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How Trump could stop losing in Iran

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by Jane Harman, opinion contributor - 05/17/26 9:00 AM ET

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by Jane Harman, opinion contributor - 05/17/26 9:00 AM ET

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and U.S. President Donald Trump attend a meeting on the sidelines of their visit to the Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing, China, Friday, May 15, 2026. (Evan Vucci/Pool Photo via AP)

The Trump-Xi summit concluded with vague promises for China to help. But as of now, the U.S. is losing the war with Iran. Thirty-seven days of intense airstrikes have only made the Iranian regime more hardline and the Strait of Hormuz — open and stable before the campaign began — is now under its control.

The question facing the U.S. today is no longer how to win this war, but how to stop the bleeding and regain some ground — just possibly enlisting China and others in fashioning a few wins.

There are three concrete priorities.

The first is to build a truly international coalition to reopen the Strait. Until the world’s most important energy chokepoint is reliably open, the global economy will continue to absorb the war’s worst shocks, and Iran will continue to dictate the terms of any negotiation. Europe and Asia depend on Gulf energy far more than America, now a major net exporter. Gulf gas is the principal alternative to renewed European dependence on Russia. Our European partners have minesweeping, escort and surveillance capability which they should have every reason to deploy alongside ours.

China, as Iran’s largest oil customer and most consequential outside backer, has its own interest in keeping the Strait open. This war should not end the way it began, with the U.S. acting on its own.

The second is to revive arms control. Stability in the region depends on preventing the nuclear arms race which this war has made considerably more likely, and that requires a sustained diplomatic effort. The president is right that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. He is also unlikely to get a comprehensive agreement this year. Iran is no closer to a weapon today than after last June’s strikes, but it is also nowhere near surrendering its enriched uranium or accepting real limits on enrichment.

The right near-term posture is to keep sanctions, monitoring and credible deterrence firmly in place. The medium-term work is to rebuild a real negotiating table with the U.S., NATO, Russia, China, and Iran, supported by experts of genuine standing. Any agreement that emerges will have to address the same questions as the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran: enrichment limits, intrusive monitoring and the eventual disposition of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. Hopefully, it will also address missiles, drones and support for proxies.

Because lasting regional stability can only come from greater integration, the third priority is to expand the Abraham Accords. The premise of the accords is the straightforward bargain that Arab states recognize Israel and open full diplomatic and economic relations with it, and Israel, in turn, supports a credible path toward a Palestinian state and two peoples living side by side in security. The 2020 agreements, a genuine achievement of this president’s first term, have proven resilient through more than two years of regional turbulence.

The war with Iran has made the case for them only stronger. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, struck by Iranian fire during the campaign, have taken the toughest line on Tehran, and Saudi Arabia is positioning to lead a broader regional bloc. The opportunity now is to translate that alignment into deeper security cooperation, alternative trade corridors, including underwater pipelines, and, over time, the widening of the Accords to include Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab world.

None of that expansion will hold, however, without meaningful progress on the Palestinian track; that is the other half of the bargain the Accords were built on. Done patiently, this is the only architecture that can bring lasting peace.

These steps are not ones this administration is likely to take on its own. That makes congressional engagement essential. I have a name for what Congress is sadly doing — modeled after TACO, Trump Always Chickens Out: CACO, Congress Always Chickens Out.

This is not a moment for chickening out. Members of both parties should use their authority over authorizing war, appropriations, oversight, and confirmations to demand a real plan from the White House and to push it toward a more constructive international posture. Restoring the soft-power and diplomatic instruments this administration has dismantled, from USAID to embassy budgets to international broadcasting, is part of that work; those are the too