disruption," Cilluffo warned, "can be exaggerated and amplified through disinformation and social media to create the perception of a much larger attack." "An adversary does not have to destroy critical infrastructure to achieve strategic effect.

It can turn a tactical disruption into outsized economic, psychological and political consequences," he said. "The mistake would be to think of an Iranian cyberattack as something separate from a wider conflict. Tehran has spent decades learning how to operate asymmetrically across domains," he added.

"Cyber gives it another means to reach beyond the battlefield and bring the consequences of a conflict directly to the homeland." The Roots of Iran's Cyber Revolution While not traditionally viewed as having access to the same resources or capabilities as top U.

S. rivals China and Russia, both of whom have also been implicated in scores of cyber operations carried out against the U.S., Iran has a long history engaging in battle on this front. Tehran has also been a frequent target of cyber infiltration, with one of the first major instances being the infamous Stuxnet computer worm that swept through and degraded or destroyed thousands of systems tied to Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities in late 2009.

The disastrous episode served as an impetus for Iran to develop and hone its own cyber prowess. "Iran has been building their capabilities ever since being on the receiving end of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet operation, nearly 15 years ago," Jason Healey, a founding member of the White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and the world's first-ever cyber command, Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, told Newsweek.

In 2012, then-Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, who was later killed on the first day of the ongoing war after Israel allegedly hacked traffic and CCTV cameras to track leadership movements, ordered the establishment of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace.

And by 2015, the IRGC had formed its own Cybersecurity Command, though the elite force had previously pursued cyber activities through its Center to Investigate Organized Crimes. While the stated mission of the IRGC's cyber wing largely pertains to maintaining internal security, preserving the Islamic Republic's values and defending against foreign foes, U.

S. experts and officials also see an offensive mandate. Newsweek has reached out to a representative of Iran's National Center for Cyberspace for comment. Contacted for comment, a U.S. defense official told Newsweek that, "as a matter of operational security, we do not comment or discuss cyber intelligence, plans, operations capabilities, or effects.

" Lethal Potential In most cases, suspected Iran-affiliated cyber operations are attributed to apparent proxy groups, including the Iranian Cyber Army, first active in 2009 as one of the earliest known groups linked by analysts to Iran. Many more have emerged since, such as those variously designated as APT—or Advanced Persistent Threat—33 (Elfin Team), APT 34 (Helix Kitten), APT 42 (Mint Sandstorm) and MuddyWater.

The latest alleged Iranian attacks on U.S. water systems were not the first of their kind. Iran-tied actors were blamed for earlier cyberattacks against a New York dam in 2013 and Pennsylvania local water authority a decade later, the latter being carried out by a group calling itself CyberAv3ngers.

CyberAv3ngers is one of several actors to have emerged in the wake of the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023. Another known as the Handala Hack Team has taken credit for a number of attacks throughout the nearly three-year Middle East crisis, perhaps most notably wiping the systems of U.

S. medical company Stryker Corporation in March of this year, shortly after the start the of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Even more recently, Iran's semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported Tuesday on an operation by the so-called Cyber Support Front to infiltrate the network of Israeli company Novamill, claimed to be involved in the manufacturing of weapons systems.

Healey, now serving as senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, warned "someday soon they might succeed with an attack on U.S. infrastructure that disrupts services and maybe even leads to deaths either directly or indirectly (such as by water outages that lead to disruption of hospitals).

" "Even to a modest event, any president might then feel the need to respond militarily and not tolerate it, as has been more the norm," he said. 'Less to Lose' Michael Sulmeyer, professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service who previously served as the Pentagon's assistant secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber adviser, recently outlined in Foreign Policy a number of ways in which China could exploit gaps in local defense infrastructure using AI-enhanced cyberattacks in the event of an escalation over Taiwan.

And he told Newsweek that "much of the same logic could apply to Iran." The most "concerning scenarios" he saw involve not a single massive "cyber Pearl Harbor" strike, but a wave of operations targeting critical infrastructure, either in the U.S. or among regional partners—potentially a combination of both.

In addition to water and power systems other sites of interest include pipelines and factories. Sulmeyer also raised the alarm on the insufficient pace at which the U.S. was adapting to the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI-powered cyberattacks with some systems taking years to properly bring up to date with the current threat landscape.

And while he noted that "the United States and Israel, among others, have significant combat power in cyberspace as well," there is another element that may compound the risk factor in dealing with Iran's cyber corps at a time when the Islamic Republic was fighting what it viewed to be an existential battle.

"Unlike many other nations, leaders in Tehran probably feel they have less to lose when conducting cyber operations for disruptive effect in addition to more traditional reconnaissance work," Sulmeyer said. A Twofold Strategy Already, Iran appears to be quietly scoring gains via a "twofold" strategy described by Nikita Shah, a former U.

K. national security official serving today as senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Intelligence, National Security, and Technology program. The first involves the use of cyber espionage to support kinetic strikes through informing target selection and battlefield damage assessment, while the second constitutes efforts to shape the narrative of the conflict and events surrounding it in Tehran's favor, including with the potential use of AI-enhanced media operations.

"This means using disruptive—but opportunistic—cyberattacks (like hack and leaks, the Stryker incident, or even likely the recent cyberattacks against the U.S. water sector) to cause localized disruption, and then to amplify the impact of those attacks through international media," Shah told Newsweek.

"This serves Iran’s information warfare goals, by provoking and dividing different global audiences, sowing fear and division that it can manipulate over the course of the conflict," she added. And the "unfortunate targets" include U.S. organizations and businesses.

"Iran will want to drag them into the war by targeting them with low-level cyber-attacks," Shah said. "In other words, causing collateral damage to them is the point—Iran will want to wear down domestic U.S audiences in the hope that this will turn U.

S. public opinion against the war, as a means of attrition." Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Edward T. Cummins and Tony Phillips.

On June 11, 2026, amid escalating military exchanges between the United States and Iran, a aircraft reportedly carrying Qatari mediators was stranded on the tarmac in Tehran.

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) stated that U.S. forces have cleared Iranian sea mines from the Strait of Hormuz, laid months ago by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In a video update on X late Thursday, Commander Adm. Brad Cooper termed the achievement a “major milestone,” stating that “international shipping lanes are open and momentum is building.

” He shared a nautical chart of the Strait of Hormuz and said the mine-clearing operation over the months was challenging and involved meticulous efforts of the Navy divers, special operations, and air assets, among other forces. “The circumstances were challenging and dangerous to say the least, but we got the job done,” said Cooper.

In recent months, nearly 1,500 vessels carrying approximately 750 million barrels of crude oil have navigated the waterway, said Cooper. Concurrently, around 50,000 U.S. troops have been enforcing a “highly effective” naval blockade, as a result of which there were ‘zero” oil exports from Iran, he said.

The CENTCOM Commander added that, as part of broader regional efforts, which involve over 20 warships and hundreds of aircraft, U.S. operations have turned back 75 vessels and disabled three non-compliant ones amid escalating tensions with Iran. “No ships have entered or left an Iranian port without our permission, and we have only allowed ships to pass through on humanitarian grounds,” added Cooper.

US Naval Blockade Hits Iranian Oil Exports This development comes against the backdrop of ongoing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, which have been ongoing for the past six months. The U.S. blockade on Iranian oil exports has significantly affected Iran’s oil shipments, according to Kpler data.

Iranian oil loadings fell to 248,000 barrels a day in August, a stark contrast to the 1.85 million barrels of crude a day exported between March and April. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei told Lebanon’s Al Manar TV that any U.S.-Iran understanding over the Strait of Hormuz must include an end to military operations in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria, along with an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and a halt to attacks on Syria.

He stressed that the U.S. must demonstrate its commitment before Iran can rebuild trust. At the time of writing, Brent crude oil futures expiring in October were trading 0.4% lower at $88.17 per barrel, while WTI crude futures expiring in October were trading 0.

5% lower at $83.11 per barrel. Trump in No Rush To Restart Iran Talks President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has adopted a relaxed stance on the timeline for Iran to return to peace negotiations and stated that he is “not in a hurry.” The President stated he has "no time schedule" for Iran to rejoin negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Trump administration is not interested in reviving the June memorandum of understanding with Iran. Instead, Trump is waiting to see whether his administration’s economic pressure campaign against Tehran will succeed.

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